The Ethical Backlash of Corporate Branding

Past decades have witnessed the growing success of branding as a corporate activity as well as a rise in anti-brand activism. While appearing to be contradictory, both trends have emerged from common sources – the transition from industrial to post-industrial society, and the advent of globalization – the examination of which might lead to a socially grounded understanding of why brand success in the future is likely to demand more than superior product performance, placing increasing demand on corporations with regard to a broader envelop of socially responsible behavior. Directions for strategic and managerial options are suggested. Guido Palazzo is Assistant Professor for Business Ethics at the University of Lausanne. He graduated in Business Administration at the University of Bamberg and earned his Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from the University of Marburg. His research interests are in Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Branding, Democratic Theory, and Organizational Ethics. Kunal Basu is a University Reader in Marketing at Said Business School, University of Oxford. He earned his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Florida. His research interests are in Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy and Brand Management.     

Structural Problems in Financing Development: Issues Relating to India

This paper argues that the process of financing development in India increased the fragility of the financial market. Consequently, the need arose for the government to implement policies that would reduce that fragility, and also to introduce strong enforceable bankruptcy laws, in order to prevent the emergence of corruption. It appears that the recent capital market reform did not give adequate attention to reducing the fragility of the financial market.     

Guaranteed Manufactured without Child Labor: The Economics of Consumer Boycotts, Social Labeling and Trade Sanctions

Does labeling products “Child‐Labor Free” provide a market‐based solution to the pervasive employment of child labor? This paper explores the promise of social labeling in the context of its four oft‐noted objectives: child labor employment, consumer information, welfare, and trade linkages, when competition between the North and South is based both on comparative cost advantage, and the use of child labor as a hidden product attribute. We show that (i) social labeling benefits consumers and Southern producers, whereas children and Northern producers are worse off; (ii) trade sanctions on unlabeled products deteriorates Southern terms of trade, but leaves the incidence of child labor strictly unaffected; and (iii) a threat to sanction imports of unlabeled Southern products discourages the South from maintaining a credible social labeling program. We also explore the question of whether social labeling should be viewed as a transitory or a permanent institution in developing economies.     

Is product boycott a good idea for controlling child labor? A theoretical investigation

A popular form of action to curb child labor and uphold international labor standards in general is a ‘product boycott’ by consumers. There are labeling agencies that inform us if, for instance, a carpet or a hand-stitched soccer ball is free of child labor. The presence of a consumer boycott will typically mean that products tainted by child labor will command a lower price on the market than ones certified to be untainted. It is popularly presumed that such consumer activism is desirable. The paper formally investigates this presumption and shows that consumer product boycotts can, in a wide class of situations, have an adverse reaction that causes child labor to rise rather than fall. This happens under weak and plausible assumptions. Hence, there has to be much greater caution in the use of consumer activism, and one has to have much more detailed information about the context where child labor occurs, before using a boycott.     

Exploration and Resource Commitments in Unequal Partnerships: An Examination of Corporate Venture Capital Investments

While established firms' relationships with external ventures may have significant strategic benefits, the realization of such benefits is fraught with considerable uncertainty. The real options and interorganizational learning literatures present an interesting trade‐off for established firms regarding commitment of resources in a partnership. This study seeks to enhance our understanding of how firms manage these trade‐offs when committing resources to external venturing initiatives. We examine the magnitude of resources initially committed by an established firm to an external venturing partnership in the context of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments. While a real options approach suggests that resource commitments should be lowered in the presence of uncertainty regarding realization of benefits, the interorganizational literature emphasizes that resource commitments may be essential for building quality relationships that expedite learning. Corporate investors, who invest in new ventures in order to gain strategic benefits, face higher uncertainty when their investment objectives involve greater exploration. However, greater exploration also increases investors' need to learn from their portfolio ventures. We, therefore, predicted that the degree of exploration would have a U‐shaped relationship with the investor's resource commitment in a venture. We also expected that factors that serve to decrease the investor's uncertainty, i.e., investor experience diversity and venture affiliation to prominent venture capitalists, would moderate the U‐shaped relationship between exploration and resource commitment. The predictions of the study are tested on a sample of 248 initial investments in private ventures made by incumbent firms in the computer, semiconductor, and telecommunications industries between 1996 and 2000. We find some support for our hypotheses. This study contributes to the external venturing literature on CVC investments by examining the determinants of the magnitude of resource commitment to new ventures, and integrates real options perspective, which advocates low resource commitments under uncertainty, with the organizational learning literature, which argues for greater resource commitment to secure partner cooperation. The results of this study reveal interesting insights into how CVC investors manage individual investments to generate strategic benefits.     

First passage time process of a standard brownian motion

Abstract

Wasan has introduced First Passage Time Process of a Standard Brownian Motion (T.B.M.S.).

The first passage time processes are of great practical importance and hence also of theoretical interest. For example, it has been used to study the movement of particles in a colloidal suspension under an electric field, it appears in the calculation of the distribution of time of hitting the boundary in a Symmetric Random Walk. It is also used in Sequential Analysis.

Its various properties are reviewed and several new ones are appended. Sufficient conditions for a first passage time process to be that of Standard Brownian Motion are given. Stochastic Integral, y-variation and behaviour at infinity are discussed.     

Inflation,earnings forecasts,and post-earnings announcement drift

We examine whether financial analysts fully incorporate expected inflation in their earnings forecasts for individual stocks. We find that expected inflation proxies, such as lagged inflation and inflation forecasts from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, predict the future earnings change of a portfolio long in high inflation exposure firms and short in low or negative inflation exposure firms, but analysts do not fully adjust for this relation. Analysts’ earnings forecast errors can be predicted using expected inflation proxies, and these systematic forecast errors are related to future stock returns. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the Chordia and Shivakumar (J Account Res 43(4):521–556, 2005) hypothesis that the post-earnings announcement drift is related to investor underestimation of the impact of expected inflation on future earnings change.     

Uninsurable risk and financial market puzzles

We compare the empirical performances of three risk-sharing arrangements involving idiosyncratic skill shocks: (a) where individuals are unable to directly insure their consumption against individual-specific shocks, (b) where agents strike long-term insurance contract with financial intermediaries involving a truth revelation constraint as in Kocherlakota and Pistaferri (2009), (c) full risk sharing. Based on the widely accepted assumption of cross-sectional log-normality of individual consumption levels, we work out closed form expressions of the pricing kernels for (a) and (b). We put these three models to test four financial market anomalies, namely the equity premium, currency premium, risk-free rate, and consumption-real exchange rate puzzles simultaneously in an integrated framework. We find that the pricing kernel associated with (a) outperforms the other two models in terms of the produced estimates of the agent’s preference parameters and the model ability to predict the equity and currency premia, the risk-free rate, and the log growth in the exchange rate. However, the predictive ability is still far from satisfactory for all three models under scrutiny.     

Another look at mass migration and unions in Western Europe

The paper analyses implications of unions' strategy for employment in western European countries that are baffled with mass migration of unskilled workers from neighboring poor countries. Unions' strategy in this paper includes bargaining for non-wage benefits together with monetary compensation for workers. It is shown that unions' strategy generates employment, raises the ratio of skilled to unskilled workers and raises national income. This suggests that even when migration acts as a competitive fringe, instead of using controversial migration policy as a covert anti-union tool, policy makers should encourage this type of bargaining which will have both economically and politically favorable effects.