new issues in corporate finance flow of funds data are used to compare methods of finance in 5 countries over the period 1970 to 1985 many of the problems associated with previous studies are avoided by estimating net instead of gross financing proportions the degree of consolidation of accounts reciprocal arrangements between borrowers and lenders and compensating deposit requirements on borrowers no longer distort financing patterns corrections for inflation are provided by employing flow rather than stock figures and using own aggregation procedures to derive stock measures significant variations in financing emerge these are not readily explained by traditional descriptions of corporate finance in particular taxation as an alternative the paper suggests that relationships between borrowers and lenders establish forms of commitment that are conducive to the provision of long term finance the separation between investment and finance which has been the starting point of corporate finance theory is untenable in a multiperiod context in which terms of finance define future allocation of control

the role of exergy in energy policy making abstract this paper deals with the utilization of exergy as an efficient tool for energy policy making applications since exergy is a measure of quantity and quality of the energy sources unlike energy which is only about the quantity in addition energy and exergy concepts are evaluated for various actual processes and the role of exergy is discussed for energy and environment policy making activities from several key perspectives e g quality energy conservation environment economy and sustainable development the results of this study exhibit that the potential usefulness exergy in addressing and solving environmental problems as well as attaining sustainable development is crucial

explaining firm capital structure the role of agency theory vs transaction cost economics the study of capital structure has increasingly gained importance in strategic management research paradigms derived from organizational economics have also gained popularity in explaining firm actions agency theory and transaction cost economics represent two such paradigms that rely on the notion of market imperfections notwithstanding the similarities between them these two offer different explanations of the role of debt and equity in a firm the governance abilities of the financing structures and the nature of assets of the firm provide two key sources of differences viewing capital structure from transaction cost economics gives rise to predictions that are contradictory to those presented by agency theory it is argued that the extant evidence mainly supports the transaction cost viewpoint two organizational phenomena leveraged buyouts and product diversification are used to highlight the comparison

gender differences in the allocation of assets in retirement savings plans in 1995 40 percent of working men and 32 percent of working women were covered by a defined contribution dc plan a distinguishing characteristic of these plans is that workers can generally choose how their assets are invested using data from the 1992 and 1995 surveys of consumer finances scf this paper examines whether workers differ systematically by gender in the allocation of assets in dc plans previous researchers have reported that many workers tend to invest their retirement assets too conservatively and in particular that women are less likely than men to invest in risky assets such as stocks in the presence of an equity premium a lower propensity by women to invest in stocks could translate into large differences in the accumulation of financial wealth for retirement we establish that gender differences in investment decisions exist though they are more complicated than previous studies have suggested we show that these differences are not completely explained by differences in individual or household characteristics a few studies have examined gender differences in investment decisions vickie l bajtelsmit and jack l vanderhei 1997 richard p hinz et al 1997 these studies use administrative data and report that women tend to invest their retirement funds in less risky vehicles than men michael haliassos and carol c bertaut 1995 use the 1983 scf to examine why such a large fraction of households do not own any stock they report that gender does not have a significant effect on the probability of owning stock though gender differences are not the focus of their paper what these data sources lack haliassos and bertaut being the exception is a rich set of demographic and other variables on households that theory predicts should affect investment behavior this paper adds to the literature by examining gender differences in investment decisions conditioning on such variables the results highlight the importance of including marital status risk aversion measures and the portfolio of assets held outside dc plans when examining gender differences in investment decisions in these plans

dynamics of health and labor market risks while there is little doubt that the probability of poor health increases with age and that less healthy people face a more difficult situation on the labor market the precise relationship between facing the risks of health deterioration and labor market instability is not well understood using 12 years of data from the german socio economic panel we study the nature of the relationship between poor health and non employment on a sample of german men aged 30 59 we propose a joint model of health and labor market risks which identifies the mechanism through which poor health contributes to the probability of being jobless and vice versa we find an important role of unobserved heterogeneity and evidence for correlation in the unobservable characteristics determining the two processes the results also show strong persistence in the dynamics of health and labor market risks

income hedging and portfolio decisions we examine whether the decision to participate in the stock market and other related portfolio decisions are influenced by income hedging motives economic theory predicts that the market participation propensity should increase as the correlation between income growth and stock market returns decreases surprisingly empirical studies find limited support for the income hedging motive using a rich unique dutch data set and the national longitudinal survey of the youth nlsy from the united states we show that when the income return correlation is low individuals exhibit a greater propensity to participate in the market and allocate a larger proportion of their wealth to risky assets even when the income risk is high individuals exhibit a higher propensity to participate in the market when the hedging potential is high these findings suggest that income hedging is an important determinant of stock market participation and asset allocation decisions

wealth and portfolio composition theory and evidence we examine a survey of 6010 u s households and estimate a model for household portfolio allocation we extend the conventional portfolio choice model in order to capture the observed incompleteness of household portfolios we show that the empirical specification of the joint discrete and continuous choice that characterizes household portfolio behavior is a switching regressions model with endogenous switching we go on to examine the impact of taxes on portfolio composition using detailed survey data to calculate precisely the marginal tax rate facing each household finally we estimate wealth elasticities of demand for a range of assets and liabilities

structural estimation of stock market participation costs abstract this paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of stock market participation where consumers decisions regarding stock market participation are influenced by participation costs the practical significance of the participation costs is considered as being a channel through which financial education programs can affect consumers investment decisions using household data from the panel study of income dynamics i estimate the magnitude of the participation cost allowing for individual heterogeneity in it the results show the average stock market participation cost is about 4 6 of labor income however it varies substantially over consumers life the model successfully predicts the level of the observed participation rate and the increasing pattern of stock market participation over the consumers life cycle

