Cornering the Japanese market

Carol Sage, Training Director of the Sheraton Center, New York City, presents an account of a training initiative in a New York City convention hotel — aimed at improving relations with Japanese guests, with a view to increasing the hotel's share of the Japanese tourist market. Training in cross-cultural awareness improved staff services for Japanese visitors, to such an extent, that the Japanese market share of the hotel has already increased.     

Maternity rights and mothers' return to work

This paper uses a cohort of 12,000 births to examine the effect of maternity rights on mothers' post-birth return to employment decisions. It uses a discrete hazard model to disentangle the effects of the terms of maternity rights entitlements from other factors that influence the timing of a mother's return to work. Mothers with rights have an underlying (but unobserved) stronger attachment to the labour market that prompts earlier return than on average. We take this into account by estimating a counterfactual distribution of return times using a sample of women who failed to qualify for maternity rights but who have similar levels of labour market attachment. Even when differential attachment is taken into account there remains a substantial impact of maternity rights on behaviour.     

CORPORATE CULTURE: THE LAST FRONTIER OF CONTROL?[1]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the present U.S. use of the concept of ‘corporate culture’ using the sociology of Emile Durkheim as a conceptual framework. Durkheim was concerned with understanding where potential sources of morality might reside in a rapidly changing, increasingly differentiated society. Proponents of corporate culture do not rely specifically on Durkheim's work but essentially answer his question by suggesting that the corporation is the appropriate site for moral order. In this paper it is argued that the attempted manipulation of a corporation's culture is simply an addition to other forms of control which companies have tried to implement. More than other forms of control, however, corporate culture elicits sentiment and emotion, and contains possibilities to ensnare workers in a hegemonic system. On the other hand, strengthening corporate cultures in the U.S.A may also lead to increased worker homogenization and activism.     

The impact of decoupled subsidies on productivity in agriculture: a cross‐country analysis using microdata

The decoupling of direct payments from production introduced in the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy is expected to make production decisions more market‐oriented and farmers more productive. However, ex‐post analyses of the productivity of farms have yet to uncover any evidence of a positive impact of the decoupling policy on farm productivity. Using Irish, Danish, and Dutch farm‐level data, we identify whether the decoupling policy has contributed to productivity growth in agriculture and farm product adjustment behavior. We find some evidence that the decoupling policy had significant positive effects on farm productivity and behavioral changes related to farm specialization.     

FIRM AND GOVERNMENT AS ACTORS IN PENROSE'S PROCESS THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL GROWTH: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE RESOURCE-BASED VIEW AND OWNERSHIP–LOCATION– INTERNATIONALISATION PARADIGM

Edith Penrose's The Theory of the Growth of the Firm proposed a process theory of growth based on the pursuit of knowledge by the firm and unconstrained by government. In her subsequent studies of foreign direct investment by large firms in developing countries, Penrose considers the firm and government as actors in the same growth process. This paper explores the development of Penrose's expanded process theory of growth from 1955 to 1973 in which she assumes that neither dual actors nor foreign expansion requires a new or special theory. This finding has implications for the resource-based view and the eclectic ownership–location–internationalisation paradigm interpretations of international business.     

Efficiency and Technological Change in the U.S. Brewing Industry

This study demonstrates that the measurement of technological change and economic efficiency are tightly linked. Efficiency measures may depend on carefully controlling for technological change, while tests of technological change may be sensitive to empirical model specifications. Moreover, the study underlines Solow's (1994) and Romer's (1994) admonition that econometricians should pay attention to industry and institutional evidence in building models of technological change. The empirical results presented here suggest that there has been substantial technological change in the U.S. brewing industry from 1950 to 1992. This occurred in the form of a dramatic shift in technology beginning with the introduction of super breweries in about 1972. There has also been a substantial increase in scale economies, which undoubtedly caused many inefficiently small firms to exit the industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Further results suggest that a more complete specification of technological change and the stochastic nature of the frontier production function leads to higher and more tenable estimates of efficiency.     

Field publishing performance of U.S. economics departments

Conclusion The purpose of this study is to reduce information costs in the market for graduate education in economics and the market for Ph.D. economists by providing information on research concentration in each of 19 fields for 1980–1986. Some variation in publishing performance across fields is found in highly regarded universities. Unexpected faculty strength is discovered in some middle level departments for particular fields. Among middle- and lower-ranked departments, substantial publishing diversity across fields is evident.