A SURVEY OF THE ECONOMICS OF FAIR TRADE

Fair Trade has spread in developing countries as an initiative aimed at lifting poor smallholder farmers out of poverty by providing them with premium prices, availability of credit, and improved community development and social goods. Fair Trade is also viewed as a niche market for high value products in a context of globalization and trade liberalization policies that affect smallholder farmers in developing countries. This paper provides an overview of the potential effects of Fair Trade, both theoretical and empirical, on small‐scale producers in developing countries. Our review discusses the empirical evidence on prices and income, as well as the importance of limited market access and productivity. We discuss evidence on labor markets and human capital investments as well.     

Unveiling dimensions of organizational culture: an exploratory study in Malaysian R&D organizations

Previous literature indicated that research and development (R&D) activities are influenced, to a large extent, by the culture of the organization. While these studies have identified elements of culture that are conducive to R&D, identifying the existing dimensions of organizational culture in Malaysian R&D organizations has not been empirically explored. The measures for this study were originally developed for the sole purpose of capturing cultural aspects in R&D organizations in the Malaysian context. These measures were developed based on the relevant issues discovered from exploratory case studies and nine categories of cultural values identified from the literature. A sample of employees (n = 198) from 45 R&D organizations took part in this study. Factor analysis was adopted to uncover common underlying dimensions (factors) of the organizational culture construct. The findings suggest that the organizational culture construct in R&D organizations may best be represented through a structure of eight factors. The eight factors are teamwork and knowledge sharing, empowerment and recognition, conformity and impediments to R&D, risk‐taking, customer orientation, autonomy, social networking, and organizational design. Despite some methodological issues that arose from this study, this model has the potential to become a management instrument to measure the underlying culture in R&D organizations. R&D managers can deploy this model to establish the baseline level of research culture in their respective units and thus provide the foundation for management initiatives to drive R&D activities. This model can also be used as benchmarking parameters when an R&D organization intends to evaluate various aspects of their organizational culture in relation to others that are considered to be leaders in the industry.     

中国对发达国家直接投资动因与障碍分析——以比利时为例

中国正逐渐成为全球对外直接投资的崛起力量,中国企业对海外市场的拓展引起了世界各国决策者以及公众媒体的关注。本文通过对Berhmann分类法以及Dunning折衷范式的补充,分析了中国企业对发达国家直接投资的动因与障碍。中国企业对发达国家直接投资宏观动因主要包括中国政府政策激励、发达国家投资环境激励、国内市场饱和压力、发达国家贸易保护主义压力;微观动因为寻求外部市场和战略资产。在发达国家直接投资过程中,中国企业不存在明显所有权优势和内部化优势,利用东道国区位优势的能力有待加强。通过对在比利时投资的中国企业实地调研,发现受访中国企业在比利时的投资活动处于初级阶段并遇到很多障碍,真正融入比利时乃至欧盟市场尚需时间。     

Household search and health insurance coverage

Health insurance in the United States is typically acquired through an employer-sponsored program. Often employees offered employer-provided health insurance have the option to extend coverage to their spouse and dependents. We investigate the implications of the “publicness” of health insurance coverage for the labor market careers of spouses. The theoretical innovations in the paper are to extend the standard partial–partial equilibrium labor market search model to a multiple searcher setting with the inclusion of multi-attribute job offers, with some of the attributes treated as public goods within the household. The model is estimated using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) using a Method of Simulated Moments (MSM) estimator. We demonstrate how previous estimates of the marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for health insurance based on cross-sectional linear regression estimators may be seriously biased due to the presence of dynamic selection effects and misspecification of the decision-making unit.     

Corporate Governance Reform and Executive Incentives: Implications for Investments and Risk Taking

We investigate the mechanism through which the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) was associated with changes in corporate investment strategies. We document that the passage of the governance regulations in SOX was followed by a significant decline in pay‐performance sensitivity (Delta) and incentives to take risk (Vega) in CEOs' compensation contracts. These changes in compensation contracts are related to a decline in investments, including research and development expenditures, capital investments and acquisitions. Moreover, consistent with the rules in SOX directly affecting CEOs' incentives to take risk, we document that the decline in investments exceeds the amount that would be expected from changes in compensation packages alone. Finally, we also find evidence that the changes in investments are related to lower operating performances of firms, suggesting that these changes were costly to investors. Our evidence speaks to the debate on how corporate governance regulation interacts with firms' and managers' incentives, and ultimately affects corporate operating and investment strategies. Our study suggests that one indirect cost of such regulations in SOX is the significant reductions in corporate risk‐taking activities in the post‐SOX period. The changes in investments were in part due to changes in executive compensation contracts and in part related to increased executives' personal costs of engaging in risky activities.     