making real progress toward more sustainable societies using decision support models and tools introduction to the special volume academics politicians professionals and the general public are aware that without stewarding our planet s natural resources man is on the pathway towards a global collapse over the next three decades mankind is expected to consume an estimated 140 billion tons of minerals ores fossil fuels and biomass per year three times current consumption social welfare and human wellbeing are threatened with the scarcity of natural resources consequently nations and their societies are also at risk of collapse the readers of this special volume will find a compilation of scholarly research papers with real life applications that take the challenge of proposing decision making models and tools to address sustainability challenges in integrative ways the main focus of this special volume is integration of sustainability dimensions economic social environmental ethical and time into decision support models and to identify pathways to achieve more sustainable societies the majority of the research in this special volume 74 percent focuses on environmental and economic dimensions only 26 percent integrated social dimensions with them methodologically a range of mathematical models and tools are presented to support prescriptive decision making with some descriptive models integrated to support decision makers in solving practical problems across a variety of industries and scenarios the breadth and complexity of issues facing organizations and society requires innovative applications of these methodologies the concerns cover a spectrum ranging from energy to solid waste management a multitude of levels from broad based policy concerns to strategic inter organizational sustainable supply chain management and significantly shop floor operational issues are also covered the variety of problems and solutions exemplifies the potential for modelling and operations research for addressing some of our world s most pressing concerns

the british low wage sector and the employment prospects of the unemployed abstractare low wages a way for the unemployed to switch to higher paying jobs using data from the british household panel survey the labour market dynamics of unemployed low paid and higher paid employed men are analysed moreover the respective un employment duration and occupational skill level are accounted for results show that in general low wages significantly reduce the risk of future unemployment and increase the chances of ascending the salary ladder especially in the case of long term unemployment 360 days furthermore the occupational skill level has a substantial influence on the upward mobility of low paid jobs individuals working in the initial period in a low paid and higher skilled occupation have on average an 11 percentage points higher probability of entering higher pay compared to when working in a low paid and low skilled occupation

programme evaluation with multiple treatments this paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes which is of high relevance in practice for example active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes employment programmes and wage subsidies similarly sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non vocational rehabilitation measures first the main identification strategies control for confounding variables difference in difference instrumental variable and regression discontinuity identification are discussed in the multiple programme setting thereafter the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined download discussion paper pdf 484 kb

asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage given incomplete factor markets appropriate time paths of flow variables must be chosen to build required stocks of assets that is critical resources are accumulated rather than acquired in strategic factor markets barney barney j 1986 strategic factor markets expectations luck and business strategy management sci october 1231 1241 sustainability of a firm s asset position hinges on how easily assets can be substituted or imitated imitability is linked to the characteristics of the asset accumulation process time compression diseconomies asset mass efficiencies inter connectedness asset erosion and causal ambiguity

going green does it depend on education gender or income sustainable development entails meeting our present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs this requires us to treat economic social and environmental aspects in an integrated way but little is known about the nature of individual preferences towards the trade offs involved in this effort for the first time we study individual preferences towards the environment social well being and financial well being by using a survey of over 1400 households in the netherlands using nonparametric parametric and matching methods we find that gender and education are important factors for sustainability rather than income levels moreover results indicate that educated females put the greatest value on going green whilst being socially minded

are women more risk averse we find that single women exhibit relatively more risk aversion in financial decision making than single men using u s sample data we examine household holdings of risky assets to determine whether there are gender differences in financial risk taking as wealth increases the proportion of wealth held as risky assets is estimated to increase by a smaller amount for single women than for single men gender differences in financial risk taking are also influenced by age race and number of children greater financial risk aversion may provide an explanation for women s lower levels of wealth compared with men s jel j16 d81 g11

compensating outside directors with stock the impact on non primary stakeholders two obvious trends in corporate governance include broadening board accountability beyond shareholders interests and paying outside directors with equity compensation stock and stock options by integrating common agency and instrumental stakeholder theories we examine the effect of stock compensation on secondary stakeholders and a firm s participation in social issues two areas where interests are less aligned with shareholder value consistent with our predictions we found that while stock compensation may be an effective way to align directors goals to those of shareholders it has adverse effects on important non shareholder constituencies in the company s operating environment

persistence of innovation discriminating between types of innovation and sources of state dependence abstract this paper advances current research on the persistence of innovation drawing on a panel data set constructed from three waves of the german part of the community innovation survey covering the time span from 2002 to 2008 i e cis iv cis 2007 and cis 2009 we explore persistence patterns for various types of innovation i e organizational product and process innovation and allowing for the moderating impact of firm level characteristics we use the ascertained patterns of persistence to comparatively evaluate various sources and underlying theoretical accounts of state dependence

sustainable economic production quantity models for inventory systems with shortage abstract recently new economic order production quantity models have shifted away from focusing only on economic issues and towards combined economic environmental concerns because of sustainable development goals despite this shift only a few works have addressed sustainable economic production quantity epq the theoretical sustainable eoq and epq models are basic models that ignore many real life conditions such as the possibility of stock out in inventory systems in this paper we develop four new sustainable economic production quantity models that consider different shortage situations to find optimal values of inventory system variables we solve four independent profit maximization problems for four different situations these proposed models include a basic model in which shortages are not allowed and when shortages are allowed the lost sale full backordering and partial backordering models can be selected by operations managers depending on the manufacturer s motivation to improve service levels we have also proposed an algorithm for determining optimum values of the decision variables for these sustainable economic production quantity models finally the formulated models are explained with some different examples and the obtained results have been analyzed and discussed these results show that the sustainable economic production quantity with partial backordering model is a general and more realistic model that can be used in many real cases with a reasonable profit amount compared with the three other proposed models

