IAMOT and Education: Defining a Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) Body-of-Knowledge (BoK) for graduate education (TIM BoK)

Whether it is called Management of Technology and Innovation (MOTI), Management of Technology (MOT), Engineering Technology Management (ETM) or Technology and Innovation Management (TIM), the TIM field is rapidly growing and diverse. This diversity is built upon disparate university locations of TIM programs; TIM’s emerging nature, its wide appeal as well as unique researcher and practitioner viewpoints. This has created a plethora of education materials, benchmark programs and pedagogical thought. Yet the field is growing so rapidly that no single source has yet been established which clearly identifies which topics and educational materials represents its basic Body of Knowledge (BoK). If this is so, then there is cause for concern.We review TIM pedagogy studies, TIM research, and the economic realities that initiated and continue to demand TIM education for managers. We leverage the five-year body of knowledge development activities of the International Association for the Management of Technology (IAMOT) education committee. We then develop a TIM BoK topic list and survey stakeholders that include: academics, industrial professionals and government policy makers. We found that there is a need for and convergence on a comprehensive TIM BoK source. The result is a TIM BoK source document that can be utilized to improve and monitor TIM educational programs around the world.     

The Relationship Between Spiritual Well-Being and Ethical Orientations in Decision Making: An Empirical Study with Business Executives in Australia

The purpose of this study was to determine the applicability of Buddhist practices in today’s workplaces. The findings were supported by interviews with Buddhist masters and Buddhist business practitioners, as well as literature review, through phenomenological analysis. As a means of presenting the main reasons why Buddhist practices should be considered in contemporary workplaces, a SWOT analysis is presented. In this analysis, a number of strengths for using Buddhist practices in workplaces are listed such as pro-scientific, greater personal responsibility, and healthy detachment, while potential weaknesses such as non-harming, equanimity, and no competition are also reviewed. Both the strengths and the weaknesses could be listed in reverse if applied to a different extent. Among the opportunities were issues such as re-educating the world of business, enhancing personal ownership and a healthier society, while the threats comprised issues such as creating different imbalances, disinterest, and stationary development.     

Extreme Value Theory and Archimedean Copulas

Using the language of copulas, we generalize the famous Fisher-Tippett Theorem of extreme value theory to the case with sequences of dependent random variables. The dependence structure is modelled using archimedean copulas. This generalization enables to study the behaviour of the maxima of dependent random sequences.     

The Emergence of Non-monetary Means of Payment in the Russian Economy

The widespread use of non-cash payments in Russia is the result of a complex bundle of factors: tax evasion, established networks of enterprises and policy-induced causes. By use of non-monetary payments, agents have relaxed their liquidity constraints, but they still lack the financial resources needed to undertake investment and restructuring. Banks' credit provision is based on criteria other than the profitability of the recipient of the funds. The interest rate, coupled with the restructuring of the banking sector, could operate as an effective lever that may lead to a more economically consistent management of liquidity and could also reduce capital flight.     

Conditional Value-at-Risk,spectral risk measures and (non-)diversification in portfolio selection problems – A comparison with mean–variance analysis

We study portfolio selection under Conditional Value-at-Risk and, as its natural extension, spectral risk measures, and compare it with traditional mean–variance analysis. Unlike the previous literature that considers an investor’s mean-spectral risk preferences for the choice of optimal portfolios only implicitly, we explicitly model these preferences in the form of a so-called spectral utility function. Within this more general framework, spectral risk measures tend towards corner solutions. If a risk free asset exists, diversification is never optimal. Similarly, without a risk free asset, only limited diversification is obtained. The reason is that spectral risk measures are based on a regulatory concept of diversification that differs fundamentally from the reward-risk tradeoff underlying the mean–variance framework.     

Multinational Firms and Labor Market Pooling

In the presence of increasing specialization of workers it becomes more and more difficult for firms to find the most suitable workers. In such an environment a multinational enterprise (MNE) has an advantage because it can exchange workers between plants in different countries. Recruiting from the home and foreign plant leads to a larger labor market pool for an MNE, reducing the mismatch of its workforce. This paper analyzes the consequences of this advantage for production, employment, prices and wages. In line with recent empirical results, we find that the additional ability to recruit workers from the home and foreign labor market leads to lower mismatch, higher average productivity of workers, lower prices, higher output, and higher employment of a plant of an MNE as compared with a national firm, while the wage‐effects depend on firm productivity.     

The contribution of trout fly fishing to the economy of Rhodes,North Eastern Cape,South Africa

Recent government legislation, which calls for the eradication of trout from ecosystems where they may cause harm, could damage the tourism appeal of many South African catchments. However, no South African studies have tried to quantify the economic impact of removing trout from rivers and streams. This study aimed first to value the Rhodes trout fishery, North Eastern Cape, South Africa, and second to assess whether the trout fly fishing industry in Rhodes could form the foundation for the implementation of a local economic development initiative. Overall, the study found that the trout fishing industry directly generates approximately R5 658 240 per annum, and sustains a minimum of 39 direct job opportunities for the community of Rhodes, and can therefore provide the impetus for the creation of a tourism-based local economic development programme.     

A MATHEMATICAL APPROACH TO HARROD'S OPEN ECONOMY DYNAMICS

This paper investigates an open economy dynamic model in the Harrod tradition. Its goal is to check if in accordance with Harrod's thought, opening to foreign trade is able to reduce the cyclical instability the economic system exhibits when it is closed to the international trade. We show that the system's dynamic behavior depends on changes in the saving rate, the competitiveness of home products in the foreign markets and the initial sign of the balance of trade. We demonstrate that stable cycles are possible only under particular conditions. Otherwise, the economy may experience chaotic motions in the long period.     

A General Approach to Rational Learning in Games

This paper provides a general framework for analysing rational learning in strategic situations in which the players have private priors and private information. The author analyses the behaviour of Bayesian rational players both in a repeated game and in a recurrent game when they are uncertain about opponents' behaviour and the game they are playing. The aim of the paper is to explain how Bayesian rational agents learn by playing and to characterize the outcome of this learning process. By studying the concept of 'conjectural equilibrium' and analysing the process of convergence of players' behaviour, the roles played by the notions of merging and of consistency are demonstrated.     

Do unemployment benefits promote or hinder job reallocation?

According to recent and largely untested theories, unemployment benefits (UBs) could improve the extent and quality of job reallocation even at the cost of increasing unemployment. In this paper, we use a new set of yearly panel data from a large number of countries to evaluate empirically the relationship between unemployment benefits and job reallocation. Unlike previous work assessing the effects of UBs on labor market stocks, we focus on flows and rely on policy “experiments,” notably the introduction from scratch of unemployment benefits in many countries. We exploit the longitudinal nature of our data to lessen the potentially important selection, endogeneity, and omitted variable problems. We find a positive, sizable, and significant effect of the introduction of UBs on job reallocation, arising mainly from the job destruction margin although this effect fades away over time. These findings appear to be robust to changes in the countries in the sample, control variables or estimation methods. We discuss to what extent our results are consistent with equilibrium matching models with or without endogenous sorting of workers into jobs providing entitlement to UBs and stochastic job matching.