What Can Be Learned from DuPont and the Freon Ban: A Case Study

Between 1974 and 1988, executives of DuPont, the world's largest producer of CFCs, were confronted with emerging evidence that CFCs were destroying the stratospheric ozone layer. The difficulty that executives face in such cases is that scientific knowledge develops over time and does not necessarily proceed in a straight line toward true conclusions. At the beginning of a new field of research, there is much uncertainty and disagreement among the experts. The solution of the ozone problem required a remarkable cooperation among science, business, and international governments. After looking at the role of DuPont executives in this drama, and the difficulties facing any executive dealing with uncertain science, the paper turns to an evaluation of the field of Business Ethics to see what light it might throw on this and analogous problems. Finally, the paper offers specific suggestions in terms of principles in dealing with uncertain science, and concludes that the course of action that DuPont followed, including some mistakes, can serve as a model for analogous crises.     

Glamour and Value Strategies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange

This paper evaluates the performance of glamour and value strategies and tests the extrapolation model for the Japanese equity market. In general, value stocks outperform glamour stocks by between 6 and 12 percent per annum for the five years after portfolio formation. Evidence from past, future and expected growth provides strong support for the story developed in Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny (1994). It is difficult to attribute the value premia to the difference, if any, in risk factors. In addition, the book-to-market premium is much closer to an arbitrage opportunity than the size premium.     

浅论我国农村环境的法律体系建设

本文分析了我国农村环境法律体系在立法、执法等方面存在的问题,据此提出了健全和完善农村环保法制的一些设想。     

绩效诱因契约设计对经理人风险行为的影响

经理人与投资人之间的代理问题是由于在信息不对称的环境下,投资人无法观察到经理人的经营活动是否真正从投资人的利益角度出发,从而引发了经理人的道德风险,产生了自利性高风险投资组合的逆诱因选择。通过应用选择权的观念推导三种不同的绩效诱因契约设计,对于抑制经理人自利性风险调整行为倾向有较好的效果。     

韩国政府为实现环保型企业经营的政策及方案

文章论述了环境问题对人类的重要性及创造环保型的企业环境需要解决的问题,在此基础上,提 出了为实现环保型企业经营韩国政府所应该采用的政策及具体的实施方案。     

Business relatedness and performance: a study of managerial perceptions

Understanding of business relatedness and performance effects is the foundation of any diversification decision, but we have limited knowledge of how managers consider relatedness. This study identified relatedness classes and performance effects using perceptual survey data from top industrial executives. Four classes with significant variable differences were found: high, technology, customer, and low relatedness. Technology relatedness had a strong positive performance effect and high relatedness had a negative effect. The findings confirm that perceptions are multidimensional, but may include five key factors rather than the previously identified attribute categories of product–markets, resources, and value chains. Contributions to diversification literature are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Performance of Actively Managed International Mutual Funds

International mutual funds allow individual investors to diversify abroad at a reasonable cost. This paper tests whether international funds that actively engage in country and security selection outperform passive global benchmarks. We apply a mean-variance efficiency test that incorporates the practical prohibition against short sales of open-end mutual funds. Our tests reject the efficiency of the world equity market portfolio over the sample period, and our funds as a group outperform the inefficient world index. However, we find no evidence of security selectivity ability using a 12-country benchmark. We do find that active international funds provide global diversification benefits. Tests using the Positive Period Weight (PPW) measure of Grinblatt and Titman (1989), which is robust to nonlinearity in fund and benchmark returns, yield similar results.     

Consistency of UK Pension Fund Investment Performance

Transition matrix techniques are used to relate the past and present performance of pension fund portfolios. In particular, funds are ranked to study the tendency of portfolios to remain in the same quartile of the ranking as they were in the previous period. For raw returns, funds in both of the top quartiles are found to be more likely to remain in the same quartile than would be expected by chance. This result can be taken as limited evidence for the consistency of performance. Similar systemic effects are observed on a risk-adjusted basis. There appears to be clear evidence that some fund managers can offer a degree of consistent good performance.     

青藏铁路施工与环境保护

文章详细介绍了青藏铁路施工对环境保护的影响,指出了强化青藏铁路环境保护工作的意义,提出了青藏铁路环境保护工作的主要内容和应当采取的措施,阐述了将青藏铁路真正建成21世纪的世界屋脊的环保型铁路的实施要点。     

Measuring Hospital Performance in the Presence of Quasi-Fixed Inputs: An Analysis of Québec Hospitals

This research proposes an approach to measure hospital performance based on a generalization of Banker and Morey (1986) and Førsund (1996). This approach considers quasi-fixed inputs explicitly, calculates their implicit cost, and quantifies returns to scale. The performance measure is decomposed into allocative and technical inefficiencies. Based on a very complete data set of Québec hospitals, we find that significant inefficiencies of up to 17% ($700 CAN million) could have been saved through improved performance. Postestimation analyses that include qualitative measures of care suggest that differences in performance are attributable to differences in management or unobservable quality of care rather than patient case mix.