measuring heterogeneity survey engagement and response quality in preferences for organic products in nigeria abstractthe identification of the market potentials of organic products is important in the drive towards a sustainable agricultural development in sub saharan africa ssa however available evidence shows that valuing attributes of credence goods such as organic products while using stated preference methods faces additional obstacles compared to other normal goods in this study we examine consumers preferences and willingness to pay wtp for health and environmental attributes of organic products in nigeria we employ an approach that allows us to adequately capture the value of organic products by linking part of the heterogeneity across respondents to differences in scale while making use of indicators of survey engagement without risks of endogeneity bias and measurement error that arise from the deterministic methods the empirical results show that market for organic products exists in nigeria with reduction in pesticide residues attribute attracting the highest value followed by the ce

fertility and female employment dynamics in europe the effect of using alternative econometric modeling assumptions we investigate the direct and long run effects of fertility on employment in europe estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and modeling assumptions related to initial conditions unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation in the error terms we find overall large direct and long run effects of giving birth on employment probabilities and these effects differ considerably across countries we find that within countries the results are sensitive to the statistical assumption made on initial conditions the inclusion of serial correlation and the assumption of strict exogeneity of children however the pattern across countries is robust to these assumptions we show that such patterns are largely consistent with prevailing institutional differences related to the flexibility of the labor markets and family policies copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

from eoq towards zi zero inventory zi is a new and powerful concept to improve production efficiency underpinning zi is set up reduction and this paper examines what eventuates when set up costs are cut the folklore is that set up reduction lowers inventory and costs we obtain results contrary to that reducing set up costs need not reduce inventory for example likewise lowering set up costs need not necessarily lower total production and inventory costs furthermore most investments produce marginally decreasing returns set up cost reduction prompts the opposite it produces marginally increasing not decreasing returns a parametric algorithm that calculates the benefit of set up cost reduction is provided most presentations of zi have been descriptive with very few mathematical models of it yet untaken by modeling certain zi concepts mathematically we scrutinize their validity and sometimes invalidity

does education increase pro environmental behavior evidence from europe abstract it is often observed that individuals with higher education levels tend to be more environmentally friendly yet the causal evidence is lacking because there may well be omitted variables that cause individuals to attain more education and also cause individuals to be environmentally conscious we implement a regression discontinuity design to estimate the increase in educational attainment due to changes in compulsory education laws in 20th century europe this allows us to overcome the identification problem of endogenous educational attainment using two waves of eurobarometer surveys we find a positive local average treatment effect for 7 of the 8 pro environmental behaviors an analysis of related questions on the survey supports the notion that education causes individuals to be more concerned with social welfare and to accordingly behave in a more environmentally friendly manner

precautionary motives and portfolio decisions theory predicts that under certain restrictions on preferences prudent consumers will allocate relatively more funds to riskless assets when there is uninsurable background risk this paper analyzes empirically the relevance of precautionary motives for the structure of household wealth to this end a new and rich data source from the netherlands is exploited the question of primary concern is what impact if any does the presence of income uncertainty have on the structure of dutch households portfolios we employ various semi parametric estimators both for cross sections and for panel data to assess the response of households portfolios to uninsurable background risk we find some but not unanimous support for the view that portfolios become less risky as income uncertainty increases

myopic loss aversion and stock investments an empirical study of private investors abstract myopic loss aversion was suggested by benartzi and thaler 1995 as an explanation for the equity premium puzzle its main prediction is that loss averse investors who evaluate their investment performance too frequently and therefore often observe small losses on their stock portfolios would invest too little in equity we investigate the link between myopic loss aversion and actual investment decisions of individual investors using survey data our results are consistent with the predictions of benartzi and thaler higher myopic loss aversion is associated with lower stock investment as a share of total assets investors tend to evaluate their stock portfolio performance too often which contributes to the prevalence of myopic loss aversion the effect of myopia is most apparent when investors both evaluate their portfolios frequently and trade stocks regularly

a portrait of the individual investor abstract behavioral finance models often rely on a concept of noise traders who are prone to judgment and decision making errors what do noise traders do we review prior research and present new survey evidence on the behavior of small individual investors who manage their own equity portfolios many people 1 discover naive patterns in past price movements 2 share popular models of value 3 are not properly diversified and 4 trade in suboptimal ways

separating moral hazard from adverse selection and learning in automobile insurance longitudinal evidence from france the identification of information problems in different markets is a challenging issue in the economic literature this paper performs tests of residual asymmetric information in the french automobile insurance market for the 1995 1997 period this market is characterized by the presence of a regulated experiencerating scheme bonus malus contract choices are strongly associated with the bonus malus of policyholders we have access to longitudinal survey data with dynamic information both on claims and accidents we propose a causality test to distinguish pathways through which a positive correlation arises between contract choice and accidents we find evidence of moral hazard among a sub group of policyholders with significant driving experience 5 15 years we distinguish this moral hazard estimate from adverse selection and learning policyholders with less experience have a combination of learning and moral hazard whereas no residual information problem is found for policyholders with more than 15 years of experience

assessing whether corporate social responsibility influence corporate value abstractthis study used the corporate social responsibility csr index to gauge the corporate value and social responsibility performance of corporations in taiwan we investigated whether csr influences corporate value and whether the extent of that influence varies with corporate value or time the results indicate that the influence of csr on corporate value does not change with time csr exerts a positive influence on company value and this influence does not change over time however the extent of the influence significantly varies with corporate value when the corporate value of a company is not high investing in csr would only increase costs and fail to effectively increase corporate value in contrast if the corporate value of the company is high investments in csr in this circumstance would instead promote the effective increase of corporate value

