Opportunities for Air Pollutant and Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction through Local Transport Planning

This paper has three main objectives: firstly, to provide quantitative information on the potential greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions reductions resulting from a number of future road transport scenarios; secondly, to illustrate the emission reduction measures available to local transport planners; and thirdly, to highlight the potential for these measures to be integrated into strategies that deliver other transport priorities. The results are drawn from a case study of Norfolk in the UK. We conclude that while technology can play a large part in reducing emissions of air pollutants, demand management is crucial to the delivery of long term greenhouse gas emission reduction and ultimately of air pollutant emissions too.     

An Ethics of Care or an Ethics of Justice

A conflict within the community of those investigating business ethics is whether decision makers are motivated by an ethics of justice or an ethics of caring. The proposition put forward in this paper is that ethical orientations are strongly related to cultural backgrounds. Specifically, Hofstede's cultural stereotyping using his masculine-feminine dimension may well match a culture's reliance on justice or caring when decisions are made. A study of college graduates from six countries showed that Hofstede's dimension was remarkably accurate in predicating a justice or caring orientation for decision makers from five of the six countries.     

The Dynamics of Rivalry

Firms face a constant challenge to understand and manage competition over time: what to do when and how much, for how long, and with what expected effect. In this battle, managers use resources they already have to develop the further resources they need, faster and more sustainably than competitors. Just three forms of rivalry capture the dynamics of these processes: developing potential customers, capturing rivals' customers and competing for sales to shared customers. Each of these applies not only to customers, but also to other assets that must be won against rivals. In complex industries, interactions between many competitors can be simplified by grouping firms together, and industry evolution and scenarios for the future can be evaluated using extensions of this approach.     

Intercultural Discourse Ethics: Testing Trompenaars' and Hampden-Turner's Conclusions about Americans and the French

Are culture driven ethical conflicts apparent in the discourse of the protagonists? A multi-year, multi-cultural study of managers by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner resulted in two conclusions relevant to business ethics. The first is that intercultural business conflicts can often be traced to a finite set of cultural differences. The second is that enough similarities exist between cultures to provide the grounds for conflict resolution. The research reported here gives credence to their study when applied to an ethical conflict viewed from French and American perspectives.     

Depositary Receipts, Country Funds, and the Peso Crash: The Intraday Evidence

We study the intraday impact of exchange rate news on emerging market American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and closed-end country funds during the 1994 Mexican peso crisis. Peso exchange-rate changes affect prices and trading volumes of Latin American equities, and some closed-end fund behavior is consistent with "noise trader" theories of small investors. However, there is no evidence that peso depreciation triggers a significant sell-off of non-Mexican securities or that other non-Mexican trading patterns change at times of high peso news flow. Thus, the "Tequila Effect" is largely confined to price changes.     

Consumer Bankruptcy in the United States: A Study of Alleged Abuse and of Local Legal Culture

This paper describes certain central aspects of the operation of the consumer bankruptcy system in the United States. It combines government data with the investigators' empirical data from two large studies done over a decade to explore two types of questions. The first area of investigation relates specifically to bankruptcy policy. The object is to identify the categories of persons principally served by the consumer bankruptcy system and to determine if suggestions of widespread abuse of that system by debtors are well-founded. The paper reports that the system is used primarily by the middle-class. It also reports that there is no evidence of widespread abuse. The second area of investigation is explanation of differences in the operation of the system in different regions of the country, differences that have persisted over twenty years despite major changes in legal rules and economic conditions. The paper argues that these differences are not explicable in terms of formal legal rules or a simple economic model and that a better explanation of the data is that the differences are the product of a "local legal culture" in each region.