Corporate Restructuring in Japan Part I: Can M‐Form Organization Manage Diverse Businesses?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the recent organizational restructuring in Japan in the framework of organizational economics, assuming that the product/market portfolio of the firm is fixed. How does a firm set about organizing its internal divisions? I first summarize some stylized facts on corporate diversification strategy and multi‐divisional (M‐form) organization in large Japanese firms from different perspectives. I then analyse the problem of choosing an organizational form. In particular, I argue that, precisely because of its related diversification, the multi‐business Japanese firm adopting the M‐form finds it difficult to differentiate its diverse businesses internally.     

Evaluating the performance of the search and matching model

Does the search and matching model fit aggregate U.S. labor market data? While the model has become an important tool of macroeconomic analysis, recent literature pointed to some significant failures in accounting for the data. This paper aims to answer two questions: (i) Does the model fit the data, and, if so, on what dimensions? (ii) Does the data “fit” the model, i.e. what are the data which are relevant to be explained by the model?The analysis shows that the model fits certain specifications of the data on many dimensions, though not on all. This includes capturing the high persistence and high volatility of most of the key variables, the negative co-variation of unemployment and vacancies, and the behavior of the worker job finding rate. A key role in this fit is played by the convexity of hiring costs and the stochastic properties of the separation rate. The latter is a major component of the rate discounting the future value of the job-worker match.The paper offers a workable, empirically grounded version of the model for the analysis of aggregate U.S. labor market dynamics.     

Delays and equilibria with large and small information in social learning

The general model of social learning with irreversible investment and endogenous timing is analyzed for any distribution of private informations. Strategic complementarities and multiple equilibria appear which are generated solely by information externalities. Different equilibria generate strikingly different amounts of information. The impacts of various assumptions (bounded beliefs, large number of agents, discrete time and short periods) are examined carefully. The properties are robust to the introduction of observation noise with a continuum of agents.     

资本形成、工业化与经济增长:中国的转轨特征

把中国的经济转轨、增长与工业化联系起来是本文的一个尝试。作者认为 ,中国的经济增长在近年来越来越表现出静态的特征 ,至今尚不具备持续的动态改进的力量 ,而中国在 2 0世纪 80年代以后的转轨过程则又典型地表现为以新兴工业部门的进入和扩张为特征的持续的工业化过程。本文给出了一个帮助理解转轨后中国经济增长可持续性的概念框架和经验描述。在这个框架里 ,中国的经济增长在过去 1 0年来所表现出的下降趋势可以由过度的工业化进程来解释。     

一种灵活的ADO方式的SQL Server数据连接方法

在基于SQLServer数据系统的C/S开发中,大多数的开发平台与数据库的连接在应用中使用的是固定参数的连接模式,灵活性很差,对于服务器端的可维护性(如服务器更名,IP地址的改变,多数据库系统混合应用等)变得越来越弱,同时维护成本也随之提升,有的甚至服务器系统安装完毕后除了数据备份之外便一直不作任何变动,在安全性和数据库系统混合运用上形成很多不兼容的问题。本文提供了一种基于TCP/IP的客户机与SQLServer连接方法(使用VB开发环境描述),使得无论服务端还是客户端的维护和应用具备高度灵活性也便于安全性维护,同时这种方法也适应于广域网环境的应用。     

陕西构建和谐社会须切实控制出生人口性别比

出生人口性别比保持在正常值域是和谐社会的一个重要基础。陕西出生人口性别比显著高于正常值，且有加剧趋势。将对构建和谐社会带来严重后果，必须采取多种措施进行控制和治理。     

Stationary solution to the overlapping generations model of fiat money: Experimental evidence

Overlapping generations model of fiat money yields an infinity of competitive equilibrium solutions, only one of which is stationary. Economies reported in this paper involved a sequence of overlapping generations of three or four individuals; each individual lived for two periods. In their young age individuals were endowed with chips that could be traded for fiat money wish the individuals of the old generation. In their old age, individuals could exchange their units o flat money for the consumption good. Results of the experiments exhibit some support for the stationary solution. The results are robust to two designs of exchange institutions (double oral auctior and supply schedule auction) and to two different endogenous ways of converting money into chips at the end of the game (average price prevailing during the last period the game is actually played and the average price forecast made during the last period the game is actually played).A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Economic Science Association and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The authors are grateful for comments received from various participants at both presentations. Financial support was provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Honeywell Foundation, National Science Foundation (SES 89-12552), and Richard. M. and Margaret Cyert Family Funds.     

Managerial judgment and forecast combination: An experimental study

This paper examines the role of managerial judgment in forming a final forecast, or judging the achievability of a critical level of sales, when multiple forecasts or opinions are available to the decision maker. Several factors that can help improve the quality of human intervention are identified and incorporated in a decision aid. Experimental results show that aided combination can help the decision maker exploit her relevant private information and mitigate the generally observed negative effects of human intervention. Further, the results suggest that emphasizing expected sales, even when the organization is primarily interested in go/no-go decisions, helps improve performance. Several suggestions for future research are presented.

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On the forecastability of share prices on the Viennese stock exchange

In this paper the Viennese stock exchange data are analysed by using ARMA and GARCH technology. After using AIC and BIC for estimating the linear structure of the time series, to the resulting innovations a GARCH(1,1) model is fit. The resulting residuals are then tested for serial independence and constancy of its distribution to check whether the models are reasonable. Main result is that the residuals of this ARMA-GARCH(1,1)-model are reasonably iid (which is checked by BDS and classical independence tests) for index data and significantly less well-behaved for stock data. Second, there is considerable autocorrelation in the data (especially in the Viennese indices WBK and ATX) which can be exploited even with 1.25% transaction costs (which is checked by a posteriori analysis of a strategy which exploits an underlying time-varying AR(1) model), however, much higher profit can be made with 0.5% transaction costs. Furthermore, the same techniques are applied to US Standard & Poor 500 index and the results for both data sets are compared giving the result that the US-market looks much more mature than the Viennese one.Financial Support by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, and the Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Vienna, Grant P 9176 is gratefully acknowledged. This paper is a slightly abbreviated version of the Research Report No. 135 by the same authors (see References), which contains many detailed plots of the results.     

Problem-solving in teaching/learning packages for Technology

In the project Technology in Secondary Education: Problem-solving in Teaching/learning Packages, two experiments regarding a construction problem and an explanation problem were conducted, in which two variants of a teching/learning package (strongly structuredvs. weakly structured) were compared. Only with the strongly structured instructional variant of the package for the explanation problem did the pupils come to a quick solution of the problem. In both experiments, the factors that influenced the problem-solving processes of the pupils were investigated. The results are of importance for curriculum developers and the authors of teaching/learning packages for Technology but further research into the factors influencing the problem solving process of pupils is necessary.