The relationship between moral decisions and their consequences: A tradeoff analysis approach

While at one level, the literature in ethics for some issues is broad, deep, and complex, for others it appears limited and lacking in sophistication. This cross — cultural study deals not only with the moral reasoning behind moral dilemmas in business but also with the magnitudes these dilemmas in concert with their possible outcomes and consequences. While many studies discuss the effect of these outcomes, we have found none that have explicitly examined them.The methodology and analysis use a novel approach for this topic, and is a major contribution of the paper: that of tradeoff analysis. Tradeoff analysis is capable of revealing both the nature of an individual's moral reasoning as well as interactions between this and the rewards or consequences for the moral action. These interactions are illustrated with a cross — cultural pilot study conducted in Singapore and the United States, which reveal noteworthy differences in moral decision making.William R. Swinyard is a Professor of Business Management at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA, 84602.Thomas J. Delong is a Professor of Education at the same university.Peng Sim Cheng is a Senior Tutor at the National University of Singapore, School of Management, Singapore 0511. Correspondence should be addressed to the first author.     

The firm's demand for daily hours of work: Some implications

Conclusion This paper starts with an intuitively plausible assumption about the way in which a worker's effectiveness varies over the workday. It develops a number of interesting implications of this assumption. First, in the absence of fixed costs of hiring and premium pay for overtime, hours per day per worker desired by the firm would not vary with the wage. Second, with fixed costs of hiring and a premium-pay-for-overtime requirement, there is likely to be a bunching of firms with desired workdays of eight hours. Third, holding hiring costs constant, desired hours will decrease with expected length of stay (expected tenure) of the employee. Fourth, the framework can be used to analyze the way in which increases in the minimum wage affect both hours per worker and the number of employees. The authors would like to thank Sherwin Rosen for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Are success and survival factors the same for social and business ventures?

Despite the growing interest in social entrepreneurship, there exist gaps in research that compares traditional business-oriented entrepreneurship with the social kind. This study attempts to fill the gap by answering the following questions: Are there significant differences between the survival chances of business and social ventures? and Do the traits of the entrepreneur and the firm play the same role as success factors for both types of venture? Hypotheses are tested using data collected from 2,179 firms. The results show that significant differences exist between social and business-oriented entrepreneurship in the form and intensity of the independent variables related to survival.     

Managing corporate identity: An internal perspective

Management plays a key role in the development and maintenance of corporate identity, including paying particular attention to the internal and controllable aspects of the process. The progression of research that examines corporate identity is contingent on clarification of the scope of corporate identity management (CIM) and development of generalizable and applicable measures of the construct. This study develops an interdisciplinary measure of the CIM construct by drawing on the literature and primary data, such as exploratory research, a survey, and a follow-up phase. Overall, CIM involves (1) the endorsement of consistent behavior through the diffusion of a company’s mission, values, and goals; (2) the expression and pursuit of brand and image consistency in the organization’s symbols and forms of communication; and (3) the implementation, support, and maintenance of visual systems. The results suggest that CIM includes the dissemination of mission and values, consistent image implementation, and visual identity implementation.     

Trade preferences and political equilibrium associated with trade liberalization

This paper, motivated by the so-called North–South problem in trade, analyzes ex ante trade preferences and the source of potential political conflicts regarding trade liberalization. Developing a dynamic extension of the traditional Heckscher–Ohlin model with imperfect labor mobility and tracking overall dynamic paths from the autarky to free-trade steady states, we demonstrate that in the presence of inter-sectoral migration barrier, bilateral free-trade agreements can be welcomed (opposed) by the majority of workers in a capital-abundant (labor-abundant) country, which is inconsistent with the welfare prediction by Stolper and Samuelson. This paper also proposes a numerical algorithm to solve for the entire transition path of the model under rational expectation. Our simulation experiments further reveal that preannounced and delayed implementation can facilitate a bilateral free-trade agreement by partially neutralizing short-run transitional gains and losses so as to persuade the losers to support the reform without affecting the beneficiaries’ trade preferences.     

Mortgagor Motivations in Prepayments for Adjustable Rate Mortgages

This paper provides the first rigorous analysis of residential adjustable mortgage prepayment using individual ARM mortgage data in Singapore. The prepayment rate for residential mortgages is low and is dominated more by macroeconomic factors than mortgage–specific factors. Specifically, the prepayment rate is increasing in residential property prices, but decreasing in income as proxied by GDP and volatility in mortgage rates. There is weak evidence to suggest that prepayment is increasing in the borrower's age, mortgage rate hikes, cash–availability variables and sentiments of the stock market, and decreasing in the price premium over valuation, payment–to–income ratio, loan–to–value ratio, loan term and floor level of the property.