Cultural globalisation, institutional diversity and the unequal accumulation of intellectual capital

National economies used to be characterised by cultural standardisationand social protection. Globalisation pushes cultural standardisationbeyond the boundaries of national states and induces a globaldilution of the standards of social protection. At the sametime, if national economies specialise according to their comparativeinstitutional advantage, global economic integration may helppromote institutional diversity and variety in welfare policies.However, the institution of a global system of intellectualproperty rights may seriously limit the ‘biodiversity’of capitalism and imply a global revenge of a new internationalform of Taylorism. The overall result may be a very unequalaccumulation of intellectual capital. Paradoxically, the modernglobal economy may end up sharing some aspects of the agrariansocieties that have been displaced by modern nation states.     

Information technology, organizational form, and transition to the market

The paper reviews theories of information technology adoption and organizational form and applies them to an empirical analysis of firm choices and characteristics in four transition economies: Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. We argue that two major structural changes have occurred, one concerning technology and another concerning firm ownership and boundaries, and we consider how each change may have affected the other. We estimate the impact of firm size, integration, and ownership on new information technology adoption and the impact of information technology on changes in firm boundaries and ownership, using a sample survey of 330 firms.     

Crises, Cronyism, and Credit

This paper examines the effects of several potential explanatory factors related to the 1997–1998 East Asian crisis. We find that a crisis can improve a poorly functioning credit system by making domestic lending rates more responsive to market-based returns. We report that the responsiveness of short-term lending rates is directly related to the level of transparency in the economy. Thus, countries with greater transparency (less corruption) are more likely to make credit decisions based on market-wide forces rather than succumb to the influence of special interest groups. Nations with greater transparency also experience significantly shorter and less severe economic downturns.     

Trade,Job Destruction and Job Creation in European Manufacturing

This paper examines the effects of international trade with the newly industrialized Asian economies on the labor markets of Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. The analysis confirms that, despite the growing importance of this trade, the problems of the European labor market can hardly be explained by the increase in imports of manufactures from the Nies. While job destruction appears completely independent from the trade flows with the emerging Asian economies, the evidence on job creation is less clear cut. In two cases imports appear to have depressed employment dynamics, but in another exports turn out to have stimulated it. The most striking evidence is on sector-specific features and individual characteristics, such as sector of (last) employment, sex and education: these variables appear to be much more important than trade in explaining individuals' positions in the labor market.     

Love,war and cultures: a reply to my commentators

The purpose of this short reply is to consider the issue of the evolution of the exceptional human intellectual capabilities which has been the focus of the majority of the comments to my article “love, war and culture: an institutional approach to human evolution” all published in the April 2013 of the Journal of Bioeconomics. All the contributions are submitted to the test of two plausibility conditions. The first requires that the explanation of the emergence of human capabilities should rely on circumstances peculiar, or better unique, to human evolution. The second states that the explanation should not rely on factors that require the pre-existence of these capabilities. The claim, advanced in this short article, is that only the “sexual subsidy hypothesis” satisfies these conditions.     

The role of relational capabilities in the organization of international sourcing activities: A literature review

Multinational companies (MNCs) establish subsidiaries in various countries, spreading the value chain internationally and fostering the involvement of external partners. The global supply network has become a major source of the total value generated by MNCs, which are pushed to develop “relational capabilities” to interact with their suppliers. The main objective of this article is to assess the current understanding in the academic literature of the intra-organisational dimension of relational capabilities, focussing on the adoption of internal mechanisms supporting international sourcing activities. A total of 47 articles are identified and assessed. The literature review shows that thus far fragmented and in some areas limited research has been conducted on the development of relational capabilities by MNCs within international sourcing activities. Research efforts have been placed mainly on the examination of organisational units active in international sourcing and on control and management processes, while less attention has been paid to knowledge management solutions.     

The Empirical Average Cost of Capital: A New Approach to Estimating the Cost of Corporate Funds

The authors develop a new way to measure the cost of capital, called the empirical average cost of capital (or “EACC”), which is consistent with existing methods of calculating the weighted average cost of capital, but uses information from the firm's financial statements and requires fewer and less subjective inputs. The authors’ model relies on the concept of economic profit while using data from the period 1990‐2012 on net operating profits and total capital to estimate the EACC at both the individual company and industry‐wide levels. Estimates of the EACC and rolling quarterly forecasts of future net operating profits for a single company, McDonald's, for its related industry, and for 57 other U.S. industries are compared to five conventional “textbook” estimates of the weighted average cost of capital published by Ibbotson Associates. The authors find that the EACC yields forecasts of future net operating profit after taxes that compare favorably to those of the five published measures of the weighted average cost of capital, as well as the average and median of these measures.     

IPO Underpricing and After-Market Liquidity

The underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) is generallyexplained with asymmetric information and risk. We complementthese traditional explanations with a new theory where investorsworry also about the after-market illiquidity that may resultfrom asymmetric information after the IPO. The less liquid theaftermarket is expected to be, and the less predictable itsliquidity, the larger will be the IPO underpricing. Our modelblends such liquidity concerns with adverse selection and riskas motives for underpricing. The model’s predictions aresupported by evidence for 337 British IPOs effected between1998 and 2000. Using various measures of liquidity, we findthat expected after-market liquidity and liquidity risk areimportant determinants of IPO underpricing.     

A call auction's impact on price formation and order routing: Evidence from the NASDAQ stock market

Electronic call auctions are used globally to open and close equity market trading; as such, they are a critically important facility that needs to be better understood. The paper focuses on the impact NASDAQ's calls (introduced in 2004) have had on bid-ask spreads, price volatility, and order routing in the continuous market that follows daily openings and which precedes daily closings. NASDAQ's closing call has significantly reduced both spreads and volatility for all market capitalization groups. Its opening call similarly reduced spreads, while a generally similar, though somewhat weaker, pattern of volatility reduction was realized. Although the pattern of trading volume has, for the most part, not been significantly affected, our findings, comprehensively viewed, suggest that the calls have had a positive spillover effect on the dynamic behavior of price formation in NASDAQ's continuous market.