Astroturfing Global Warming: It Isn’t Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence

Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations usually sponsored by large corporations to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or to challenge and deny those against them. They constitute the corporate version of grassroots social movements. Serious ethical and societal concerns underline this astroturfing practice, especially if corporations are successful in influencing public opinion by undertaking a social movement approach. This study is motivated by this particular issue and examines the effectiveness of astroturf organizations in the global warming context, wherein large corporate polluters have an incentive to set up astroturf organizations to undermine the importance of human activities in climate change. We conduct an experiment to determine whether astroturf organizations have an impact on the level of user certainty about the causes of global warming. Results show that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the causes of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used grassroots websites. Astroturf organizations are hence successful in promoting business interests over environmental protection. In addition to the multiple business ethics issues it raises, astroturfing poses a significant threat to the legitimacy of the grassroots movement.     

Firm size,age, industrial networking,and growth: a case of the Korean manufacturing industry

This paper investigates the roles of firm size, age, and industrial networking in determining firm growth. Analyses using the 2-year panel data of 7,889 Korean manufacturing firms between 1994 and 2003 confirm that firm size and age have significant negative effects on firm growth and significant positive impacts on firm survival. R&D and export activities are found to facilitate both firm growth and survival. The primary focus of this study is to examine the effects of industrial networking, such as subcontracting and clustering, on firm growth. The results show that subcontracting does not yield any positive effect for firm growth, but encumbers survival, which may be accounted for by the high subcontracting intensity among small firms. Clustering, on the other hand, is found to promote firm growth and survival. There is, however, little evidence that such a positive effect of clustering is derived from network externalities through cooperation and competition among firms in a cluster per se.     

Bidding in real estate: A game theoretic approach

Taking advantage of recent developments in bargaining theory, we examine the bidding process for residential real estate. Within this game theoretic context, we consider whether the phenomenon of buyer's remorse is compatible with the rationality required of participants.     

Global diversification strategy and corporate profit performance

Based on a sample of 62 multinationals, this paper examines the impact of global diversification strategy on corporate profit performance by integrating the product and the international market dimensions of diversification. The results suggest that the corporate profit performance impact of related and unrelated diversification varies contingent upon the extent of a firm's international market diversification. One important lesson of this work is that both business strategy researchers and managers should review corporate diversification as having distinct yet interactive strategic dimensions—product and international market—and they would do well to recognize both the different and the joint effect of these dimensions on corporate profit performance.     

INVESTMENT PERFORMANCE OF COMMON STOCKS IN RELATION TO INSIDER OWNERSHIP

In this paper, the authors empirically examine whether corporations with high degrees of insider ownership enjoy superior returns compared with firms with more diffuse ownership. In addition, the authors evaluate the effects of insider ownership on security returns in relations to the well-known effects of size and earnings yield (or price-earnings) ratios. Results indicate that, in addition to Basu's price-earnings effect, insider ownership is a new statistically significant variable that is associated with abnormal returns. This return anomaly might occur because the market pays an inadequate price for top managements' equity ownership, a firm-specific fundamental variable that has a theoretical foundation in agency theory.     

The extent of nonstationarity of beta

This paper investigates the extent of nonstationarity of beta across the firm size and the beta magnitude by suggesting the sequential parameter stationarity model and estimating change-points of betas. The high-beta firm has shorter stationary interval, which means that its beta changes more frequently than do the low-beta firm's. The firm size, however, does not have a monotonic relation with the length of stationary interval. The small and large firms have relatively shorter stationary interval than do the mid-sized firms. The average length of stationary interval is estimated about five years (exactly 54.19 months). This fact could support the currently widely-used arbitrary 5-year assumption of beta stationarity. The fluctuation of the large firm's beta is more severe than the small firm's, and the high- and low-beta firms have the relatively greater fluctuating betas than do the mid-beta firms. The frequency of detected change-points is found to be positively related to market returns. When the market return is high, the systematic risk changes more frequently, and vice versa.     

The timing of prepayment: A theoretical analysis

This article develops the analytical methods necessary to determine the prepayment patterns of a mortgage contract. The most obvious measure of how many years a mortgage is likely to last is the expected time to termination. It is this measure that we most fully explore. However, since the method employed is able to characterize the probability of prepayment in any given time period, the means is provided to determine any measure of the time to termination.     

Waiting to Default: The Value of Delay

This paper analyzes the opportunity for early termination of a mortgage contract. We consider the possibility of defaulting on the property and explore the rules that are used by a value-maximizing borrower in exercising this option to default. The discussion centers on the value of waiting to make such a decision and the consequences of this rational inertia. We show that the observed delay in default usually attributed to transaction costs can instead be explained as entirely rational choice in a dynamic environment.     

Causes of repressed inflation in the Soviet consumer market, 1965–1989: retail price subsidies,the siphoning effect,and the budget deficit

This article uses material which has recently been made available from Russian archives to analyse the causes of repressed inflation in the Soviet consumer market. It finds that retail price subsidies, which increased as a proportion of state budget expenditure from 4 per cent in 1965 to 20 per cent in the late 1980s, intensified consumer market disequilibrium. The provision of these subsidies had negative effects on the market by maintaining the purchasing power of households for consumer goods and by increasing the budget deficit. The unauthorized purchase of consumer goods by enterprises tended to increase during these years also.     

Predation and accumulation

This article incorporates the economic theory of predation into the theory of economic growth. The analytical framework is a general-equilibrium model of the interaction between two dynasties: a potential predator and its prey. We find that the rate of accumulation of capital and the security of property are positively related only for generations of the prey dynasty that tolerate predation. Generations of the prey dynasty that choose to deter predation, even though their property is perfectly secure, accumulate productive capital more slowly than the preceding generations that tolerated predation.