strategic corporate social responsibility and economic performance this article proposes a novel corporate social responsibility csr index based on a data envelopment analysis dea model acknowledging the argument that companies might favour those csr dimensions that provide strategic competitive advantages we argue that the index can capture companies strategic approach to csr furthermore our findings reveal a neutral relationship between this strategic csr index and economic performance as measured by return on assets roa and tobin s q when controlling for firm unobserved heterogeneity and past economic performance by contrast an equally weighted index of the same csr indicators is found to be negatively related with roa which reinforces our claim that this specific dea based index is a measure of strategic csr

planning and financial literacy how do women fare many older us households have done little or no planning for retirement and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement of particular concern is the relative position of older women who are more vulnerable to old age poverty due to their longer longevity this paper uses data from a special module we devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 health and retirement study it shows that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole in addition women who are less financially literate are also less likely to plan for retirement and be successful planners these findings have important implications for policy and for programs aimed at fostering financial security at older ages

exploring the curvature of the relationship between hrm csr and corporate financial performance this article contributes to the general literature on the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance as well as to the emerging hrm csr literature by exploring the curvature of the relationship between hrm csp and cfp we advance conceptual arguments in favor of an inverted u shaped relationship our results demonstrate a significant quadratic relationship between hrm csp and cfp we provide evidence that this relationship is not linear or s shaped but rather inverted u shaped

firm specificity in corporate applied r d much corporate research and development r d has characteristics that tie it strongly to the firm in which it takes place and which may make the process of undertaking r d or the outcome of the r d difficult for other firms to duplicate perfectly that is the r d is firm specific this is particularly true for more highly applied r d which tends to involve incremental technological change and often entails alterations and enhancements to existing firm assets production processes and products the often firm specific nature of corporate r d tends to receive relatively little attention in the study of technological innovation this article outlines the primary characteristics of firm specificity in r d and discusses two interrelated consequences of such firm specificity 1 heterogeneity in the r d applications of firms within an industry and 2 increased ability of firms to earn returns to r d often termed appropriability both factors have important implications for firm strategy empirical

ceo duality as a double edged sword how boards of directors balance entrenchment avoidance and unity of command when a firm s chief executive officer is also the chairperson of its board directors have opposing objectives according to organization theory such ceo duality establishes strong unambiguous le

the design of bank loan contracts the unique characteristics of bank loans emerge endogenously to enhance efficiency in a model of renegotiation between a borrower and a lender in which there is the potential for moral hazard on each side of the relationship firm risk is endogenous and renegotiated interest rates on the debt need not be monotone in firm risk the initial terms of the debt are not set to price default risk but rather are set to efficiently balance bargaining power in later renegotiation loan pricing may be nonlinear involving initial transfers either from the borrower to the bank or front the bank to the borrower article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

state dependence serial correlation and heterogeneity in intertemporal labor force participation of married women a dynamic search framework is developed to analyze the intertemporal labor force participation behavior of married women using longitudinal data to allow for a rich dynamic structure the sensitivity to alternative distributional assumptions is evaluated using linear probability and probit models the dynamic probit models are estimated using maximum simulated likelihood msl estimation to overcome the computational difficulties inherent in maximum likelihood estimation of models with nontrivial error structures the results find that participation decisions are characterized by significant state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the error component the hypothesis that fertility decisions are exogenous to women s participation decisions is rejected when dynamics are ignored however there is no evidence against this hypothesis in dynamic model specifications women s participation response is stronger to permanent than current nonlabor income reflecting unobserved taste factors

doing well by doing good green office buildings this paper provides the first credible evidence on the economic value of the certification of green buildings in the commercial sector value derived from impersonal market transactions rather than engineering estimates we match publicly available information on the addresses of energy star and leed rated office buildings to a commercial data source detailing the characteristics of u s office buildings and their rental rates we analyze the micro data on 694 certified green buildings and on 7489 other office buildings located within a quarter mile of the certified buildings we find systematic evidence that rents for green offices are about two percent higher than rents for comparable buildings located nearby effective rents i e rents adjusted for the occupancy levels in office buildings are about six percent higher in green buildings than in comparable office buildings nearby at prevailing capitalization rates conversion of the average non green building to an equivalent green building would add more than 5 million in market value these results are robust to the statistical models employed

how does household portfolio diversification vary with financial literacy and financial advice household investment mistakes are an important concern for researchers and policymakers alike portfolio underdiversification ranks among those mistakes that are potentially most costly however its roots and empirical importance are poorly understood i estimate quantitatively meaningful diversification statistics and investigate their relationship with key variables nearly all households that score high on financial literacy or rely on professionals or private contacts for advice achieve reasonable investment outcomes compared to these groups households with below median financial literacy that trust their own decision making capabilities lose an expected 50 bps on average all group differences stem from the top of the loss distribution

deregulation disintermediation and agency costs of debt evidence from japan abstract many japanese firms reduced dependence on banks following financial deregulation in the 1980s the financial architecture of japanese firms after liberalization provides an opportunity to investigate the choice of financing with public bonds versus monitored bank loans examination of accounting and stock price data for a sample of japanese firms in the late 1980s suggests that debt structure is related to variables that serve as proxies for agency costs of debt in particular we find that the proportion of bond debt is inversely related to growth opportunities while the proportion of bank debt is positively related to growth opportunities

impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled impacts of land certification on tenure security investment and land market participation evidence from ethiopia conducted between 2006 and 2011 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of land registration on tenure security land related investment and rental market participation using 900 randomly selected households and 4000 plots cultivated by the households on the household and land plots level certification resulted in significant reduction of tenure insecurity and an increase in land related investment the propensity to invest in water conservation increased between 20 and 30 percent from panel estimates the increased investment appears to be sustained over the long term the propensity to rent land increases by 9 to 13 percent the titling had significant positive impacts on the rate at which female headed households rented their land funding for the study derived from the gender action plan global land tools network and norwegian environmentally and socially sustainable development essd trust fund

