Kidnapped

Recent battle cries to boost health care coverage for children might suggest help is on the way. Yet as politicians tout their new-found generosity, they've also been snatching away some government money for kids.     

Business Ethics in The Philippines

The plurality of languages and ethnicities, the geographic fragmentation, the predominant Roman Catholic religion, together with the still relatively short experience in nationhood account for a very peculiar understanding of "business ethics" in the Philippines. The rapid growth and liberalization of the economy, coupled with the inequitable distribution of wealth, the destruction of the environment and corruption are the main ethical concerns. Businesspersons and the academe endeavor to find creative solutions for these unique challenges.     

The importance of demographics in economic analysis: the unusual suspects.

"The proper use of demographic information can add significantly to the ability to analyze and forecast economic activity. With housing, short-run forecasting is difficult and long-term forecasting impossible without considering changing demographic factors. Combining detailed demographic analysis with sound structural econometric modeling of the cyclical factors underlying the demand for and the supply of housing has resulted in significantly more accurate analyses and forecasts of the [U.S.] housing market."     

Management-Science and Business-Ethics

Many leading management scientists have advocated ethicalism: the incorporation of social and ethical concerns into traditional "rational" OR-MS techniques and management decisions. In fact, elementary forms of decision analysis can readily be augmented, using ethical theory, in ways that sweep in ethical issues. In addition, alternative conceptual models of Decision-Analysis, Game-Theory and Optimality are now available, all of which have brought OR-MS and Business-Ethics into a closer alignment.     

Demographic change and income inequality in the United States, 1976-1989

"The U.S. economy experienced significant increases in the degree of income inequality over the past two decades.... In this paper we consider the effects of race, age, female headship, and college education on the distribution of family income by developing a multivariate methodology that allows us to gauge the influence of one factor while holding other determinants of family incomes constant. Over the period studied we find that race had only a minor effect on the overall size distribution of income. Age had a somewhat greater effect than race. In contrast, the impact of female heads and college education were quite substantial. The multivariate estimates reveal that the effects of female heads and college education both increase the Gini to a much greater extent than the progressivity of federal income taxes decreases it. The effects of college education and female headed families on inequality have grown larger across time, while the influence of age has declined. We find that the effects of race on inequality have changed little over the 1976 to 1989 period."     

Determinants of internal and external R&D: Some Dutch evidence

Summary Innovating firms can choose to engage in either internal or external R&D, or in both. In the current study, we shall examine internal and external R&D separately to determine empirically the market structure characteristics explaining the external R&D share and the differences in market structure determinants between internal and external R&D. Our results indicate that a government policy that aims at stimulating technological progress by offering external research facilities is particularly interesting for smaller, capital-intensive firms operating in less concentrated markets.We would like to thank Alfred Kleinknecht for providing the R&D data and Kees Bakker and Yvonne Prince for providing the market structure data. We thank Alfred Kleinknecht, Bart Nooteboom and an anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions We acknowledge a research grant from the Stichting KMO Fonds.