Negotiating as an ethics action (praxis) strategy

Ethical reasoning as an action (praxis) as opposed to a knowing (epistemology) strategy is not always effective in guilding ethical, stopping or turning around unethical organizational behavior. In contrast, nonviolent forcing strategies can be very effective, but also destructive. If reasoning is an idealistic thesis and forcing is its pragmatic, material antithesis, then do we need a synthesis action (praxis) strategy such as problem solving negotiating? There are also limitations with negotiating.     

Uniqueness of the fair premium for equity-linked life insurance contracts

An equity-linked life insurance contract combines an endowment life insurance and an investment strategy with a minimum guarantee. The benefit of this contract is determined by the guaranteed amount plus a bonus equal to a call on the portfolio. This bonus is similar to an Asian option. This article analyzes the relationship between the periodic insurance premium and its proportional share invested into the portfolio. For a general model of the financial risks we show the existence and uniqueness of an insurance premium. Furthermore the premium is strictly increasing and convex as a function of the share invested.     

The instantaneous capital market line

Summary. We show that if the intercept and slope of the instantaneous capital market line are deterministic, then investors will not hold any hedge portfolios in the sense of Merton [9, 11]. They will choose portfolios that plot on the capital market line, and they will slide up and down the capital market line over time as their wealth and risk tolerance change. This result allows us to aggregate over investors and derive a single factor CAPM where the first and second moments of security returns may change stochastically over time and markets are potentially incomplete.Received: 21 June 2004, Revised: 10 December 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: G11, G12.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Econometric Society Meeting in Pasadena (1997) under the title “Portfolio selection and asset pricing with dynamically incomplete markets and time-varying first and second moments”.     

Withholding taxes or information exchange: the taxation of international interest flows

This paper considers withholding taxes and information exchange as alternative means to tax international interest income. For each regime, we consider the maximum level of taxation of foreign-source income that can be sustained as the equilibrium of a repeated game. The best regime is the one that brings the level of taxation in the repeated game closest to the cooperative level of interest taxation. Sustainable levels of taxation in either regime depend on the importance of bank profits and on the marginal cost of public funds, among other things. Simulations with the model illustrate the choice between withholding taxes and information exchange. An explicit possibility is the emergence of a mixed regime, with one country imposing a withholding tax and the other country providing information. The basic model is extended to allow for size differences between the two countries and to incorporate a third, outside country.     

Mind the gap: the role of HRM in creating,capturing and leveraging rare knowledge in hostile environments

Abstract

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) have increasingly entered markets in less developed regions of the world afflicted with weak institutions and political conflict. Some are characterised by ‘extreme’ cases of institutional voids and terrorism, creating a hostile environment for the organisation and its people. This in-depth qualitative study of a service company, a European telecommunications joint venture in Afghanistan, seeks to shed light and build theory on the human resource management (HRM) dimension of managerial learning and knowledge acquisition in hostile environments, as part of the MNE’s organisational learning process. Specifically, we investigate how knowledge gaps can be addressed through supportive HR practices, and how knowledge classified as ‘rare’ can be captured and leveraged through HR interventions such as debriefing. We stipulate that HR practices and interventions adapted to hostile environments, together with expatriate willingness to learn and share new knowledge, play a critical role in the creation, capturing and leveraging of rare knowledge for subsequent use by the MNE in other hostile locations. The study has implications for international HRM and organisational resilience, under the proposition that competitive advantage can be gained through exploitation of rare knowledge acquired in hostile environments.     

Tax policy, venture capital, and entrepreneurship

The paper studies the effects of tax policy on venture capital activity. Entrepreneurs pursue a single high risk project each but have no own resources. Financiers provide funds, covering investment cost plus an upfront payment, in exchange for a share in the firm. The contract must include incentives to enlist full effort of entrepreneurs. Venture capitalists also assist with valuable business advice to enhance survival chances. The paper develops a general equilibrium framework with a traditional and an entrepreneurial sector and investigates the effects of taxes on the equilibrium level of managerial advice, entrepreneurship and welfare. It considers differential wage and capital income taxes, a comprehensive income tax, progressive taxation as well as investment and output subsidies to the entrepreneurial sector.     

Getting value for money from your science park

Based on 34 semi-structured interviews covering 25 university–industry collaborations (UICs) at science parks attached to Danish and Norwegian universities, this paper focuses on aspects of value creation and how to measure the performance of UICs. The research findings have resulted in a set of relevant performance measures for the UICs that have the potential to become levers of management for the modern-day university seeking to enhance the pay-off from its third core (mission) activities.     

NUMERICAL DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS OF FRACTIONAL UNIT ROOT AND COINTEGRATION TESTS

We calculate, by simulations, numerical asymptotic distribution functions of likelihood ratio tests for fractional unit roots and cointegration rank. Because these distributions depend on a real‐valued parameter b which must be estimated, simple tabulation is not feasible. Partly owing to the presence of this parameter, the choice of model specification for the response surface regressions used to obtain the numerical distribution functions is more involved than is usually the case. We deal with model uncertainty by model averaging rather than by model selection. We make available a computer program which, given the dimension of the problem, q, and a value of b, provides either a set of critical values or the asymptotic P‐value for any value of the likelihood ratio statistic. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inference in Cointegrating Models: UK M1 Revisited

The paper addresses the practical determination of cointegration rank. This is difficult for many reasons: deterministic terms play a crucial role in limiting distributions, and systems may not be formulated to ensure similarity to nuisance parameters; finite-sample critical values may differ from asymptotic equivalents; dummy variables alter critical values, often greatly; multiple cointegration vectors must be identified to allow inference; the data may be I(2) rather than I(1), altering distributions; and conditioning must be done with care. These issues are illustrated by an empirical application of multivariate cointegration analysis to a small model of narrow money, prices, output and interest rates in the UK.