board openness during an economic crisis does a board with greater gender diversity make better investment decisions drawing on austrian economic cycle theory and work groups theory we argue that such board openness will help male board members to overcome gender biases discrimination and conflicts integrate different perspectives under the economic cycle and crisis and foster an environment in which better decisions are made the results of an empirical study of 14 609 firm quarter observations from 1 555 listed firms in china between 2007 and 2009 strongly support our arguments we find that a chinese board is more likely to accept female directorship during an economic crisis than during an economic prosperity stage boards with greater gender diversity are more likely to make tough counter cyclical investments to improve firm performance during a crisis our study enriches the board decision making literature by exploring the impacts of board gender diversity on firm performance within the context of an economic crisis the results of our study also carry significant managerial implications for overcoming gender stereotypes biases and prejudices on a board

towards a coherent multi level framework for resource accounting abstract with increasing resource scarcity and environmental impacts resulting from inefficient resource utilisation accounting for resource consumption along the life cycle of a product or service becomes critical for designing production consumption systems this work aims at developing a coherent framework for resource accounting to support the evaluation of alternatives for production and consumption activities the framework provides an understanding of resource utilisation at unit process inter process and production consumption levels within a system the multilevel characteristic of this framework allows a comprehensive and holistic view of a system with the potential to reveal how decisions at one level would affect other levels of the system based on such a multilevel view a unique adaptation of the cumulative exergy resource accounting method is proposed to quantify resource consumption associated with both technological and natural processes this work also differentiates between and accounts for the operational resource consumption in resource extraction agriculture and manufacturing and for the capital resource consumption for providing machinery and infrastructure this is a practical framework for resource accounting that can be used by process engineers and local planners to support decision making regarding alternative system designs gain insights on the performance of a production system and devise design options including retrofits for improving the overall resource efficiency of a system by revealing the resource consumption through each system layer the framework provides a robust and transparent way to capture effects of decision making during design or retrofitting of processes in order to find the most efficient design options in addition the framework can be applied to support research in other areas such as those addressing the social cultural and business perspectives of resource management finally a case study on the production and consumption of sugarcane ethanol is used to illustrate the features of the proposed framework the framework proved useful in assessing the effects of design decisions at the various levels such as choosing between molecular sieve and azeotropic distillation at the unit level adoption of water recycling at the process level and bagasse exchange flows at inter process level the proposed systematic approach has given insights into how changes in resource consumption occur at different levels

retrospective reporting of household wealth evidence from the 1983 1989 survey of consumer finances one way to obtain panel like information on household wealth is to ask households about changes in their asset holdings yet the reliability of retrospective data is unclear considering the potential for recall error this article examines the reliability of retrospective reporting using data from the 1983 1989 survey of consumer finances we find substantial inconsistencies between reported net investments in assets with measured changes in holdings inconsistencies are less severe for salient transactions like home sales and more severe for aggregated items like financial assets

the effects of top management team integrative complexity and decentralized decision making on corporate social performance we examine the influence of top management teams tmts integrative complexity and decentralization of decision making on corporate social performance we argue that both factors increase tmt ability to gather information on and attend to stakeholder needs thereby yielding higher corporate social performance we further predict that decentralization moderates the relationship between integrative complexity and corporate social performance in such a way that the relationship is stronger under conditions of centralization using a q sort methodology which translates complex qualitative observations into quantitative metrics we examined integrative complexity and decentralization in 61 fortune 500 firms and found support for our predictions in the wake of numerous corporate scandals corporate social performance has garnered much attention from business practitioners and academics alike corporate social performance refers to a business organization s configuration of principles of social responsibility processes of social responsiveness and policies programs and observable outcomes as they relate to the firm s societal relationships wood 1991 693 the dominant perspective taken in evaluating a firm s corporate social performance is the stakeholder approach according to which firms act in a socially responsible manner when they take the interests of multiple stakeholders e g customers employees into account mcguire dow argheyd 2003 ruf muralidhar brown janney paul 2001

asset allocation and individual risk aversion 1992 asset allocation and individual risk aversion financial analysts journal vol 48 no 6 pp 32 37

do finance professors invest like everyone else comparing the results of the fed s survey of consumer finances with those of a survey of finance professors at u s universities the authors found that finance professors are significantly more likely than others to invest in equities they also found that finance professors are less prone to behavioral biases because their decision not to invest in equities is based on neither the outcome of their past investments nor their short term expectations of the market see comments and response on this article

r d investment and financing choices a comprehensive perspective abstract we posit that the effects of r d investment on financing choices depend on the degree of intervention barriers and appropriation discrepancy between capital providers and the firm based on these two contingencies we categorize financing instruments into four types common equity common stock convertible securities preferred stock and convertible debt transactional debt corporate bonds and relational debt bank and commercial loans from the experiences of 39 petroleum firms during the period 1976 2005 we found r d investment has a positive effect on the use of common equity a u shaped effect on the use of convertible securities and an inverted u shaped effect on the use of relational debt to raise capital these effects are sustained over several years

how many parts to make at once reprinted from factory the magazine of management volume 10 number 2 february 1913 pp 135 136 152 interest on capital tied up in wages material and overhead sets a maximum limit to the quantity of parts which can be profitably manufactured at one time set up costs on the job fix the minimum experience has shown one manager a way to determine the economical size of lots

the interrelated dynamics of unemployment and low wage employment this paper examines the extent of state dependence in unemployment and the role played in this by intervening low wage employment a range of dynamic random and fixed effects estimators are compared low wage employment is found to have almost as large an adverse effect as unemployment on future prospects and the difference in their effects is found to be insignificant evidence is presented that low wage jobs act as the main conduit for repeat unemployment and considerably increases its probability obtaining a higher wage job reduces the increased risk of repeat unemployment to insignificance

