University Students’ Attitudes Towards Entrepreneurship: A Two Countries Comparison

There is general agreement that attitudes towards the entrepreneur, entrepreneurial activity, and its social function are determinant factors for university students to decide an entrepreneurial career.This empirical study aims at assessing and comparing the attitudes of university students towards entrepreneurship and enterprise formation in Catalonia and Puerto Rico, using a sample of 837 and 435 students, respectively.Results reveal a positive entrepreneur’s image. Both samples have a favorable perception of desirability of new venture creation, although the perception of feasibility is by far not so positive and only a small percentage has the firm intention to create a new company.     

Learning by doing,spillovers and shakeouts

This paper studies industry evolution driven by non strategic learning by doing and spillovers. We characterize a dynamic process of cost and output changes and its effect on welfare and industry profits. The paper gives conditions for shakeouts to occur and analyzes the key factors affecting these conditions. Since shakeouts could lead to a long-run social loss due to higher market concentration, there is a role for a government to play in limiting unnecessary shakeouts. The most effective way to do so is to enhance spillovers.JEL Classification: L11, L13, O31Correspondence to: Michael TroegeWe would like to thank Hans Mewis, Christophe Moussu and an anonymous referee for valuable comments and suggestions. We also benefited from comments of seminar participants at WZB, Humboldt University, Northwestern University and the EEA/ESEM 1999 meetings. Part of the research was carried out while Michael Tröge was visiting Northwestern University. Financial support by the German Research Council (DFG) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Corporations,Stakeholders and Sustainable Development I: A Theoretical Exploration of Business–Society Relations

Sustainable development (SD) – that is, “Development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and aspirations” – can be pursued in many different ways. Stakeholder relations management (SRM) is one such way, through which corporations are confronted with economic, social, and environmental stakeholder claims. This paper lays the groundwork for an empirical analysis of the question of how far SD can be achieved through SRM. It describes the so-called SD–SRM perspective as a distinctive research approach and shows how it relates to the wider body of stakeholder theory. Next, the concept of SD is operationalized for the microeconomic level with reference to important documents. Based on the ensuing SD framework, it is shown how SD and SRM relate to each other, and how the two concepts relate to other popular concepts such as Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility. The paper concludes that the significance of societal guiding models such as SD and of management approaches like CSR is strongly dependent on their footing in society. Reinhard Steurer is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Research Institute for Managing Sustainability at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Adminstration. His research focuses on the changing roles of states, businesses and civil societies in the context of sustainable development. He is author and co-author of numerous articles, dealing with questions of how governments and businesses tackle the challenge of sustainable development, and what the two societal domains can learn from each other in doing so. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Salzburg/Austria, and a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Maryland/U.S.A. Markus E. Langer studied ecology and environmental economics at the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Economics and Business Adminstration as well as industrial environmental management at Yale University. He is currently working as Managing Director of FORUM Umweltbildung. Previously he was working since 1999 as a senior researcher and lecturer at the Research Institute for Managing Sustainability at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Adminstration. His research focused on the Evaluation of Sustainable Development as well as Corporate Social Responsibility and Stakeholder Management. Astrid Konrad studied business administration at the University of Graz. She has been working at the Research Institute for Managing Sustainability at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Adminstration since 2002. Her research focus is on Corporate Social Responsibility and Stakeholder Management. André Martinuzzi studied business adminstration at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He is working as a project manager at the Department of Environmental Economics and Management since 1993, as a lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Adminstration and leads the Managing Sustainability Research Centre since 1999. Since 2001 he worked as a scientific coordinator of Austria’s Sustainability Strategy. In 2003 he worked as a scientific editor of the Corporate Social Responsibility vision statement of the Austrian Industry and as a process consultant for the Austrian Forest Program. Research areas: Eco-Consulting, Corporate Sustainability, Evaluating Sustainable Development, Sustainability Strategies and Stakeholder Dialogues.     

Compensation Design and Career Concerns of Fund Manager

We develop an optimal incentive contract for the fund manager with career concerns. Drawing upon the framework of Gibbons and Murphy (1992), we restructure the performance of fund manager with emphasis on the multiplicative effect of previous effort on the latter period, and derive the positive cross-period linkage of fund managers efforts. In particular, our study derives that a greater first-periods effort by the fund manager will induce more second-period effort and greater compensation in either fixed or variable (performance-related) portion of the payment. Though the total performance related pay might increase as the result of greater effort in the previous period, we show that the pay-performance sensitivity in the second period will decline. Moreover, the initial wealth increase will motivate the fund manager to exert more effort and induce better performance, but decrease the pay-performance sensitivity in the second period.JEL Classification: G2, J33, J41     

