Modelling the Impact of Environmental and Organizational Determinants on Green Supply Chain Innovation and Performance

Both customers and suppliers are becoming increasingly concerned about environmental issues in modern food chains. A firm’s decision to implement green supply chain management is based on the social objectives of the firm and its management, its desire to pursue corporate social responsibility, its relationships with channel partners, and environmental determinants such as government legislation. The speed at which green supply chain management is implemented within an organization depends on its agility and its ability to facilitate innovation. Innovation may take the form of new product development or new process development, including the introduction of environmental management systems and total quality management in both production and purchasing. This article presents a conceptual model to explain how the various theoretical constructs are related and how innovation effects green supply chain management and performance.     

Do regional payroll tax reductions boost employment?

Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we evaluate the effects of a 10 percentage point reduction in the payroll tax introduced in 2002 in northern Sweden. We find no employment effects among firms existing both before and after the reform, whereas the average wage bill per employee increases by about 0.25% per percentage point reduction in the tax rate. Extending the analysis to include entry and exit of firms, we find evidence of positive effects on the number of firms and a tendency to positive employment effects. Moreover, the wage incidence estimates become insignificant when we account for entry and exit of firms.     

Saving the Commons in an Age of Plunder

Land ownership, as commonly understood today, originated with the enclosure movement during the English Tudor era almost four centuries ago. Karl Polanyi referred to this “propertization” of nature as the “great transformation.” That land, water, and air was a social commons is now archaic and forgotten, and with it the classical economic concept of rent, which was, in theory, once paid to royalty as the earth's guardian. Garrett Hardin's article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” raised alarm about the abuse and loss of this realm, and he recommended constraints and privatization to prevent this. Most people view titles to landed property much as they do their household goods, but Henry George saw that the earth should be seen as a common resource and its value taxed to benefit everyone. This would restore economic equilibrium to market exchanges and pay for government services. The capture of natural resource rents can supplant taxes on wages and capital goods, and it comports with all textbook principles of sound tax theory. This policy can be the modern replacement for the commons, and implementing resource rent capture is both economically and technically feasible.     

Abusive work practices and bullying among chefs: A review of the literature

Discussion in the media suggests that bullying and abuse are rife in commercial kitchens. This paper analyses the issue of abusive work practices among chefs through a review of the literature; it examines the possible causes of bullying and abusive behaviour in the industry and argues that personal characteristics, culture and socialisation, and the transient nature of the industry, may offer some explanations as to why abusive behaviour is tolerated.Evidence from the literature suggests that abuse may be an expected part of the culture of a commercial kitchen; this is supported by both historical and social structures including education and training systems.In conclusion, research into abusive behaviour among chefs has been limited and further research into its true extent, and how it becomes tolerated, would be useful.     

Regulatory induced performance persistence: Evidence from hedge funds

This paper tests the idea that financial regulation can impact performance persistence in the context of the hedge fund industry in 48 countries over the years 1994–2008. The data show evidence of three types of regulation influencing performance persistence: (1) minimum capital restrictions, which restrict lower quality funds and hence increase the likelihood of performance persistence, (2) restrictions on location of key service providers, which restrict human capital choices and hence tend to mitigate performance persistence, and (3) distribution channels, which make fund performance more opaque, decrease the likelihood of performance persistence. We do not find evidence that distribution channels, that promote fund presence to institutional investors, enhance performance persistence. Finally, we show differences in the effect of regulation on persistence by fund quartile ranking.     

Linkages among Interest Rates in the United States, Germany and Norway

The Johansen multivariate cointegration methodology is used to analyze relationships among short-term and long-term interest rates in the United States, Germany and Norway. A variance decomposition approach is applied to estimate the proportion of each interest rate's forecast error variance attributable to innovations in the other interest rates. Impulse response functions are plotted to illustrate the speed with which interest rate events are transmitted between capital markets. The analyses illustrate that US interest rates have a significant influence on both German and Norwegian interest rates, while the reverse effect is modest. Norway is also strongly exposed to German interest rate movements, which reflects the consequences of a small country linking its currency to the value of European currencies.     

Interdependence and economic development in North and South

In the past four or five years politicians in the industrialized countries and research workers as well have been making increasing use of the term “interdependence” as quintessential to the economic and political relations between the North and the South. What does this term mean? Can the extent and the effects of this interdependence be quantified?