WINDOW ON EASTERN EUROPE: Ethical Perceptions of Polish Business Students

An experienced educationalist comments on the views of top Polish business students on ethics in public life, government and business in modern Poland. The author is Wicklander Professor of Professional Ethics at DePaul University, Chicago, and also served recently as Visiting Fulbright Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. He is currently President of the Society of Business Ethics in the USA.     

Human Capital and Growth Cycles

This paper studies the dynamic interaction between human capital accumulation and economic growth. Capital market imperfections and an indivisibility in human capital investment prevent poor agents from accumulating skills, the acquisition of which positively affects technological progress. More productive technologies in turn require more sophisticated qualification and involve higher training costs. The equilibrium dynamics can be characterized by the joint evolution of productivity growth, the schooling costs, and the income distribution. Under our assumptions, individual incomes follow a non-linear Markov chain. This non-linearity generates endogenous fluctuations of schooling activities and the rate at which productivity improvements occur. We thank an anonymous referee for many helpful suggestions. Support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant KA1519/2-2 is gratefully acknowledged.     

Bootstrap and Pretest J-Type Non-Nested Tests for Orthogonal Regression Models: Some Monte Carlo Evidence

This paper compares the size and power of two J-type tests for weakly correlated or nearly orthogonal non-nested regression models: a bootstrap and a pretest test. The latter seems to outperform the former in terms of its size characteristics, especially when the alternative model has more non-nested regressors and the orthogonality between the two sets of regressors is severe. The bootstrap test does better in terms of power.

     

Does Foreign Direct Investment Crowd Out Domestic Entrepreneurship?

In analyzing firm entry and exit across Belgian manufacturing industries, this paper presents evidence that import competition and foreign direct investment discourage entry and stimulate exit of domestic entrepreneurs. These results are in line with theoretical occupational choice models that predict foreign direct investment would crowd out domestic entrepreneurs through their selections in product and labor markets. However, the empirical results also suggest that this crowding out effect may be moderated or even reversed in the long-run due to the long term positive effects of FDI on domestic entrepreneurship as a result of learning, demonstration, networking and linkage effects between foreign and domestic firms.     

What kind of marketing distribution mix can maximize revenues: The wholesaler travel agencies' perspective?

This study attempts to identify the variety of marketing channel efficiencies for marketing activities and sets up an optimal marketing distribution mix when using different distribution channels for wholesaler travel agencies. This research examines 12 large-scale travel agencies in Taiwan and offers seven direct and indirect distribution channels in order to establish an optimal marketing distribution mix and identifies the different forms of distribution involved. We also implement the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to prioritize the seven main marketing distribution channels of travel agency: websites, cable TV, radios, professional magazines, retailer travel agencies, strategic alliances, and newspapers. Five criteria are categorized as a distribution channel selection: overall cost of the channel, target audience respondent rate, impression rates, transactional capabilities, and gross profit of the channel. The results show that Taiwan's wholesaler travel agencies adopt the retailer travel agency as their highest priority of channel selection, while travel agency websites hold it as their second priority. Transactional capabilities, gross profit of the channel, and overall cost of the channel are the top three favorable choices among the five criteria considered. This study proposes an innovative hierarchy model of marketing distribution mix to a wholesaler travel agency practitioner when making decisions in order to effectively exploit the different distribution mix, to maximize performances and revenues, and to overcome the traditional experience based on the shortcomings of the selection.     

Adoption of Online Grocery Shopping: Personal or Household Characteristics?

This article analyzes how sociodemographic characteristics impact the adoption of online grocery shopping, and relies on the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability (MOA) model to explore what these sociodemographics actually capture and how they are linked with consumer motivations. The researchers exploit a survey among 468 customers of Belgian supermarket chain Colruyt. Their logistic regression shows that while variables at the personal level do affect adoption of the online channel, consumers’ motivations to adopt in fact lie on the household level. In particular, the effect of age disappears or becomes less strong when it is combined with household characteristics. An examination of respondents’ self-reported motivations confirms that age does not only capture a person’s ability to use the technology but also its usefulness for that person’s household, in that age is correlated with the presence of young children and the working situation in the household.     

Measuring Motivations for Media Exposure: A Thesis

The present article discusses the problem of separating the motivation conceptempirically from other relevant concepts in research on mass media audiences.For about half a century, audience researchers use questionnaire items with adistinct format as measurements of motivations for media exposure. It isargued that these motivation items grammatically reflect the nature of themotivation concept as a theoretically intermediate variable between behaviourand its social or mental background, thus constituting the most plausibleindicators of the concept. However, it is also argued that these questionnaireitems are double-barrelled and that any measurement of motivations based onthe items can largely be considered an ambiguous mixture of behaviour and itssocial or mental origin. A study is presented that provides empirical support for this position.