Managerial Actions, Stock Returns, and Earnings: The Case of Business-to-Business Internet Firms

In this study we investigate the valuation implications of managerial actions undertaken by 57 Internet firms engaged in Business-to-Business (B2B) e-commerce. We classify 3,007 managerial actions undertaken by our sample firms between the firm's IPO date and September 30, 2000 into nine action categories: (1) acquisition of major customers, (2) introduction of new products and services, (3) promotional and marketing actions, (4) actions taken to address the concerns of stakeholders such as employees and the community at large, (5) announcements of technology, marketing, and distribution alliances, (6) completion of acquisitions, (7) expansion into international markets, (8) management team building actions, and (9) organizational changes.
In the short window tests, we find a significant increase in stock price volatility over a three-day event window surrounding the announcement of almost all actions suggesting that announcement of managerial actions provides value-relevant information to the stock market. In the long window tests, we use factor analysis to group the counts of managerial actions taken by each firm over its post-IPO life into two broad managerial initiatives—market penetration and organization building. These two initiatives explain a substantial portion of the cross-sectional variation in the firms' post-IPO life stock market returns beyond that explained by both reported earnings and analysts' forecasts of future earnings and revenues. Thus, investors appear to supplement relatively meager accounting information with data about the cross-sectional intensity of managerial actions in setting stock prices of B2B Internet firms.     

Changing Strategies and Tactics for New Product Development

There has been a considerable amount of effort and writing devoted to improving the new product development process during the last two decades. Although there have been some surprises in this literature and in reports from the field on how to manage this complex business process, we now have a good view of the state-of-the-art practices that work and do not work to accelerate commercial success of new ventures. We know much less about how firms change their strategies for new product development.
In this article, we report on a study to investigate how companies change the way they originate and develop new products in manufacturing. We made no prior assumptions about what best practices might be for changing the direction of the new product development process, but we reasonably were sure there would be trends in how companies were attempting to create this strategic change. Even though one size does not fit all, there were significant trends in our findings.
We studied eight manufacturing firms using in-depth, open-ended interviews and were surprised to find that most of these companies are beginning to develop products that are new to the firm, industry, and the world (nearly half, or 10 of 21 new product projects), where they had not been eager for radical change in the past. These newer products likely are to be driven by a combination of market and technology forces, with general requirements being directed by internal forces: middle and top management. Results also indicate significantly that being able to marshal resources and capabilities is easier if change is less demanding and less radical, but when middle managers are driving the conversion of general requirements into specifications, resource issues have yet to be resolved. Implications of these findings are discussed for companies aspiring to change the entire process of new product development in their firms based on these significant results.     

CONTINGENT CLAIMS VALUED AND HEDGED BY PRICING AND INVESTING IN A BASIS

Contingent claims with payoffs depending on finitely many asset prices are modeled as elements of a separable Hilbert space. Under fairly general conditions, including market completeness, it is shown that one may change measure to a reference measure under which asset prices are Gaussian and for which the family of Hermite polynomials serves as an orthonormal basis. Basis pricing synthesizes claim valuation and basis investment provides static hedging opportunities. For claims written as functions of a single asset price we infer from observed option prices the implicit prices of basis elements and use these to construct the implied equivalent martingale measure density with respect to the reference measure, which in this case is the Black-Scholes geometric Brownian motion model. Data on S & P 500 options from the Wall Street Journal are used to illustrate the calculations involved. On this illustrative data set the equivalent martingale measure deviates from the Black-Scholes model by relatively discounting the larger price movements with a compensating premia placed on the smaller movements.     

A note on disease burden and pharmaceutical R&D

We examine the relationship between research and development (R&D) expenditures and the expected impact of diseases in a simple theoretical framework that allows for intellectual property rights (IPR) protection to be strong or weak. In our theoretical model, an agent forms an expectation of the impact of a disease using a publicly available statistic on the (population level) disease burden, such as disability-adjusted life year. We show that a profit-maximising firm will exert relatively more R&D effort on diseases with intermediate expected impacts. We also discuss how a weak IPR regime alters the pattern of R&D investment.     

Oil Risk Exposure: The Case of the U.S. Oil and Gas Sector

We estimate oil price risk exposures of the U.S. oil and gas sector using the Fama‐French‐Carhart's four‐factor asset pricing model augmented with oil price and interest rate factors. Results show that the market, book‐to‐market, and size factors, as well as momentum characteristics of stocks and changes in oil prices are significant determinants of returns for the sector. Oil price risk exposures of U.S. oil and gas companies in the oil and gas sector are generally positive and significant. Our study also finds that oil price risk exposures vary considerably over time, and across firms and industry subsectors.