Ethics from the top: top management and ethical business

Codes of ethics and conduct typically demand the highest standard of ethical behaviour from every single employee. This implies a democratic or lobbyist understanding of ethics in business. The contrasting view would argue that business ethics is an elitist undertaking that can only be instigated from the top, by managing directors or owner managers. This article looks at three types of ethical businesses, three types of approaches to ethical problem-solving, and three possible incentives for ethical business to see which of the above is more convincing. It will be argued that the impulse for value-driven business has to come from the top. Only top management and owner managers have the opportunity to foster major change in business practice.     

Provincial Motor Vehicle Taxation in Indonesia

Vehicle-based taxes are collected by provincial governments in Indonesia and constitute their most important source of locally collected revenue. This paper evaluates the structure and revenue performance of the two vehicle-based taxes–-the vehicle registration tax and the vehicle transfer tax–-focusing in particular on their allocative efficiency. This is evaluated in terms of their potential to meet road maintenance resource requirements, and the study finds that objectives other than allocative efficiency have determined the structure of the two taxes.     

The Tunisia Wheat Market in the Context of World Price Volatility: A Stochastic Partial Equilibrium Approach

Food security is a key objective of agricultural and food policy in Tunisia. The 2007–2008 food crisis highlighted the negative impacts of price volatility on international markets both in terms of food insecurity and budget exposure. Tunisian food subsidy expenditures ranged from $180 million to $710 million in 2006–2010, so volatile world prices meant volatile subsidy costs. Moreover, cereal production in Tunisia still has much instability due to climate conditions, which also influences imports and, consequently, subsidy expenditures. This study applies a structural model to conduct stochastic analyses of trade and policy impacts on food security and budget expenditures in the Tunisian wheat market. The methodology disaggregates durum wheat and soft wheat markets and generates projections of import prices of durum wheat and soft wheat, using projections of world prices provided by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at University of Missouri (FAPRI-MU). The key innovation is the generated stochastic analyses of subsidy costs based on stochastic world price projections and stochastic domestic wheat yields based on historic yield variances. The analysis highlights the sensitivity of subsidy costs to world prices, volumes imported and domestic production, so that alternative policy tools can be considered.     

A dynamic perspective on the impact of process innovation upon competitive strategies

The paper lays the foundation for building a dynamic theory of the impact of process innovation upon competitive strategies. An innovation is tracked over two and a half decades to observe changing patterns in competition resulting from ongoing innovation development, emerging complementary technologies, and expanding use. The study finds that the innovation created competitive opportunities and threats for both firms that adopted it and those that did not.     

Price dynamics in limit order markets

This article presents a one-tick dynamic model of a limit ordermarket. Agents choose to submit a limit order or a market orderdepending on the state of the limit order book. Each traderknows that her order will affect the order placement strategiesof those who follow and the execution probability of her limitorder is endogenous. All traders take this into account which,in equilibrium, generates systematic patterns in transactionprices and order placement strategies even with no asymmetricinformation.