E-Procurement adoption in the Southcoast SMEs

E-Commerce is expected to play a major role in the 21st century global market. Of the various E-commerce models (B2B, B2C, B2E and B2G), B2B has been particularly successful, due to adoption of standardized processes for document exchange (like EDI), shipping, tracking, delivery and payment among supply chain partners. One element of B2B is E-procurement. E-procurement focuses on acquisition of resources, especially MRO items, and increasingly materials and components. Some analysts believe that enormous cost savings and increased effectiveness can be achieved through the utilization of E-procurement. E-procurement utilizes electronic purchase procedures implemented through Internet communication and Web based buying tools. Studies in the literature report on the adoption of E-procurement in different countries and industries. This study focuses on the current status of E-procurement in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) located in the Southcoast of Massachusetts. The main objective of this research is to understand the current state of E-procurement in SMEs and to examine those things that influence E-procurement adoption. A questionnaire-based survey was employed for data collection. A conceptual model was developed to describe/explain the adoption of E-procurement and a framework is proposed for the successful adoption of E-procurement on the Southcoast of Massachusetts.     

Borrower runs

Microfinance institutions and other lenders in developing countries rely on the promise of future loans to induce repayment. However, if borrowers expect that others will default, and so loans will no longer be available in the future, then they will default as well. We refer to such contagion as a borrower run. The optimal lending contract must provide additional repayment incentives to counter this tendency to default.     

Internationalization of R&;D in China and India: Conventional wisdom versus reality

In spite of a growing trend of foreign research and development (R&;D) investment in China and India, academic research in this field has not kept pace. To what extent are opportunities and challenges of managing R&;D different in these countries from those in the West? By drawing on academic literature as well as press articles on this topic, we compare and contrast what the conventional wisdom suggests and what the realities are in China and India. We suggest that multinational corporations (MNCs) should not forget the conventional wisdom of managing their innovative R&;D policies but should also learn from the unique challenges and capabilities in China and India.     

Causality between money and prices in Indonesia

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between money supply and prices in Indonesia, where money supply is taken to be the stock of narrow money (currency + demand deposits) and prices are proxied by the Jakarta cost of living index. The period studied is 1969–1980. Two concepts of causality namely “proper” causality in which the causal effect takes at least one quarter to manifest itself and “instantaneous” causality in which there are no lags, are employed. The hypothesis of “proper” causality is rejected by bothGranger andSims tests. However, the hypothesis that money and prices are contemporaneously correlated cannot be easily dismissed. Using the framework of [Geweke], contemporaneous causality is treated as a part of linear feedback and the lagged version of Sims test was used. We found that the hypothesis that prices cause money supply cannot be dismissed on the basis of Wald test. However, the contribution of instantaneous causality is very large to the total variance of linear feedback.     

Dynamics of the Relationship Between the Terms of Trade and the Trade Balance in Developing Countries of Asia,Africa and Latin America

The objectives of this study are to examine the relationship between the terms of trade and trade balance to GDP ratios for a large number of developing economies using data on barter terms of trade, real exchange rate and trade balances. The literature on the subject postulates J-curve or S-curve between terms of trade and trade balance and we examine whether there is any evidence of a J-curve or S-curve relationship in time series data over the period 1970–1999. We find that for a few economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the existence of a S-curve is supported. However, for a large number of countries, neither a strict J-curve nor S-curve relationship holds.

     

THE MAGNITUDE OF PRICING ERRORS IN THE ARBITRAGE PRICING THEORY

In this paper the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) pricing errors for individual securities are estimated employing maximum likelihood factor analysis and Fama-MacBeth style aggregation. Results show that the pricing errors are large and statistically significant and that there is a high degree of variability in pricing errors across securities. This evidence contradicts the prevailing APT intuition that the pricing errors can be ignored as negligible. Pricing errors are also found to be related to residual variance and firm size.