Minimizing the Probability of Lifetime Ruin When Shocks Might Occur: Perturbation Analysis

We determine the optimal investment strategy to minimize the probability of an individual’s lifetime ruin when the underlying model parameters are subject to a shock. Specifically, we consider two possibilities: (1) changes in the individual’s net consumption and mortality rate and (2) changes in the parameters of the financial market. We assume that these rates might change once at a random time. Changes in an individual’s net consumption and mortality rate occur when the individual experiences an accident or other unexpected life event, while changes in the financial market occur due to shifts in the economy or in the political climate. We apply perturbation analysis to approximate the probability of lifetime ruin and the corresponding optimal investment strategy for small changes in the model parameters and observe numerically that these approximations are reasonable ones, even when the changes are not small.     

Integration into Global Production and Distribution Networks through FDI: The Case of Poland

Technological progress has led to increasing importance of the international division of labour organized around global production and distribution networks. Multinational corporations have been a driving force behind these developments. This article studies the role of MNCs in integrating a host country into the international system of division of labour in the context of Poland. It provides evidence of Poland's increasing participation in global production and distribution networks that is taking place through FDI inflows. It concludes that, thanks to a large volume of FDI inflows, Poland's exports driven by production fragmentation will continue to expand at even faster rates than those observed in recent years.     

The innovation consequences of mandatory patent disclosures

We investigate the effect of patent disclosures on corporate innovation. Using the American Inventor's Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that increased patent disclosures, we find an increase in innovation for firms whose rivals reveal more information after the AIPA and a decrease in innovation for firms whose own disclosures are divulged to competitors as a result of the law. These findings suggest patent disclosures generate both spillover benefits and proprietary costs. Our findings provide justification for patent disclosure requirements by demonstrating positive externalities: rivals' disclosures facilitate a firm's innovation. However, we also highlight that mandatory patent disclosures can impose proprietary costs on firms. These results broadly contribute to our understanding of the real effects of disclosure, such that forcing firms to share proprietary information can be privately costly but beneficial to other firms.     

Japanese women in management: Where are they?

The two economic superpowers, Japan and the United States, have different patterns of contribution by their female populations. The authors travelled to Japan to research and observe firsthand the contributions made and the roles filled by the Japanese female. A comparison of costs and benefits to each country created by the different roles of females is discussed. Questions such as the following are explored:

• Does the Japanese female contribution to child-rearing and nurturing of new coporate members outweigh her lost contribution to the workplace?
• Has the United States gained or lost ground economically due to women integrating the American workplace?
• Will Japanese women be content to be on the fringes of the economic system for another generation?
• What is the likely future scenario for the workplace for both economic superpowers?

     

Who Should Abate Carbon Emissions? A Note

Economists commonly believe that failure to equalize the marginal cost of carbon abatement across countries implies a loss of global efficiency. Chichilnisky and Heal [(1994), Economic Letters 44, 444] first challenged this consensus a decade ago, demonstrating that, in general, efficiency does not require equalizing marginal abatement costs. This note revisits that important debate. It provides the missing intuition behind Chichilnisky and Heal’s surprising result, explains what critical assumption gives rise to their result, and clarifies the role a social welfare function plays in their model. The implications of Chichilnisky and Heal’s result are increasingly important, given international debate over the preferential role given to developing countries in the Kyoto Protocol and the role those countries will play in future climate negotiations.     

Results of a cross-national structured cognitive interviewing protocol to test measures of disability

This paper describes the Washington Group project to test a short battery of disability questions developed for national censuses. The study used an unusually structured cognitive test protocol and was administered to a total of 1,290 respondents selected from convenience samples in fifteen countries in Central and South America, Asia and Africa. The test protocol consisted of the six core disability questions followed by questions designed to illustrate: (1) whether core questions were administered with relative ease; (2) how core questions were interpreted by respondents; (3) the factors considered by respondents when forming answers to core questions; and (4) the degree of consistency between responses to core questions and a set of more detailed functioning questions. Additionally, demographic and general health sections allowed for an examination of comparability, specifically, whether test questions performed consistently across all respondents, or if nationality, education, gender or socio-economic status impacted the ways in which respondents interpreted or considered each core question.     

Gender,Organizational Justice Perceptions,and Union Organizing

The authors examine the relationship between gender and organizational justice perceptions and the implications of this relationship for organizing women. They employ a survey study design to confirm expectations associated with the anecdotal literature on this topic, namely that women place greater value on interactional justice than on distributive or procedural justice. Results indicate that gender leads to valuing interactional justice more highly only in interaction with race. Specifically, in contrast to white women and both white and black men, black women give greater weight to being treated with dignity and respect than to the other two organizational justice dimensions.

Globalization and the connection of remote communities: A review of household effects and their biodiversity implications

The remote regions of the world provide refuge to a disproportionate amount of the Earth's biodiversity. As globalization continues, isolated human communities in these regions are increasingly connected to global market, migration, and technology networks. We review the diffuse literature on the household effects of changing market access, migration, and technology adoption in remote regions and implications for native biodiversity. Market access affects biodiversity in remote communities through changes in household economics and social networks. Migration, either to or from remote settlements, affects biodiversity through changes in population, remittances, human capital, and social networks. Finally, we consider effects due to production, public infrastructure, and information and communication technologies. There is much ambiguity surrounding these causal pathways, and thus we also examine the roles of various ecological, household, community, and institutional mediating factors in determining the impacts of global connection. Finally, we explore the limitations of our current knowledge and research practices and propose directions for future work to address key uncertainties in theory and evidence as well as weaknesses in methodological approaches. We recommend a broad and interdisciplinary mode of inquiry as the best means toward clarifying globalization's impacts on human settlements and the biodiversity harbored in the Earth's remaining remote regions.