Adequacy of International Codes of Behavior

International codes of corporate behavior have been proposed, discussed, negotiated, and promulgated by governments, transnational corporations, and inter-corporate associations over the past few decades. It is not clear that they have been resoundingly as successful in changing corporate behavior – particularly as to corruption and environmental protection – as have national government requirements imposed on foreign enterprises and their own officials. This article arrays the many attempts to structure cooperative action to re-order corporate behavior on several dimensions – restrictive business practices, labor conditions, human rights, environmental production, and corruption. It then assesses the extent to which behavior has been changed and what techniques are more effective in making corporate behavior more ethical.     

The Nordic Model and Structural Change: Lessons from the Collapse of Saab Automobile AB

The case of Saab and Trollhättan shows one way that societies can harness the productive side of creative destruction while mitigating the harm it causes.     

Health and Employment amongst Older Workers*

Health and employment are strongly correlated. This paper reviews the existing evidence and brings in new evidence on the following issues: (a) the measurement of health; (b) the impact of health on employment rather than just the association between health and employment; (c) the mechanisms by which health impacts employment; and (d) the likely effect of recent retirement and disability policy changes in the UK. Although the magnitude of the estimated effect of health on employment varies greatly from study to study, some of this variation is driven by the health measure used. Given our preferred measure, the evidence suggests that 5–10 per cent of the employment decline between ages 50 and 70 is due to declining health in England, with the largest effects among low-educated men. Most of the effect comes through declining preferences for work and lower productivity when in bad health, although some of the effect is from government-provided incentives to not work when in bad health, such as from disability benefits.     

Corporate decision making in the presence of political uncertainty: The case of corporate cash holdings

Using a quarterly panel of U.S. corporations over the period 1985–2014, we show that corporate managers respond to political uncertainty and economic policy uncertainty shocks in different ways. We proxy for political uncertainty using the Partisan Conflict Index and employ a prevalent empirical macroeconomic methodology to construct structural shocks that are orthogonal to shocks captured by the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. Following a political uncertainty shock, corporations increase cash but do not adjust investment. Alternatively, following an economic policy uncertainty shock, firms appear to draw on cash and reduce capital spending to increase research and development spending.     

Distance education in the future: Exploring the application of distributed group support systems

Distributed Group Support Systems (DGSS) provide a means for several individuals to interact with one another from different geographic locations using telecommunications and Group Support Systems (GSS) technologies. As this technology emerges, new applications will be sought to utilize the tremendous capabilities for long distance interaction and communication. One potential application of DGSS is its use in the delivery of Distance Education. Distance Education (DE) involves the delivery of education (or training) from one site to one (or more) geographically dispersed sites. The capability of DGSS to add an additional communications channel, one by which all students could interact with one another at the same time, provides an exciting array of opportunities for the application of DGSS. This article explores ways in which DGSS could be utilized to improve the delivery of education and training to dispersed locations. Background information of GSS and DE are provided Results of a case, study in which a fiber optic cable network was used for delivering a DE class on Information Systems are briefly highlighted, along with suggestions for future research in this area.A previous version of this article appears in the Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, Volume IV, pp. 142–148.     

Investor Response to Mutual Fund Policy Variables

The effects of investment performance and macro-economic influences on money flow to individual mutual funds previously have been investigated and found to provide little explanatory power. In this article we investigate an additional category of factors that may logically be thought to affect the flow of money to funds, namely, the fund policy factors over which managers have some degree of control. These are: load/no-load status, sales commission structures, minimum dollar investment levels, and expenses. We establish associations between these factors and new money flows. Several significant relationships are found. Overall, however, the policy variables we investigated explain little of the variability in new money flows. A competitive equilibrium appears to exist such that no single fund attracts new money at disproportionately high rates through its policies. Our results, like those obtained for performance and macro-economic variables, highlight the inability of mutual fund research to date to explain adequately the flow of new money to individual funds.     

Temporary Buydowns and Affordability

This paper is directed to a neglected aspect of the problem of home ownership affordability: the impact on affordability of temporary buy downs. A temporary buydown is an option offered to home buyers to reduce the mortgage payment in the early years of the loan. The borrower allocates cash up front to an escrow account from which funds are withdrawn monthly to supplement the borrower's mortgage payment.
Temporary buydowns are underused partly because of the difficulty of determining whether, in any particular case, they will increase affordability. This paper develops a new instrument called the maximum affordable mortgage (MAX) which automatically allocates the buyer's available cash between buydown, down payment and other uses in a manner which maximizes affordability for the buyer, subject to whatever underwriting constraints the investor wishes to impose on payment graduation and/or the total size of the buydown.
The lender originating the MAX must be able to solve a complex algorithm at the point of sale, but the complexity is all behind the scenes. Using a computer, a loan officer can quickly find the cash allocation that maximizes affordability. The power of the MAX in increasing affordability may be enhanced if it is combined with a buyup wherein the lender trades off lower points against a higher rate.     

Henry George and George Bernard Shaw: Comparison and Contrast

A bstract . Henry George , the American economist and social philosopher , and George Bernard Shaw , the British playwright and social reformer , were two famous personalities of the last quarter of the 19th century, each a prophet in his own way. The two men probably never met, though Shaw credited George's oratory as well as his classic. Progress and Poverty , with awakening his interest in economic issues, and to his last days acknowledged his debt to George. Both were deeply committed to ending poverty. But there the similarity ended—George was devoted to ethical democracy, Shaw to socialist dictatorship. George saw cooperative individualism as the goal of social reconstruction; Shaw dreamed of a Superman, and fancied himself a supporter of the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, and of Soviet Russian'communism.'Shaw saw the purpose of life as "being used for a (mighty) purpose;" George saw it as blazing a trail for'progressive humanity,'cooperating with the Creator in creating a moral world.     

The Linkage between Prices,Wages, and Labor Productivity: A Panel Study of Manufacturing Industries

This article investigates the long-run relationship between prices and wage-adjusted productivity as well as between real wages and average labor productivity at the industry level for a panel of 459 U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1956-1996. Panel reintegration test results strongly reject the null of no reintegration in the panel between both prices and wage-adjusted productivity and between labor productivity and real wages for many (but not all) industries. Granger-causality tests show that prices are weakly exogenous and cause movements in unit labor cost. Bidirectional Granger causality is found between real wages and productivity; however, a one-to-one relationship is strongly rejected between real wages and productivity. Increases in labor productivity are associated with a less than unity increase in real wages.