The influence of guided preparation on the long-term performance of new ventures

This article further develops a theory of guided preparation and new venture performance and tests its fundamental relationships on a sample of 159 new ventures that received outsider assistance 5–9 years earlier and had been in business for 3–8 years. The results suggest that the long-term growth of the ventures since start-up is significantly related to guided preparation. However, a curvilinear model rather, than a linear model, was found to best capture the relationships of interest. This suggests that there are diminishing marginal returns associated with guided preparation and that too much may even have a negative influence on performance.     

The Fisher Effect Puzzle: A Case of Non-Linear Relationship?

The Fisher effect specifies a positive, one-for-one relationship between the nominal interest rate and expected inflation. Most recent empirical studies on the Fisher equation, typically based on ordinary least squares and co-integration estimation, found that the equation did not fit various data sets well. However, recent empirical studies showed that this fit improves if the Fisher equation is treated as a non-linear equation. Using U.S. quarterly data, this paper examines whether the results of the previous studies on the Fisher equation arose as a direct consequence of specification errors. We use time-varying coefficient (TVC) estimation, a procedure that allows us to directly confront the unknown functional form problem, specification errors, and spurious relationships. We find strong support for the view that, under TVC estimation, the Fisher equation holds and is no longer a puzzle.     

WHY ARE SOME PLACES RICH WHILE OTHERS ARE POOR? THE INSTITUTIONAL NECESSITY OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM

We survey perspectives on the economic differences between countries and argue that economic freedom is the key to prosperity. We close by outlining the policy implications. Specifically, removing obstacles to the exercise of economic freedom is an important step towards prosperity.     

Pesticide use among emerging farmers in South Africa: contributing factors and stakeholder perspectives

The commercial agricultural sector in South Africa has historically been dominated by large-scale operations run by white owners and managers. In redressing this imbalance, black farmers classified as ‘emerging’ are being encouraged to engage in high-input agricultural production in order to obtain ‘commercial’ status. Since existing practices in commercial agriculture rely heavily on pesticides, emerging farmers aspiring to become commercial are pressured to adopt and/or increase the use of pesticides. However, problems of access to land, finances, resources, skills and markets overshadow the health and safety of these farmers and their labour force that may be affected by exposure to pesticides. This paper presents the results of a policy study based on primary interview data with key stakeholders and secondary documentary review data, to illustrate how pesticides are used in an occupational health and safety vacuum because the focus of key institutions is rather on economic productivity.     

SIX CHALLENGES IN DESIGNING EQUITY-BASED PAY

The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the equitybased pay of U.S. corporate executives, an increase that has been driven almost entirely by the explosion of stock option grants. When properly designed, equity‐based pay can raise corporate productivity and shareholder value by helping companies attract, motivate, and retain talented managers. But there are good reasons to question whether the current forms of U.S. equity pay are optimal. In many cases, substantial stock and option payoffs to top executives–particularly those who cashed out much of their holdings near the top of the market–appear to have come at the expense of their shareholders, generating considerable skepticism about not just executive pay practices, but the overall quality of U.S. corporate governance. At the same time, many companies that have experienced sharp stock price declines are now struggling with the problem of retaining employees holding lots of deep‐underwater options. This article discusses the design of equity‐based pay plans that aim to motivate sustainable, or long‐run, value creation. As a first step, the author recommends the use of longer vesting periods and other requirements on executive stock and option holdings, both to limit managers' ability to “time” the market and to reduce their incentives to take shortsighted actions that increase near‐term earnings at the expense of longer‐term cash flow. Besides requiring “more permanent” holdings, the author also proposes a change in how stock options are issued. In place of popular “fixed value” plans that adjust the number of options awarded each year to reflect changes in the share price (and that effectively reward management for poor performance by granting more options when the price falls, and fewer when it rises), the author recommends the use of “fixed number” plans that avoid this unintended distortion of incentives. As the author also notes, there is considerable confusion about the real economic cost of options relative to stock. Part of the confusion stems, of course, from current GAAP accounting, which allows companies to report the issuance of at‐the‐money options as costless and so creates a bias against stock and other forms of compensation. But, coming on top of the “opportunity cost” of executive stock options to the company's shareholders, there is another, potentially significant cost of options (and, to a lesser extent, stock) that arises from the propensity of executives and employees to place a lower value on company stock and options than well‐diversified outside investors. The author's conclusion is that grants of (slow‐vesting) stock are likely to have at least three significant advantages over employee stock options:

• ? they are more highly valued by executives and employees (per dollar of cost to shareholders);
• ? they continue to provide reasonably strong ownership incentives and retention power, regardless of whether the stock price rises or falls, because they don't go underwater; and
• ? the value of such grants is much more transparent to stockholders, employees, and the press.

     

Modelling the post-industrial city

A new kind of city is emerging: globalized (connected to other cities in global networks); tertiarized and even quaternarized (dependent almost entirely for its economic existence on advanced services); ‘informationalized’ (using information as a raw material); and polycentric (dispersing residences and decentralizing employment into multiple centres or ‘edge cities’). The question is how we can adapt the urban and transportation models, which originated in the very different world of the 1960s, to these conditions, and what kind of model would then result.     

Evolving Market Efficiency with an Application to Some Bulgarian Shares

With new technically advanced methods and computers at our disposal, the efficient market hypothesis is once again being debated. At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented growth in both existing and new financial markets. These new markets are often in economies which have just recently embraced free market economics; we term these stock markets infant markets. Such stock markets are obviously not efficient in allocating the supply of savings to productive capital. We do not test whether or not these infant markets are informationally efficient, but instead examine whether and how they are becoming more efficient. We propose modelling the excess returns of individual securities using a multi-factor model with time-varying coefficients and generalised auto-regressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) errors. If the markets are becoming more informationally efficient or the agents are learning, we would expect this to manifest itself as the time-varying coefficients becoming more stable as time increases. We test our model using data on four Bulgarian shares. First, we estimate an AR(2) model and a GARCH-M(1,1) model for the shares. Then, we estimated our AR(2) model with time varying coefficients and GARCH type errors. We find varying levels of efficiency and varying speeds of movement towards efficiency within our sample of four shares. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Outcomes of a career planning and development program for registered nurses

The impact of a career planning and development program (CPDP) for registered nurses (RNs) on nurse and system outcomes was examined. The CPDP was effective as participants were able to create a career vision and individualized career plan.     

Evaluating the Gains to Cooperation in the G-3

A model of the G-3 is introduced which has a transparent structure including a simple but analytically tractable supply side. New optimising techniques are used to conduct extensive policy experiments on this multicountry model (including full Nash solutions and a fully cooperative solution). In the case of a fiscal shock originating in theUS, we find evidence of significant spillovers to other countries, which can only be ameliorated in the fully cooperative regime.