LOGISTICS SALIENCE IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT

The primary purpose of this paper was to empirically explore some of the reasons that logistics has become more important, or salient, in comparison to other functions within the firm. A survey of 296 managers across multiple industries in the U.S. found logistics becomes more important within the firm when the industry increases in uncertainty, when there is an emphasis on time‐based competition, when there is greater adoption of information technology, and when there is an emphasis on cross‐functional integration.     

Updating the Determinants of Firm Performance: Estimation using the 1998 UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey

We examine the determinants of establishment performance in the UK, using cross‐sectional data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to replicate research by Fernie and Metcalf (1995) who used data from the 1990 Workplace Employee Relations Survey; specifically, we test whether employee representation, contingent pay and efforts to boost employee participation affect a set of economic and industrial relations outcome indicators in the manner they suggest. We also re‐estimate the influential WERS90‐based study of Machin and Stewart (1996) on the links between union status and financial performance. In both cases we report very different results.     

Control of lipid oxidation in cooked ground beef with water and salts*

The effects of exogenous water and salts on lipid oxidation in ground beef were determined. Deionized water, salts, or both, were added to treatment samples. Salts used were sodium chloride, potassium chloride and sodium sulphate, all at 3% concentration. The Thiobarbituric acid (TBA) test was used to assess lipid oxidation. Addition of water at a 10% or 20% level had no effect on rancidity. Sodium chloride and potassium chloride reduced TBA numbers. Adding water to those samples containing potassium chloride and sodium sulphate raised moisture content.     

The Dynamics of Alliance Conditions in the Alliance Development Process

One of the key issues in understanding the developmental processes of strategic alliances is how the alliance conditions change over the different stages of alliance development. A related question concerns the nature of the co-evolutionary dynamics of alliances in terms of their constituent partner firms. In this article we propose an integrated process model of alliances that is based on alliance conditions, allianc developmental stages, and an alliance system comprising co-evolutionary elements. We suggest that alliance conditions, or the key characteristics of an alliance at any given moment, link the alliance environment (firm characteristics) and the alliance development process. We also explore how specific patterns of alliance conditions have differential impacts on the interactive elements of the alliance co-evolutionary system.     

Market Structures for U.S. Water Quality Trading

The use of transferable discharge permits as a water pollution control policy is rapidly increasing in the United States. Drawing on evidence from existing water quality trading programs, this paper provides a taxonomy of the forms that such markets take. Four main structures are identified: exchanges, bilateral negotiations, clearinghouses, and sole-source offsets. Each of these structures has its own strengths and weaknesses; none is optimal for all scenarios. Since market structure is largely determined by a program's rules, policy makers should be aware of the differences between these structures and the conditions under which each comes to be.     

Policy reform and productivity change in Chinese agriculture: A distance function approach

Agricultural policy reform has been an important source of change in the Chinese agricultural sector. The reforms led to productivity growth and helped China to pursue its self-sufficiency goal especially in the grain sector. In order to analyze whether observable productivity growth stems from technologically induced components or from the market induced parts, a multi-input–multi-output model is derived by using an econometric distance function framework. A decomposition allows to distinguish allocative effects, scale effects, technological change, and technical efficiency change. Data on farms in Zhejiang from 1986 to 2000 are used to analyze the impact of policy reform.     

Symmetry and order in the portfolio allocation problem

Summary. This research studies the role of multivariate distribution structures on random asset returns in determining the optimal allocation vector for an expected utility maximizer. All our conclusions pertain for the set of risk averters. By carefully disturbing symmetry in the distribution of the, possibly covarying, returns, we ascertain the ordinal structure of the optimized allocation vector. Rank order of allocations is also established when a permutation symmetric random vector is mapped into the returns vector through location and scale shifts. It is shown that increased dispersion in the vectors of location and scale parameters benefit, ex-ante, investors as does a decrease in the rank correlation coefficient between the location and scale parameter vectors. Revealed preference comparative static results are identified for the location and scale vectors of asset returns. For most issues addressed, we arrive at much stronger inferences when a safe asset is available. Received: August 8, 2000; revised version: January 8, 2001     

Evaluating FOMC forecasts

Monetary policy outcomes have improved since the early 1980s. One factor contributing to the improvement is that Federal Reserve policymakers began reporting economic forecasts to Congress in 1979. These forecasts indicate what the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. We evaluate the accuracy of the FOMC forecasts relative to private sector forecasts, the forecasts of the Research Staff at the Board of Governors, and a naïve alternative. We find that the FOMC output forecasts were better than the naïve model and at least as good as those of the private sector and the Fed staff. The FOMC inflation forecasts were more accurate than the private sector forecasts and the naïve model; for the period ending in 1996, however, they were not as accurate as Fed staff inflation forecasts.