Motivations and barriers of foreign R&D activities in China

The continued growth of the Chinese economy accompanied with the expansion of international investment in China has led to an increase in foreign research and development (R&D) activities in the country. Aside from the rising importance of R&D internationalization, research on foreign R&D in China has been neglected in the past due to its emerging status. In this article we examine drivers and barriers for conducting R&D in China. The focus of our research is on transnational companies typically characterized by decentralized R&D activities. Our research is mainly based on qualitative interviews with senior R&D managers. The success of foreign R&D activities in China strongly depends on the realistic estimation of its advantages and the proper identification and handling of barriers.     

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.      

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.     

Reviewing Oates' insights in a repeated game setting

This paper analyzes the optimal assignment of public good policies to layers of a federal system in a repeated game setting. Under a centralized regime, public goods are financed jointly across regions, and a federal legislature decides on the regional quantities. Under a decentralized regime, public goods are financed locally, and governments play a non-cooperative provision game. We find that a centralized (decentralized) regime is more likely to provide the efficient public good policies in case spillovers are small (large). Received: September 2003, Accepted: October 2004 JEL Classification: H11, H41 I wish to thank Clemens Fuest, Anke Kessler, Christoph Lülfesmann, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments on this paper. Financial support by the DFG (SPP 1142) is gratefully acknowledged.     

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.