causal relationship between energy consumption and gdp growth revisited a dynamic panel data approach abstract this paper uses the panel data of energy consumption and gdp for 82 countries from 1972 to 2002 based on the income levels defined by the world bank the data are divided into four categories low income group lower middle income group upper middle income group and high income group we employ the gmm sys approach for the estimation of the panel var model in each of the four groups afterwards the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is tested and ascertained we discover a in the low income group there exists no causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth b in the middle income groups lower and upper middle income groups economic growth leads energy consumption positively c in the high income group countries economic growth leads energy consumption negatively after further in depth analysis of energy related data the results indicate that in the high income group there is a great environmental improvement as a result of more efficient energy use and reduction in the release of co2 however in the upper middle income group countries after the energy crisis the energy efficiency declines and the release of co2 rises since there is no evidence indicating that energy consumption leads economic growth in any of the four income groups a stronger energy conservation policy should be pursued in all countries

a century of evolution from harris s basic lot size model survey and research agenda abstract determining the economic lot size has always represented one of the most important issues in production planning this problem has long attracted the attention of researchers and several models have been developed to meet requirements at minimum cost in this paper we explore and discuss the evolution of these models during one hundred years of history starting from the basic model developed by harris in 1913 up to today following harris s work a number of researchers have devised extensions that incorporate additional considerations the evolution of eoq theory strongly reflects the development of industrial systems over the past century here we outline all the research areas faced in the past by conducting a holistic analysis of 219 selected journal papers and trying to give a comprehensive view of past work on the eoq problem finally a new research agenda is proposed and discussed

marginal taxes and the asset portfolios of swedish households this paper focuses on the effects of marginal tax rates wealth income and a set of socioeconomic and demographic variables on the portfolio composition of households using detailed micro data on 2 000 swedish households in particular efforts are made to disentangle the effects of marginal tax rates on the portfolio behavior of households some econometric problems involved when estimating asset demand equations in the presence of incomplete portfolios are briefly discussed a final section examines the overall effect of marginal tax rates on asset demands by applying estimated discrete and continuous portfolio equations to compute different tax elasticities

debt and communications technology diffusion retrospective evidence this study has evaluated the relationship between debt in the capital structure of firms and the dynamics of broadband and digital technology adoption in the united states based on a large dataset on local exchange carriers in the united states over a contemporary historical fourteen year period from 1988 to 2001 using treatment effects modeling the impact of debt in impacting the levels of firms broadband deployment has been found to be negative and significant the primary source of debt in the sector has been in the form of arm s length corporate bonds and the assumptions of the monitoring hypothesis associated with such debt that lenders in the face of information and collective actions problems might not be able to control managers and hence invest less in highly technology intensive situations are supported by the data additionally the data set has been split into separate sets for two periods one between 1988 and 1995 for the period before the telecommunications act of 1996 came into force and the other set between 1996 and 2001 and the results have stayed consistent a test of the coefficients between the two periods has shown that the negative impact of leverage on broadband deployment has become stronger after the introduction of competition in the sector and this has suggested that the change in the institutional logics between the two periods has been of material impact in influencing lenders perceptions

dynamism capital structure and performance in a sub saharan economy extending the institutional difference hypothesis extant research examining the capital structure performance relationship has been undertaken primarily in developed economies these studies integrate agency theory considerations with the contingency perspective and suggest a positive interaction between sector dynamism equity and performance our study extends this research stream by examining the capital structure performance link in a sub saharan economy an underresearched but economically emerging region using logic undergirding a substantial stream of institutional theory based studies that we term the institutional difference hypothesis we argue that the implications of the capital structure performance relationship are contingent on the extent of national level institutional underdevelopment taking into account institutional differences between developed economies and those in the sub saharan region we hypothesize a negative interaction between sector dynamism equity and firm performance in sub sahara using longitudinal data from ghanaia

improving supply chain sustainability using exergy analysis abstract sustainable supply chain management is the improved level of management through the integration of environmental and social issues in parallel to the economic issues it has emerged as a growing subject that now receives increasing interest from practitioners and academicians limited attempts have been made to take a broader look at the overall issues that form the core topics of this type of supply chain in fact there have been many exclusive studies that investigated the impact of inadvertent or unavoidable costs of supply chain processes exergy analysis is a powerful thermodynamic tool that may be employed to analyze and identify the inefficiencies in a process or a system it has also been extended to efficiently evaluate how sustainable an industrial system process or product is this paper introduces exergetic models that compute and compare the consumed exergy for two coordination policies it also evaluates the consumed exergy when producing ordering locally versus globally it recognizes the importance of financial social and environmental aspects of choosing the more sustainable destination to produce and distribute a product numerical examples are presented and discussed to provide some insights for managers and decision makers to select between domestic policies based on the consumed exergy and the monetary cost results show that societies can gain more from less consumed exergy and firms can save on some costs when producing ordering domestically this paper recommends to governments and other stakeholders to take actions that are effective in making societies consume resources wisely

the implications of debt heterogeneity for r d investment and firm performance an assumption in prior research is that debt is homogeneous and provides inappropriate governance for r d investments we argue that debt is heterogeneous although transactional debt does indeed impose strict contractual constraints that provide inappropriate governance for r d investments relational debt has very different characteristics that provide more appropriate governance using a sample of japanese firms we find that firms that align their debt structures with their r d investments perform better than those that are misaligned furthermore firms tend to align their debt structure with r d investments but only after deregulation permits relatively free access to various types of debt

