Managing low‐skill workers: a study of small UK food manufacturing firms

Low‐wage work is of growing significance in the UK. This article tests the model of the low‐skills equilibrium (LSE) through a study of 27 small firms in a sector, food manufacturing, widely identified as being in an LSE. Three hypotheses are tested. (1) There will be a single, fixed equilibrium. We find more variety, reflecting the specific circumstances of firms. (2) An equilibrium is sustained by weak support institutions and a product market dominated by low value‐added goods. The expectation about institutions is supported, but the product market permitted some, albeit weak, opportunities to escape the LSE. (3) Skills will be low, and workplace regimes will be characterised by work intensification. Some firms were developing employee skills. Work intensification was rare, reflecting the absence of Taylorisation and the importance of face‐to‐face relationships. Overall, some firms had the will to escape the LSE, but weak institutional support and a ready supply of labour substantially reduced the incentives to do so.     

Performance of Foreign and Global Mutual Funds: The Role of Security Selection,Region‐Shifting,and Style‐Shifting Abilities

We examine the performance of U.S.‐based foreign and global funds after controlling for their regional and style exposure. We show that, on average, the total performance (TP) and security selection abilities of both foreign and global funds are significantly negative and exhibit short‐term predictability. Additionally, R² reflects funds’ security selection abilities, consistent with previous findings for domestic mutual funds. Investors can earn higher abnormal returns and TP in the short run by purchasing past winners with low R² than by purchasing past losers with high R². However, there is no evidence of predictability in the funds' region‐shifting and style‐shifting abilities.     

Integrated marketing as management of holistic consumer experience

In a bid to combine the two major perspectives (strategic communications and strategic brand management) of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), this article proposes a Holistic Consumer Experience Management framework. According to the framework, the key mission of IMC is to effectively manage the mediated impression of and the direct encounter with the brand, so that synergism ensues among all the interrelated elements of IMC, including research and development, manufacturing, price formulation, channel arrangement, consumer service management, marketing message construction, and communication program execution. As such, IMC is capable of enhancing the holistic consumer experience and creating a holistic brand value structure, which can unite the consumer's sensory, emotional, social, and intellectual experiences in a new and positive way.     

Entrepreneurship and Risk Aversion

Evans and Jovanovic (1989, Journal of Political Economy 97(4), 808–827) find that wealth is an important determinant of business startups due to liquidity constraints. However, Cressy (2000, Economic Letters 66, 235–240) argues that if risk aversion is a negative function of wealth, Evans and Jovanovic’s empirical results could be spurious and the positive effect of wealth could be due to the omission of risk aversion in the regression equation. In other words, according to Cressy, one’s wealth does not have any effect on business startups once the degree of risk aversion is accounted for. This paper attempts to investigate the validity of Cressy’s conjecture. We empirically examine the effect of wealth on the transition into self-employment, while allowing for the effect of risk aversion. Our empirical findings show that Evans and Jovanovic’s (1989) results are robust, i.e., wealth has a positive effect on business startups even allowing for the confounding effects of risk aversion.     

Development of hybrid fuzzy multi-criteria decision approach to evaluate key factors for marketing strategic alliance formation based on multiple theories

This study integrates three methods for evaluating the interaction and importance of key factors, while mapping the differences between development and maintenance stages during the formation of marketing strategic alliances in the telecommunications industry. A systematic, quantitative, integrated measurement is proposed to evaluate the importance of factors. Moreover, it provides a holistic picture of similarities and differences across stages for establishing marketing strategic alliance relationships. The factors' evaluation results show that the maintenance stage is critical for the relationship as it relates to sustaining the collaboration and can determine whether a marketing strategic alliance will continue or terminate.     

Using AHP to evaluate the criteria of auto spare parts industry

Analytic hierarchy process method is applied by surveying auto spare parts suppliers in Taiwan to identify the importance of 7 major criteria and 30 sub-criteria. Quality is the most essential criterion whereas production is the least important criterion identified in this study. Unlike the traditional viewpoints that local auto spare parts makers tend to emphasize on production, quality, service, technological capability, and price are relatively more important. In addition, four of five sub-criteria under the criterion of quality play an important role for the local suppliers to gain competitive advantages. By identifying the most essential criteria and sub-criteria, the performance based on those criteria and sub-criteria should be closely monitored and relentlessly improved under such competitive business environment.     

The relationship between airline performance and corporate governance amongst US Listed companies

The paper explores links between the operating performance of 30 airlines in the US and corporate governance. Initially data envelopment analysis is used to assess the relative efficiency of airlines and to investigate the contribution of inputs and outputs that affect technical efficiency. Efficiency decomposition combined with cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling is used to explore competitive advantage of airlines. Finally, the question of whether or not corporate governance affects the airlines’ performance is examined.     

Interest rate rules and macroeconomic stability with transaction costs

This paper analyzes the relationship between interest-rate feedback rules and macroeconomic stability in the presence of transaction costs. We show that with the Sims-type (1994) transaction-cost technology, a passive, rather than an active, interest-rate rule is more likely to generate a stabilizing effect against belief-driven fluctuations if both the intertemporal elasticity of substitution with respect to consumption and the sensitivity of the transaction costs with respect to the velocity of money are low. This result is valid under either an unbounded or a bounded transaction-cost technology. Of importance, our result is relevant under empirically plausible parameters, while it sharply contrasts with Taylor's (1993) prediction.     

Inward technology licensing and firm performance: a longitudinal study

Inward technology licensing (ITL) is often viewed as an important strategy adopted by firms to achieve innovation. However, relatively limited research has focused on evaluating the contribution of ITL to firm performance. The gap is all the more surprising since the benefits of external technology acquisition on innovation output have been emphasized in a lot of the literature. This study therefore sets out to investigate the extent to which the investment of ITL by firms affects their performance. In view of the relative abundance of data on variables for a longitudinal investigation, this analysis concentrates on the electronics-manufacturing industry. The longitudinal sample allows this examination to control the more extraneous effects and to provide more convincing evidence for examining the relationship of ITL and firm performance. A total of 341 Taiwanese electronics-manufacturing firms balanced over the period from 1998 to 2002 is taken as the analytical sample. The basic statistics indicate that acquiring technology externally shows an increasing tendency within the firms. The analyses, from the least square dummy variable method, reveal that ITL per se does not provide a significant contribution to firm performance; however, the positive impact of ITL on their performance increases with the level of the firms' internal research and development (R&D) efforts. Both the checks for robustness and the split-sample analyses validate the results. The findings not only highlight the importance of internal R&D efforts but also suggest that firms had better use ITL as a complement rather than a substitute of internal R&D for their competence.     

What drives foreign expansion of the top 100 multinational banks? The role of the credit reporting system

This study explores how information costs, proxied by characteristics of credit reporting systems, affect the foreign expansion of the top 100 multinational banks. We find that banks prefer to expand operations in countries where private credit bureaus exist or where the credit reporting system is of better quality. This preference is particularly strong for banks’ branch decisions. Furthermore, banks prefer subsidiary entry only in countries where private credit bureaus exist with better credit information quality. Overall, our results indicate that banks are attracted to countries where the credit reporting system helps reduce banks’ information costs.