Common good leadership in business management: an ethical model from the Indian tradition

While dominant management thinking is steered by profit maximisation, this paper proposes that sustained organisational growth can best be stimulated by attention to the common good and the capacity of corporate leaders to create commitment to the common good. The leadership thinking of Kautilya and Ashoka embodies this principle. Both offer a common good approach, emphasising the leader's moral and legal responsibility for people's welfare, the robust interaction between the business community and the state, and the importance of moral training of leaders in identifying and promoting the common good. We argue that the complex process of re‐orientating corporate priorities towards the common good requires alertness and concerted effort if both business and society are to truly benefit. As Ashoka said: ‘A good deed is a difficult thing’.     

RECENT FINANCIAL AND ACCOUNTABILITY CHANGES IN GENERAL PRACTICE: AN UNHEALTHY INTRUSION INTO MEDICAL AUTONOMY?

Recently General Medical Practice has been inundated with a range of financial and accountability changes. These imposed changes have been welcomed with considerable resentment by General Practitioners (GPs hereafter). This paper explores some of the key historical and contextual reasons for this resentment. The conclusion is that it is traceable to firstly, the nature of these reforms, which are seen as irrelevant at best or, at worst, run counter to the values and concerns of GPs, and secondly, and related to this, to the perceived inappropriate intrusion into medical autonomy by a Government whose forbears were previously enabling such freedom.     

Dynamic Relationships in the Market for Ocean Grain Freighting Services

A vector autoregressive model containing ocean grain freight rates, grain shipments, idled tonnage, new carrier deliveries and fuel prices is used to evaluate dynamic linkages in the ocean grain transport market. Dynamic relationships are of particular importance in ocean freighting months because freighting services are often contracted several months before shipment. In addition, such markets may be slow to adjust to shocks because of significant short-run fixities in shipping services. Ocean grain freight rates are found to be responsive to fuel prices and new ship deliveries, but are not affected by demand shocks. Ship idling rates are found to be sensitive to fuel prices, grain shipments and freight rates. Significant adjustment lags are revealed.     

Asymptotic analysis for optimal investment and consumption with transaction costs

We consider an agent who invests in a stock and a money market and consumes in order to maximize the utility of consumption over an infinite planning horizon in the presence of a proportional transaction cost . The utility function is of the form U(c) = c^1-p/(1-p) for p > 0, . We provide a heuristic and a rigorous derivation of the asymptotic expansion of the value function in powers of , and we also obtain asymptotic results on the boundary of the no-trade region.Received: July 2003, Mathematics Subject Classification (1991): 90A09, 60H30, 60G44JEL Classification: G13Work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants DMS-0103814 and DMS-0139911.     

A Test of a Buying Rule for "Underpriced" Apartment Buildings

Apartment-building repeat-sales data are used to test a trading rule. Property values are estimated through regression; if the actual price is less than the estimated value, the property may be "undervalued." Returns are calculated for these "undervalued" properties and adjusted for risk using the Sharpe ratio. A test is done of whether these ratios are significantly different for different portfolios. The "undervalued" properties have higher appreciation returns, but once these are adjusted for risk, the differences in returns are not significant. The paper contributes to the real estate efficiency literature and suggests a workable method for comparing the performance of real estate portfolios on a risk-adjusted basis.     

Die Beziehung zwischen internationalem Handel und internationalen Bewegungen von Kapital und Arbeit

Ohne ZusammenfassungDieser Aufsatz gibt den hauptsächlichen Inhalt von drei Vorlesungen wieder, die im Dezember 1929 an der London School of Economics gehalten wurden. Er ist fast identisch mit einigen Abschnitten aus dem Buche des Autors Interregional and International Trade, welches sich nun seiner lang aufgeschobenen Veröffentlichung nähert.Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Gerhard Tintner, Wine.