Lend me your wallets: the effect of charismatic leadership on external support for an organization

We argue that charismatic leadership can influence external support for the organization, particularly in making the company more attractive to outside investors. Two studies were conducted to test this general hypothesis. First, an archival study demonstrated that the stock of companies headed by charismatic leaders appreciated more than the stock of comparable companies, even after differences in corporate performance were controlled. It was also found that the effect of charismatic leadership was heightened under more difficult economic conditions. Second, an experiment was conducted in which the salience of charismatic leadership was manipulated, along with information about the prospects for an organization's turnaround. Results showed that appeals from a charismatic leader led to increased investment in the firm, and the leader's influence was greater when the prospects for an organizational turnaround were more difficult. It was also found that an endowment of stock enhanced the influence of charismatic appeals and that charismatic leadership may have affected the general risk propensities of followers. These findings were interpreted in terms of an external perspective on leadership, illustrating how leaders can manage the firm's economic and social environment. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Regional and National Perspectives of China's Integration into the WTO: A CGE Inquiry with Emphasis on the Agricultural Sector

China's integration in the World Trade Organization (WTO) is already on its fast track. Understanding the complexity of China's dynamic adjustment resulting from its membership in the WTO and the differential regional impacts within China is very important and poses crucial challenge in evaluating its impacts. In this study, we make an attempt to incorporate seven regional commodity-detailed models into a dis-aggregated multi-sector and multi-region China Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) framework. This framework has allowed us to evaluate the impacts of China's integration into the WTO at both national and regional levels and analyze the inter-linkages between China's provincial agricultural markets. Using the framework and assumptions about factor mobility, we assess the impacts on China's agricultural and non-agricultural sectors (regionally and nationally) by reduction of its trade policy distortions, such as tariffs rate changes and quantitative restrictions. We also evaluate the structural changes on China's national and regional production and trade as China implements its commitments and moves into the WTO.     

The Small Business Capital Market Behavior in Athens Stock Exchange

Financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs), especially business investments and growth, is a composite and particular complicated affair in the Greek entrepreneurial reality. This paper examines the significance of secondary capital markets, as an alternative source of financing small-medium enterprises’ new entrepreneurial plans. Cointegration technique is applied to test the relationship between the secondary capital market and the dominant sectors in Athens Stock Exchange (ASE). Causality tests are also used to provide evidence on the existence of interdependence between the cointegrated series. The results indicate that there is significant uni-directional causality between primary and secondary capital market in Greece, enhancing us to suggest valuable policy implications.      

THE EFFECTS OF COMPANY TRAINING,FURTHER EDUCATION AND THE YOUTH TRAINING SCHEME ON THE EARNINGS OF YOUNG EMPLOYEES*

Abstract This paper provides evidence on the impact of company training, of post-compulsory education and of the UK Youth Training Scheme in the late 1980's on the earnings of 21-year-old employees in England and Wales. Earnings equations are estimated for each of seven groups of employees who have followed alternative routes from compulsory education into employment, allowing for selectivity into these routes. There are several findings, including: both high parental social class and better school qualifications help to channel people into higher status routes, while high local unemployment has the opposite effect; participation in company training in long spells substantially raises wages but short spells do not; YTS participation fails to raise, and possibly substantially lowers, wages even three years after graduation compared to those who left school at 16 and went to work and received no training; there is weak evidence that, even for those that do not enter higher education, it is better to stay on at school after 16 than go into YTS.     

PROBLEMS OF AGRICULTURAL EXTERNALITIES: A CONCEPTUAL MODEL WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH

Using a bargaining model the interaction between agriculture and the environment is explored. Application of the model to nitrogen pollution and management agreements directs attention to the research needs for achieving more rational environmental management     

New Labour and Community Protests: the Case of the Govanhill Swimming Pool Campaign, Glasgow

Taking the case study of a community based protest against the closure of a swimming pool in Glasgow, this paper seeks to raise important critical questions about some of the key ideas informing New Labour's urban policy agenda: social capital and active community. It argues that normative notions of active citizenship seriously conflict with bottom-up community protests, highlighting in the process issues of power and inequality. Against claims that New Labour is promoting government through community, here we claim that in the context of this community protest, there was government against community.     

CREATING VALUE IN THE OIL INDUSTRY

In contrast with current thinking that conglomerates are inefficient, this article begins by presenting arguments in favor of the size and structure of the large integrated oil companies, also known as "the supermajors." Among the advantages are tax efficiency, information flow, political and technological know-how, broad supplier and customer relationships, scale economies, cross-business economies of scope, brand power, and the ability to coordinate strategic initiatives across businesses. These advantages all translate into a lower cost of capital.
One problem, however, is that this lower cost of capital does not seem to be reflected in the target returns on capital currently set by the supermajors. Observing that the financial goal of a corporation is to maximize not its return on capital but rather the net present value of expected future cash flows and earnings, the authors argue that the majors need to make two major changes to current practice. First, their investment hurdle rates should be reduced from their current level of 14–15% to the weighted average cost of capital, which is estimated to run about 8–9%. Second, the actual returns on capital reported in published accounts are largely meaningless; and when evaluating new investments and existing operations alike, the companies must find an annual performance measure that better reflects the economic realities of the business. This paper recommends use of a performance measurement framework based on economic profit that should serve two critical purposes: it will encourage managers to undertake all value-increasing projects (not just those that will maintain or increase reported return on capital), and it will help the companies communicate their strategy and results to the investment community.     

A New Approach to Random Utility Modeling using the Dirichlet Multinomial Distribution

In this paper we introduce a new econometricapproach to analyzing recreational site choicedata, the Dirichlet multinomial model. Thismodel, which nests the standard conditionalmultinomial logit model, can accommodateover-dispersed data and may provide moreefficient estimators of coefficients andconsequent welfare measures than the standardconditional logit model, which is so widelyused in the Random Utility Model approach torecreation demand. We illustrate thisDirichlet approach using a data set of rockclimbers in Scotland, and study the impacts onper-trip consumers surplus of alternativemanagement strategies for popular rock climbingsites. Results show that the Dirichletmultinomial approach produces coefficient andwelfare estimates having smaller samplingvariability in this case. We also compareclassical welfare measures with their posteriorequivalents, which allow for welfare changes tobe dis-aggregated.