An empirical comparison of GARCH option pricing models

Recent empirical studies have shown that GARCH models can be successfully used to describe option prices. Pricing such contracts requires knowledge of the risk neutral cumulative return distribution. Since the analytical forms of these distributions are generally unknown, computationally intensive numerical schemes are required for pricing to proceed. Heston and Nandi (2000) consider a particular GARCH structure that permits analytical solutions for pricing European options and they provide empirical support for their model. The analytical tractability comes at a potential cost of realism in the underlying GARCH dynamics. In particular, their model falls in the affine family, whereas most GARCH models that have been examined fall in the non-affine family. This article takes a closer look at this model with the objective of establishing whether there is a cost to restricting focus to models in the affine family. We confirm Heston and Nandi's findings, namely that their model can explain a significant portion of the volatility smile. However, we show that a simple non affine NGARCH option model is superior in removing biases from pricing residuals for all moneyness and maturity categories especially for out-the-money contracts. The implications of this finding are examined. JEL Classification G13     

让仓库流动起来

通过对中国仓储管理现状的分析,结合海尔集团和青岛啤酒仓储管理的成功经验,说明了物流产业只有全面整合仓储资源,解决仓库的闲置、盲目建设、设备陈旧等方面的问题,才能使仓储更好地流动起来,融入供应链管理过程中,实现一体化运作.     

The combination of two tragedies: commons and anticommons tragedies

This paper studies the relationship between social conflict and skilled–unskilled wage inequality through the three-sector general equilibrium approach. In the basic model without the urban unskilled minimum wage, we find that when the government enhances the degree of controlling social conflict, the skilled–unskilled wage inequality will be narrowed down (resp. widened) if the urban skilled sector is more capital intensive (resp. labor intensive) than the urban unskilled sector. The extended models address the issue under different economic structures or different types of social conflict. In the extended model with the urban unskilled minimum wage, we find that the skilled–unskilled inequality will be widened when the degree of controlling social conflict is increased. In other extended models, we find that the above obtained results are still robust.     

Ecological-Inference-Based Latent Growth Models: Modeling Changes of Alienation

Ecological-inference-based statistical methods employ aggregated (ecological) data to approximately infer individual-level structures of interests when individual-level data were not available. Under the same conceptual frames, we introduce the ecological-inference-based latent growth model (EI-LGM) to analyze cross-years latent trends of a general population when longitudinally collected data were not available. We showed both the substantive values and methodological feasibilities of EI-LGMs. Substantively, we analyze results from several Taiwan Social Change Surveys (TSCS) to show the cross-years latent trends using a subscale of alienation psychological characteristics. Not only the cross-years movements of measurement constructs of the scale were shown, the trends of latent factors were revealed as well. More importantly, these trends can be formally tested under the frameworks of EI-LGMs. Statistically, EI-LGMs were implemented under the weighted least square (WLS) approaches because of the dichotomous outcomes of the subscale. We demonstrate some of the estimation methods as well as some cautions of interpreting EI-LGMs using the estimated results.Part of this paper was presented at the Fourth Survey Research Conference held at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, August 29–August 30, 2002.     

The Sensory Order and other Adaptive Classifying Systems

Synopsis Hayek’s cognitive theory, which seeks to describe the operation of a particular order, in fact provides a paradigmatic account of knowledge-generating orders in general. We claim that this paradigm provides a fertile conceptual framework for exploring a variety of problems in economics and social theory. In particular, we shall show that Hayek’s conception of the ‘map’ and the ‘model’, which he uses to explain the operation of the complex adaptive classifying system called ‘mind’, are promising analytical devices with applications extending to social structures of various kinds and complexity. We use Hayek’s notion of the map and model to analyze how different social structures – regarded as classifying systems – work in terms of their input, processing, and output capabilities. The adaptive characteristics of such systems, via communicative routines, multi-level classification, and feedback, form central motifs for our discussion of markets, science, and other social structures. We show that by analyzing the knowledge-generating characteristics of such structures we are also able to gain insights about the circumstances affecting their adaptive properties.     

Sustainable Development: Epistemological Frameworks &; an Ethic of Choice

As the second part of a research agenda addressing the idea and meaning of Sustainable Development, this paper responds to the challenges set in the first paper. Using a Foucaudian perspective, we uncover and highlight the importance of discourse in the development of societal context which could lead to the radical change in our epistemological thought necessary for Sustainable Development to reach its potential. By developing an argument for an epistemological change, we suggest that business organizations have an ethical responsibility towards revaluating Sustainable Development, leading to a discourse based on an integrated inclusive process of celebrating diversity in all its forms. The paper goes on to explore the argument for such a change. This exploration is based on three issues: the notion of over simplification in the promotion of development; the idea of an imbalance in the interaction of business and government operating in the larger context of society; and the notion of increasing responsibility with increasing influence in terms of the business organization within society. Having established the argument for an ethical choice by business organizations, we then reflect on how such a change could be incorporated into an organization.Andrew Fergus is a PhD Candidate with a double major in Organizational Dynamics (Organizational theory/behavior) and Environmental Management/Sustainable Development. His research is focused towards the dynamic relationships found at the interface of organizations, society, and the environment.Dr Julie Rowney is a Professor, Human Resources and Organizational Dynamics, and is the Director of the Faculties International Sustainable Energy Development Programs in Latin America, the Caribbean, Iran and China. Her research activities lie in the areas of diversity, gender, sustainable development, leadership, change, and international/crosscultural comparisons.