Achieving greater financial independence for Latin America: A proposal

Financial intermediation development in Latin America illustrates the various ways in which the financial system may influence growth, efficiency, and welfare. Though the financial repression of earlier years has begun to be alleviated, much of the resulting growth of finance in Latin America has been concentrated within the countries or between them and the now-developed regions. Intraregional financial flows have been largely overlooked as an avenue for the increase of financial savings and of regional control over the mobilization and allocation of financial resources. This paper proposes the creation of new instruments designed to further the development of financial intermediation on a regional basis. A Latin American Development Bond programme is suggested which would increase the level of voluntary financial savings for regional development purposes and would reduce the present triangulation of credit flows through financial intermediaries outside of Latin America.     

Magazine Readership Patterns

A nationwide life style survey served as the basis for exploring women's magazine exposure behavior. Seven magazine exposure patterns were identified using factor analysis and interpreted on the basis of the common content of the magazines representing each pattern. Comparison of the findings of this study with prior studies suggested that media patterns are relatively stable over time.     

Friendly Fire? The Impact of US Antidumping Enforcement on US Exporters

While there has been considerable interest in recent years in the role of macroeconomic determinants of antidumping actions by the United States and other traditional users, on the one hand, and the determinants of the growing global usage of this trade policy instrument, on the other, there has to date been no systematic exploration of the motivations for the significant number of foreign antidumping cases filed against US exporters. Several observers have remarked that the growing number of foreign users of antidumping might threaten US exporters, but the determinants of these actions have not been examined. That is the purpose of this study. We find that these actions are in part explained by macroeconomic forces and as a response to US export superiority in particular sectors, however a significant role (and larger than found for global antidumping more generally) is played by retaliation for US trade policy actions. JEL no.  F13     

Labor relations at the shop floor level

The tenacious myth that a free economy and free society impoverish working people undergirds modern government interference in labor markets and legal privilege for adversarial labor unions. Managers are concerned about harmony and productivity at the shop floor level. The opposite characteristics of conflict, disco-ordination and inefficiency are anathema. Most of the union difficulties managers must cope with at the shop floor level stem from a fundamental source, namely the philosophy of collectivism. This paper analyzes the fable of labor's disadvantage, wage determination under personal and impersonal conditions, public policy toward labor contracts and the role of businessmen in making labor markets operate more efficiently.     

New venture strategies: Theory development with an empirical base

The strategy focus of over 2500 new ventures across six different industries was examined to identify what dimensions coalesce into distinct configurations. The supposition that traditional strategy typologies are inadequate to describe the breadth of differentiation exhibited among new ventures was supported. Factor and cluster analysis revealed six generic new venture strategy archetypes that can be distinguished along two dimensions; scope of segmentation, and product vs. marketing emphasis. The extent to which the archetypes tend to dominate in different industries was found to vary according to the industry's position on the industry supply chain. Strategies with a narrow scope of segmentation tended to prevail in industries near the end of the supply chain, whereas those that adopted a broad approach tended to predominate in industries near the beginning or middle of the supply chain.     

Occupational health: offering a spectrum of services

Hospitals must continue to explore ways in which to meet the needs of the employer market. As health care costs (workers' compensation and otherwise) account for a larger portion of a company's total expense dollars, the employer will continue to have a greater voice in how those dollars are expended. Hospitals and occupational health programs that recognize this fact will not only survive, they will prosper.     

Screening item effects in estimating the prevalence of nascent entrepreneurs

The use of human population surveys to estimate the prevalence of nascent entrepreneurs has become a major feature of both longitudinal studies of the firm creation process, such as the US Panel Studies of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) research program, as well as cross-national comparisons, as reflected in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) initiative. The basic procedure has been to use interview screening items to locate individuals that may be considered candidate nascent entrepreneurs; other criteria are then used to identify those considered active nascent entrepreneurs. In these human population surveys, little attention has been paid to the potential impact of variations in wording in the initial screening items, either across time in the same language or in different languages, on the final prevalence rates. Analysis of 134 independent samples in the US over the 1993–2006 period, where different screening items were employed, indicates a major impact of item wording. Once adjustments to account for item variation were made, there was no statistically significant change in the prevalence of active nascent entrepreneurs, from 5 to 6 per 100 over the 1998–2006 period. This pattern of temporal stability is consistent with three other national programs measuring U.S. new firm creation activity.