Framing the field of international human resource management research

This article presents an overarching framework of the international human resource management field. The framework has four different levels: Macro (encompassing countries, regions and industries), the Multinational Corporation, Unit (typically subsidiary) and Individual (including teams, employees and their family members). At each level, we make a distinction between Influencing Factors, the HRM Function (encompassing both the HR department and HR policies and practices), Proximal Outcomes and Distant Outcomes of HRM. The framework allows us to examine existing research and suggest avenues for future work.     

EU agriculture: Reduced protection from exchange rate instability

In the past, the protection of agriculture in the EU from exchange rate instability was accomplished at the cost of confusing regulations, welfare losses and the discrimination of other sectors. Will the 1993 reform of the Agri-Monetary System, combined with wide 15% European Monetary System margins and the recent GATT agreement, lead to more efficiency in European agriculture?     

Inferior factor in Cournot oligopoly revisited

We reconsider the recent work by Okuguchi (J Econ 101:125–131, 2010) on (possibly asymmetric) Cournotian firms with two production factors, one being inferior for each firm. It is shown there that an increase in the price of the inferior factor does raise the equilibrium industry output. In addition of providing a simpler and more rigorous proof of that result, we generalize it to the case of technologies with $s\ge 2$ factors and also allow some firms not to use the inferior one.     

The Impact of Upfront Payments on Assortment Decisions in Retailing

There is a contentious debate about the exclusionary effects of upfront payments to be made by manufacturers to place their products on retailers’ shelves. Analyzing a two-stage bargaining process with one downstream retailer and a pool of upstream manufacturers, we find that upfront payments lead to a smaller assortment if the retailer’s bargaining power is high enough and the suppliers’ products are close substitutes.     

Kapital und Zins in der stationären Verkehrswirtschaft

Ohne ZusammenfassungVortrag, gehalten an der Universität Freiburg i. Br. am 19./20. November 1940.