Dynamics in foreign markets — A study of strategic control in CEE

Effective coordination is crucial to managing a global network of subsidiaries. Although much has been said on the instruments multinational companies use to control their foreign operations, only very little is known on how they develop over time. An empirical longitudinal analysis of 40 multinationals shows that as subsidiaries mature, control strategies need to be adapted. Consequently, headquarters’ executives need to take into account a dynamic perspective on interactive effects of single control instruments when selecting control strategies during the internationalization process.     

Measuring Ethnic Community Involvement: Development and Initial Testing of an Index*

This paper builds on the work of Chaganti and Greene, who distinguish between ethnic minority entrepreneurs/small business owners who are very involved with their ethnic community and those who are not. We extend their work by developing an Index of Ethnic Community Involvement based not only on personal but also business characteristics. We utilize a large sample size (698 interviews with entrepreneurs), drawn from five ethnic groups, and develop a valid and reliable (0.69) Index of Ethnic Involvement (IEI) with a strong emphasis on social capital theory. Our initial analysis shows the IEI predicts some personal and business characteristics. Future development will include building regression models to predict business outcomes. The IEI, when fully developed, promises to be useful for targeting assistance, education and training programs, and policy initiatives for entrepreneurs and small business owners according to the level of ethnic community involvement.     

GAMBLING, SPECULATION, AND INSURANCE: WHY THEY CONTINUE TO BE CONFUSED AND CONDEMNED

Governments and the media have often attacked financiers for “speculating” in their countries' currencies, thereby forcing them to make drastic and sometimes painful changes in monetary and fiscal policies. This article argues that such accusations have no basis in economic theory, and that “such rhetoric should be seen for what it is: an attempt by politicians and policy-makers to divert attention and blame from their own mismanagement.” More generally, the author argues that the failure of the general public to understand the social benefits of financial activies such as trading in government bonds, commodity futures, and, more recently, financial derivatives has led throughout history to “prejudice, bad laws, and bad regulations.” Much as the charging of interest and certain forms of insurance were proscribed by the medieval Church, agricultural commodity futures were attacked in the 19th century (and in much of the 20th as well) in the U.S. and elsewhere as thinly disguised forms of gambling. Moreover, the same restrictions that were imposed on gambling and futures markets during the 19th and early 20th centuries are now imposed in many Third-World countries. Instead of encouraging the use of forward markets by small producers and traders, and promoting the development of organized commodity markets and banks in local centers, most less-developed countries today support national and international “stabilization” measures such as buffer stocks and regulations like price floors, price ceilings, and crop quotas. Meanwhile, in Western nations, governments continue to accuse financial markets of “destabilizing speculation” and of a myopic obsession with short-term profitability—even as the U.S. IPO market continues to assign record values to companies that have yet to show profits. Viewed in this light, the media and regulatory assaults on the junk bond markets in the late 1980s and on derivatives in the early 1990s are only the latest in a long line of misguided attacks on financial innovation.     

Transnational networking and business performance: Ethnic entrepreneurs in Canada

It is generally acknowledged that transnational networking plays an important role in promoting the performance of ethnic entrepreneurial firms. Yet distinctions between the different types of transnational networking and their effects on business performance have received scant attention in the literature, probably because ethnicity has been considered to be the main actor in the networking–performance relationship. This paper argues that one of the reasons why business performance differs across ethnic entrepreneurial firms is that ethnic entrepreneurs engage in dissimilar types of transnational networking. Analyses of the data generated by 720 ethnic entrepreneurs in Canada revealed that ethnicity, along with human capital and push/pull factors, both of which are part of our conceptual framework, plays a central role in the engagement of different types of transnational networking and that the different types of transnational networking affect business turnover (sales) and business survival (age). Push/pull factors were found to play a marginal role in business performance. These results highlight the competitive market that immigrants and members of ethnic minority groups encounter in the hosting economy and stress the value of transnational networking.     

The role of supervision in child injury risk: definition,conceptual and measurement issues

The purpose of this paper was to examine caregiver supervision and its role as an active strategy in childhood injury prevention. Through a review of the literature, the authors addressed conceptual and methodological issues related to supervision, such as the question of how to define ‘adequate supervision.’ Three critical dimensions (attention, proximity and continuity) of caregiver supervisory behaviors are identified as important areas for measurement. Presented is a framework for understanding the role of passive and active supervisory behaviors within the social context. The framework includes family and community characteristics and policies/regulations that may be important in caregiver decisions to use active or passive injury prevention strategies. Future research directions are discussed.     

Consumer Control and Empowerment: A Primer

This paper introduces consumer empowerment as a promising research area. Going beyond lay wisdom that more control is always better, we outline several hypotheses concerning (a) the factors that influence the perception of empowerment, and (b) the consequences of greater control and the subjective experience of empowerment on consumer satisfaction and confidence.     

An intertemporal equilibrium beta pricing model

This article develops an intertemporal, discrete-time, competitiveequilibrium version of the arbitrage pricing theory, (APT) andexplores the econometric implications of this model under variousrestrictions on investor preferences and on the dynamic behaviourof dividends. We describe conditions under which the econometrictechnique typically used for estimating and testing the APTcan be shown to be consistent with our economic model. We relateour intertemporal version of the APT to the static APT and toMerton's intertemporal capital asset pricing model.