environmentally responsible inventory models non classical models for a non classical era abstract mathematical models of inventory typically include the three inventory associated costs of surplus shortage and ordering these classic inventory models are then analysed so as to choose inventory parameters that usually minimise the total cost of operating the inventory system being investigated unfortunately classic inventory models do not provide a meaningful basis for analysing many real and increasingly important practical inventory problems and situations it is therefore not surprising that over recent years several authors have discussed these issues in broad terms and suggested that a new paradigm needs to be developed this paper develops some specific aspects of this discussion in particular the paper identifies a range of inventory problems that are not covered appropriately by traditional inventory analysis one of these is to design responsible inventory systems i e systems that reflect the needs of the environment the paper then examines the importance of inventory planning to the environment in greater detail for example packaging is important not only because of its costs and the protection that it provides to the inventory items but also because of its eventual effects on the environment in terms of the use of resources and potential landfill for similar reasons waste which can result from poor inventory management is highly important the location of stores is important because location affects transport costs thus the influence of the secondary aspects of most inventory models packaging waste and location are important but even more important are the inter relations with the total system in particular the location of the manufacturing plants and the effect that inventory planning has on the logistics chain potentially have considerable environmental implications inventory is part of a wider system however until the cost charged for an activity reflects the true environmental cost of that activity it is likely that decisions will be made on the basis of erroneous data in that situation we are faced with either determining the environmental cost of specific actions or to use environmental costs that are somewhat contrived in which case it may be more sensible to use very different performance measures and models the paper discusses these ideas and ways in which inventory policies may reassure us with our environmental concerns

the pension problem on demographic time bombs and odious debt much has been written recently particularly after 2000 2002 left pensions in tatters about the challenge of meeting pension obligations the challenge discussed here is interesting and multifaceted embracing issues of demographics reasonable expectations business ethics stakeholder interests the social compact and intergenerational equity the first step is to acknowledge the reality that assuming investments will earn a risk premium without acknowledging the risk that they will not deliver a premium disguises the real size of pension liabilities

the economic order quantity model revisited an extended exergy accounting approach abstract the economic order quantity eoq model has been popular among academicians and practitioners for decades despite the many variants of the eoq that have appeared in the literature to fine tune it to reality it still has limitations a major one is that it does not take into account the hidden costs inherent in inventory systems some of these costs relate to sustainability issues including environmental social labor and economic effects this paper considers some of these costs referred to as the exergetic costs and estimates them using the extended exergy accounting eea approach extended exergy accounting assigns equivalent exergetic values to capital labor and environmental remediation costs of a system the analysis combines the classical exergy analysis with the sustainability factors which are the labor capital and environment the paper uses an exergetic model to determine the eoq inventory policies for three firms operating in the usa germany and china the results show that the eoq is different for the three firms because the equivalent exergy of capital labor and environment remediation costs is different in each country

poverty and social exclusion two sides of the same coin or dynamically interrelated processes there is growing interest in the analysis and measurement of social exclusion to complement the static and dynamic literature on income poverty on theoretical grounds social exclusion and income poverty are seen as different processes but with closely interrelated dynamics however our empirical understanding of the way these two processes dynamically interact at the individual level is still very limited to shed some light on the issue we use a dynamic bivariate probit model controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and wooldridge 2005 type initial conditions both the first and second order markov dynamics are examined we estimate the model using the italian sample of the european community household panel echp waves 1 8 and find a sizable extent of state dependence in both poverty and social exclusion moreover there are dynamic cross effects implying that poverty and social exclusion are mutually reinforcing social policies aimed at eradicating poverty and avoiding individuals social

gender differences in revealed risk taking evidence from mutual fund investors abstract using data from a national survey of nearly 2000 mutual fund investors we investigate whether investor gender is related to risk taking as revealed in mutual fund investment decisions consonant with the received literature we find that women exhibit less risk taking than men in their most recent largest and riskiest mutual fund investment decisions more importantly we find that the impact of gender on risk taking is significantly weakened when investor knowledge of financial markets and investments is controlled in the regression equation this result suggests that the greater level of risk aversion among women that is frequently documented in the literature can be substantially but not completely explained by knowledge disparities

gender differences in risk aversion and expected retirement benefits women are generally considered more risk averse than men controlling for age income and education this study examined the impact of gender on the superannuation retirement fund risk preferences of staff in the australian university sector the findings suggest that women choose more conservative investment strategies than men and that lower income which affects the amount members contribute to their superannuation funds is the primary contributor to the lower projected retirement benefits of women providing members with a choice among risk levels in their retirement investments should significantly benefit male and female retirees

economic production quantity model for items with imperfect quality abstract the assumptions necessary to justify the use of economic production quantity epq eoq models are rarely met to provide mathematical models that more closely conform to actual inventories and respond to the factors that contribute to inventory costs the models must be extended or altered this paper hypothesizes a production inventory situation where items received or produced are not of perfect quality items of imperfect quality not necessarily defective could be used in another production inventory situation that is less restrictive process and acceptance control the electronics industry gives good examples of such situations this paper extends the traditional epq eoq model by accounting for imperfect quality items when using the epq eoq formulae this paper also considers the issue that poor quality items are sold as a single batch by the end of the 100 screening process a mathematical model is developed and numerical examples are provided to illustrate the solution procedure

gender differences in optimism and asset allocation we investigate two alternative explanations why men may hold more stocks than women do apart from the traditional explanation of a gender difference in risk aversion gender differences in either optimism or in perceived risk of financial markets might cause men to hold riskier assets our results show that men tend to be significantly more optimistic than women regarding a broad range of issues including the economy and financial markets after we take differences in optimism into account systematic gender differences in asset allocations disappear

