Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Export instability,expansion and market concentration: A methodological interpretation

An analysis of the interrelationships among export instability, expansion and market concentration exhibited by fourteen Western Pacific countries yields three important and meaningful results. There exists a positive and significant association firstly, between export instability and export growth, secondly between the latter and geographical concentration, and hence thirdly between export fluctuations and market concentration but not in any direct causal manner as has been postulated by the general ‘concensus’. There is also evidence that the United States and Japan tend to provide the best growth potential, as demand sources for exports from Western Pacific area, at least in the near future.     

Gibrat’s Law with Mild Nonrandom Growth

Gibrat’s Law (GL) has repeatedly failed to gain full empirical confirmation in specific industries. This study offers a deliberately favorable opportunity for full confirmation in the truckload sector of the U.S. trucking industry where firms are highly homogeneous. As such, most nonrandom determinants of growth remain very similar for all firms, so significant differences in growth rates are not expected. Still, there is only incomplete support: (1) long term growth rates are not equal for all firms, but the differences are small and not size-related except for the smallest firms, and (2) the size distributions better approximate lognormal when the smallest firms are excluded, but in no case does the variance rise over time. This suggests that for most other industries, where nonrandom growth should be much stronger, GL would seem unlikely to play more than a minor role in portraying actual firm growth or the evolution of market structure.     

Economic crisis: Management and innovative development issues

This article discusses the reasons for Russia’s vulnerability to the factors of the economic crisis. We propose a conception based on A.A. Bogdanov’s general theory of crisis and I. Shumpeter’s economic cycles. The concept involves crisis management as an alternative to traditional anticrisis approaches and the basis of a strategy for recovering from a crisis and the long-term innovative development of the economy.     

Can investors time their exposure to private equity?

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. This occurs, in part, because investors can only time their commitments to funds; they cannot time when commitments are called or when investments are exited. There is a high degree of time-series correlation in net cash flows even across commitment strategies that allocate capital in a very different manner over time.     

On the Hybrid Nature of REITs

The consensus that emerges from the current research on the linkage between securitized and direct investment in real estate is that direct (private) real estate returns play a relatively minor role in the real estate investment trust (REIT) return generating process. However, this result may at least partially be due to the coarseness of the measures of direct real estate returns or the relatively short return horizons used in previous studies. This study takes a different and unique perspective. Unlike earlier studies we do not use aggregated, average appraisal based returns on direct real estate investment. Instead, we use the MIT TBI indexes, which are transaction based price indexes, available both on the aggregate and sub-index levels. We find that the relation between REIT and direct real estate returns appears to be stronger at longer horizons. More specifically, using a cointegration framework, we find robust evidence that REITs and the underlying real estate are related and that they share a long run equilibrium. Interestingly, we find that both REITs and direct real estate returns adjust towards this long run relationship. When we examine property type level data we find similar results.     

Testing the CAPM revisited

This paper re-examines the tests of the Sharpe–Lintner Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The null that the CAPM intercepts are zero is tested for ten size-based stock portfolios and for twenty five book-to-market sorted portfolios using five-year, ten-year and longer sub-periods during 1965–2004. The paper shows that the evidence for rejecting the CAPM on statistical grounds is weaker than the consensus view suggests, and highlights the pitfalls of testing multiple hypotheses with the conventional heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation robust (HAR) test with asymptotic P-values. The conventional test rejects the null for almost all sub-periods, which is consistent with the evidence in the literature. By contrast, the null is not rejected for most of the sub-periods by the new HAR tests developed by Kiefer et al. (2000), Kiefer and Vogelsang (2005), and Sun et al. (2008).     

There is relevance in the classroom: Analysis of present methods of teaching business ethics

In 1988 the Journal of Business Ethics published a paper by David Mathison entitled Business Ethics Cases and Decision Models: A Call for Relevancy in the Classroom. Mathison argued that the present methods of teaching business ethics may be inappropriate for MBA students. He believes that faculty are teaching at one decision-making level and that students are and will be functioning on another (lower) level. The purpose of this paper is to respond to Mathison's arguments and offer support for the present methods and materials used to teach Master level ethics classes. The support includes suggested class discussion ideas and assignments.Victoria K. Strong is a graduate student at Bentley College. She returned to school to pursue a Master of Science in Accountancy after working in the engineering profession for 12 years. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1984. Her business experience includes positions as Mechanical Design Engineer and Unit Supervisor of an engineering development laboratory. Alan N. Hoffman is an Associate Professor of Management at Bentley College. He received his DBA from Indiana University. Dr. Hoffman's writing has been published in the Academy of Management Journal and Human Relations.The authors would like to thank Carolyn Colt and the entire spring 1988 MG520-class for their valuable contributions.