Trade patterns and institutional change in East Asia

We investigate how trade patterns – institutionally intensive exports (IIX) – affect institutional quality in East Asia compared to the rest of the world, and whether the effect changed due to the Asian financial crisis. To examine this, we use panel data of 117 countries for the period 1988–2007. Our fixed effect model estimation reveals that the effect of IIX on institutional quality is negative and significant for East Asia, while the effect is insignificant for the rest of the world. The negative effect in East Asia is more pronounced for the five East Asian countries that were strongly affected by the crisis – South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand – than for other East Asian countries. Furthermore, our results reveal that the negative effect for East Asia does not change significantly after the crisis, both in the short and long term, and that improvement in institutional quality after the crisis is not different from that of the rest of the world. This suggests that the crisis had no significant impact on East Asia's institutional quality or on the effects of IIX on institutional quality.     

The Hausman test and weak instruments

We consider the following problem. There is a structural equation of interest that contains an explanatory variable that theory predicts is endogenous. There are one or more instrumental variables that credibly are exogenous with regard to this structural equation, but which have limited explanatory power for the endogenous variable. Further, there is one or more potentially ‘strong’ instruments, which has much more explanatory power but which may not be exogenous. Hausman (1978) provided a test for the exogeneity of the second instrument when none of the instruments are weak. Here, we focus on how the standard Hausman test does in the presence of weak instruments using the Staiger–Stock asymptotics. It is natural to conjecture that the standard version of the Hausman test would be invalid in the weak instrument case, which we confirm. However, we provide a version of the Hausman test that is valid even in the presence of weak IV and illustrate how to implement the test in the presence of heteroskedasticity. We show that the situation we analyze occurs in several important economic examples. Our Monte Carlo experiments show that our procedure works relatively well in finite samples. We should note that our test is not consistent, although we believe that it is impossible to construct a consistent test with weak instruments.     

Long-term performance of divesting firms and the effect of managerial ownership

We study the long-term performance of firms that divest assets to assess whether gains arise from reducing agency costs. We find that divesting firms underperform control firms before the divestiture and outperform control firms following the divestiture. The poor performance experienced by divesting firms is unrelated to managerial ownership, but the post-divestiture improvement in performance is strongly related to stock ownership by the CEO. The results support the argument that divestitures remove assets that generate negative synergies and that managerial ownership provides strong incentives to improve operations following the divestiture.     

Structural equation model for predicting technology commercialization success index (TCSI)

Expecting high return, many firms try to invest on R&D of new technology. However, critical loss of assets would occur, when a firm fails to commercialize the developed technology. It would be of interest to provide the ideal environment for commercialization from the R&D stage. In this study, we use a structural equation model (SEM) to forecast the technology commercialization success index (TCSI) in relation to technology developer, technology receiver, technology transfer center, and environmental factors. The proposed SEM is fitted based on partial least square (PLS) estimation procedure. Individual TCSI is then found following the approach used for American customer satisfaction index (ACSI) for various combinations of characteristics of the type of technology, technology receiver, and technology developer. We expect that the proposed approach for TCSI can be used as guidance for an ideal match of technology with technology developer and technology receiver.     

An AHP & Survey for Selecting Workflow Management Systems

The aim of this study was to establish the important criteria to be considered in selecting the workflow solution for a particular organization’s business process reengineering project. The success of a BPR project depends on the attainment of a subtle balance between two conflicting goals—control of the core work processes and empowerment of the individual employees. This balance in turn must differ from industry to industry, due to the difference in the core processes and the organizational structure. In this study, functions of the workflow management system that were considered important for reengineering an organization were structured as an attribute hierarchy according to the analytic hierarchy process model to facilitate the choice between conflicting functions. The attribute hierarchy was evaluated through a survey conducted on representatives of South Korean firms from different industries, the results of which indicate that workflow management systems must be designed to conform to a firm’s particular managerial practices and organizational structure, which differ among industries.© 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Complexity in choice experiments: choice of the status quo alternative and implications for welfare measurement*

We examine the propensity of respondents to choose the status quo (SQ) or current situation alternative as a function of complexity in two separate state‐of‐the‐world choice experiments. Complexity in each choice set was characterized as the number of single and multiple changes in levels of attributes from the current situation and the order of the choice task in the sequence of multiple tasks provided to respondents. We show that increasing complexity leads to increased choice of the SQ and that a respondent’s age and level of education also influenced this choice. We outline the effects of the alternate approaches for incorporating the SQ into welfare measurement. These findings have implications for the design of stated preference experiments, examining passive use values and for empirical analysis leading to welfare measurement.     

Four tigers and the dragon: values differences,similarities, and consensus

This study examines the influence of economic and political factors that contribute to the convergence and/or divergence in value priorities of five East Asian societies—China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. We find that political and social-economic factors influence the values orientations of managers within this region. However, economic development level is an insufficient explanation for values convergence without consideration of the societal context and cultural traditions in which that development occurred.

Test of random versus fixed effects with small within variation

Comparisons of within and between estimators using the conventional Hausman test may be subject to statistical problems if the within variation is not sufficiently large. Adopting an alternative asymptotic approximation, we propose a modification of Hausman test that is valid whether the within variation is small or large.