a policy utility dislocation model based on prospect theory a case study of promoting policies with low carbon lifestyle abstract a low carbon lifestyle is an inevitable choice for mitigating climate change however in the actual situation where policy makers and policy target groups are separated from each other low carbon lifestyle changes are often manifested as individual strong government actions behind which social actions are seriously lagging based on this observation in this study a concept of policy utility dislocation was developed and a policy utility dislocation model was constructed based on prospect theory numerical simulation showed that policy utility dislocation can be reduced by increasing the proportion of residents environmental benefits government efforts and subsidies and reducing the cost of implementing a low carbon lifestyle for residents in particular when the environmental benefits of the government and residents accounted for 15 and 65 respectively or the subsidy coefficient was 2 the policy utility dislocation became zero in addition policy utility dislocation began to appear when the cost of implementing a low carbon lifestyle exceeded 3 this study enriches the connotation of policy utility and quantifies the policy utility dislocation and provides new ways to launch policies that promote low carbon lifestyles

capital structure and innovation trajectory the role of debt in balancing exploration and exploitation we examine the role of debt as a governance mechanism in balancing exploration and exploitation we argue that while equity is conducive to uncertain exploration critical for innovation debt provides countervailing incentives for engaging in exploitation by imposing cash flow obligations and the threat of bankruptcy as a consequence debt becomes a vital instrument in directing innovation along the optimal trajectory while preventing the balance from shifting too far toward suboptimal exploration to support our arguments drawing on patent data we first demonstrate that a firm s leverage is positively related to knowledge exploitation activity as reflected in its self citations next we show that firms that have potentially engaged in suboptimal exploration as manifest in underutilized stocks of proprietary knowledge are likely to experience leverage increases in the short run and these leverage increases in turn result in subsequent increases in self citations these effects are consistent with

borrowing from pui to pay pom multiple borrowing and over indebtedness in rural thailand summary rural financial markets have grown rapidly in asian emerging market economies thus contributing to economic development and the reduction of poverty at the same time however the level of indebtedness of rural households has increased making households more vulnerable to shocks one of the reasons for rising household debt is the ease of borrowing simultaneously from a growing number of lending institutions this paper addresses two major questions first does borrowing from multiple sources increase rural households risk of over indebtedness second do over indebted rural households refinance their outstanding loans through multiple borrowing running the risk of becoming trapped in a debt cycle employing a dynamic random effects bivariate probit model for a unique set of longitudinal household panel data from northeast thailand this study examines the bidirectional relationship between over indebtedness and multiple borrowing to determine to what extent rural households become trapped in debt cycles on the one hand the results indicate that households in northeast thailand take on multiple loans which further increases their risk of becoming over indebted on the other hand our model results do not confirm the widespread notion that over indebted rural households use multiple loans to refinance unpayable debts

profitability transactional alignment and organizational mortality in the u s trucking industry the winds of creative destruction rarely blow more fiercely than in a newly deregulated environment managers simultaneously face a novel focus on operating efficiency and an onslaught of new competitors what must managers do to enable their firms to survive in such an environment what factors bear on firms survival this paper presents an analysis of mortality of large motor carriers in the u s interstate for hire trucking industry after deregulation it examines this phenomenon through a multidisciplinary lens that encompasses organizational ecology neoclassical economics and transaction cost economics the paper posits that carrier mortality is a function of both firm level and industry level attributes which are drawn from both ecological and economic theories while each of these theories separately informs motor carrier mortality the inclusion of predictions derived from both disciplines in one model significantly increases explanatory power over either theory evaluated alone the empirical analysis is among the first to show increased mortality when firms do not adhere to operating policies consistent with transaction cost minimization principles in sum managers are well advised to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to strategy to ensure their firms survival 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

institutional cultural and transaction cost influences on entry mode choice and performance in this study we examine foreign market entry mode choice and firm performance for a sample of european union firms examining both financial and non financial performance measures we attempt to determine if firms that select their entry mode based on transaction cost institutional context and cultural context variables perform better than firms that make other mode choices we found that mode choice did matter firms whose mode choice could be predicted by the extended transaction cost model performed significantly better on both financial and non financial measures than did firms whose mode choice could not be predicted by the extended transaction cost model implications for future research are discussed

ownership of stocks and mutual funds a panel data analysis this paper analyzes the ownership dynamics of stocks and mutual funds using representative household panel data the dutch center savings survey 1993 1998 a bivariate dynamic binary choice model is introduced allowing for interactions between the two types of assets we find that unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence play a large role for both types of assets the positive relation between ownership of one type in one period and the other type in the next period is explained by correlated unobserved heterogeneity a negative state dependence effect of lagged ownership of stocks on ownership of mutual funds is found which can be explained by the costs of shifting funds across the two forms of stockholding

stature obesity and portfolio choice using multiple u s and european data sources we show that observed physical attributes are related to participation in financial markets specifically we find that individuals who are relatively tall and of normal weight are more likely to hold stocks in their financial portfolios we consider several potential mechanisms that could drive the relation between physical attributes and portfolio decisions we find that teenage social experiences as well as genetic and prenatal endowments that are fixed at birth are the two channels through which height affects financial decisions furthermore we find that the relation between body mass index and portfolio decisions is largely driven by education and race data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2016 2508 this paper was accepted by wei jiang finance

the corporate social performance financial performance link strategic managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in an environment that is placing more and more pressures on them recent scholarship in strategic management suggests that many of these pressures come directly from sources associated with social issues in management rather than traditional arenas of strategic management using a greatly improved source of data on corporate social performance this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance corporate social performance csp is found to be positively associated with prior financial performance supporting the theory that slack resource availability and csp are positively related csp is also found to be positively associated with future financial performance supporting the theory that good management and csp are positively related 1997 by john wiley sons ltd