management of social issues in supply chains a literature review exploring social issues actions and performance outcomes the social dimension of sustainable development and its impact on supply chains have so far received less attention than the environmental dimension the aim of the research is to explore the intersection between social issues corporate social responsibility csr actions and performance outcomes a structured literature review of social issues in supply chains is presented analysing the research published so far in peer reviewed publications linking csr and supply chain management allows the exploration of strategies and performance outcomes with a focus on social issues the corresponding responsible supply chain actions adopted by firms to address these issues are grouped into communication compliance and supplier development strategies social and economic as well as buyer and supplier performance are identified as the key outcomes but the interactions among these constructs would require further research this paper contributes to the understanding of managing social issues in supply chains by linking social issues responsible supply chain actions and performance outcomes the paper consolidates related research by offering an overarching conceptual framework and points to future research directions and simultaneously provides insights into the management of social issues in supply chains

channel coordination and profit distribution in a social responsible three layer supply chain abstract this paper analyzes coordination of a manufacturer distributer retailer supply chain where the manufacturer exhibits corporate social responsibility csr in manufacturer stackelberg game setting the paper proposes a contract bargaining process to resolve channel conflict and to distribute surplus profit among the channel members the contract bargaining process consists of two wholesale price discount nash bargaining one between the distributer and the retailer based on the outcome of that between the distributer and the manufacturer although the contract bargaining process cuts out channel conflict and distributes surplus profit the wholesale prices are quite different from those of a pure profit maximizing supply chain the wholesale price of the manufacturer is less than its marginal production cost above a threshold of csr even it is negative for the manufacturer s heavy csr practice so the manufacturer s profit may be negative the behavior of the wholesale price of the distributer is same as that of the manufacturer but for higher threshold of csr

explaining male wage inequality in the philippines non parametric and semiparametric approaches the study examines the roles of experience and education in explaining the increase in wage inequality among philippine male workers between 1988 and 1995 it also provides a methodological approach to the analysis of wage inequality by combining non parametric methods with semiparametric additive models using the variance accounting framework non parametric density estimators allow flexibility in dealing with distributional inference while additive models yield marginal effects estimates under minimal assumptions on the functional specification of the wage schooling and wage experience relationships the results show that much of the inequality increase from 1988 to 1995 was caused by greater variabilities in returns to schooling and experience among 1995 workers the rise of the p90 p10 percentile ratio was caused by greater return variabilities on schooling and experience in the 90th percentile

pricing and green level decisions of a green supply chain with governmental interventions under fuzzy uncertainties abstract environmental issues make green manufacturing become inevitable and fuzzy uncertainty prevails in supply chain management in order to further promote the development of green supply chain according to channel leadership scenario we develop three game models of a green supply chain with governmental interventions under fuzzy uncertainties of both manufacturing cost and consumer demand we study how prices green levels and expected profits are influenced by channel leadership and governmental interventions green level sensitivity and fuzzy degree of parameters are considered analytical results indicate that manufacturer stackelberg scenario is the inferior structure than other scenarios and retailer stackelberg scenario is superior to other scenarios for all players under the strong governmental interventions then when governmental interventions increase the green level will increase but the tendency of retail price depends on channel leadership governmental interventions are not always beneficial to the green supply chain and the manufacturer further although the government s subsidy is offered to the manufacturer the retailer benefits from it ultimately and further becomes the main puller of the development of green products in addition a relatively high green level floor for subsidy results in the manufacturer s first mover disadvantage

impact of income growth and economic reform on nutrition availability in urban china 1986 2000 abstract urban china has experienced rapid income growth over the past 20 years however nutrition availability for the poor declined in the 1990s does this imply a zero or negative income elasticity using a large representative urban sample of repeated cross sectional data for the period 1986 2000 we find that income elasticities of calorie availability are far from zero and the lower the income level the higher the income elasticity the main reason for the reduction in calorie availability in the early 1990s was a sharp increase in food prices afterward calorie availability for the above medium income groups stabilized and then increased for the low income groups calorie availability continued to decline which may be related to the large scale social welfare reform that increased households need to pay for nonfood necessities such as education medical and housing expenses

integrated markup rules for optimal pricing decisions in expanding markets for organic produce in expanding markets firms face uncertainty about demand response to changing conditions and the appropriate pricing response inclusion of retail demand factors in explaining markup decisions by wholesalers is crucial to accurate evaluation of the effects of price and market changes on profitability we apply an integrated demand and markup model to markets for organic broccoli and carrots where wholesalers set markups facing retail demand the estimated integrated system includes crossequation restrictions on organic and conventional prices received from retail publicity about food safety scares and availability of a competing certification programme the results show that organic wholesalers behave strategically in response to observable demand factors as they expand into fresh produce markets wholesalers arbitrage markups across items to increase market share combining crop specific and overall market information to decide on appropriate responses wholesalers also attempt to moderate markups in r

modeling conditional yield densities given the increasing interest in agricultural risk many have sought improved methods to characterize conditional crop yield densities while most have postulated the beta as a flexible alternative to the normal others have chosen nonparametric methods unfortunately yield data tends not to be sufficiently abundant to invalidate many reasonable parametric models this is problematic because conclusions from economic analyses which require estimated conditional yield densities tend not to be invariant to the modeling assumption we propose a semiparametric estimator that because of its theoretical properties and our simulation results enables one to empirically proceed with a higher degree of confidence copyright 2003 oxford university press

snow removal auctions in montreal costs informational rents and procurement management using semiparametric and nonparametric estimation techniques we infer cost distributions and informational rents from 457 snow removal contracts o ered for tender by the city of montreal our results are compatible with standard received theory of competitive auctions there is a positive correlation between costs and bids and rents increase with the variance of costs bids and costs have decreased over the sample period while rents remained relatively constant the city deserves credit for these results as it has succeeded in exploiting economies of scale and triggering innovations while maintaining competition further it has been successful in adjusting its reserve prices to keep up with the decreasing cost of snow removal

the growth of family farms in hungary the article investigates the validity of gibrat s law for hungarian family farms using fadn data collected between 2001 and 2007 gibrat s law states that the growth rate of firms will be independent of their initial size regression results allow us to reject gibrat s law for all quantiles evidence suggests that smaller farms tend to grow faster than larger ones results do not support the hypothesis of disappearing middle in hungarian agriculture we study a number of socio economic factors that can help to explain farm growth we find that total subsidies received by a farm and the farm operator s age are the most significant factors correlated with farm growth

how well do children insure parents against low retirement income an analysis using survey data from urban china abstract as population aging becomes more pronounced in the developing world the uneven implementation of social safety nets raises important questions as to how well traditional family based mechanisms insure elderly incomes when pension systems fail using a unique dataset from a recent household survey conducted in urban china we find evidence that private transfers respond to low household income of retired workers when income falls below the poverty line this finding is consistent with an altruistic motive for transfers at low levels of household income at the same time however the transfer response to elderly pre transfer income is not sufficient to fully cover shortfalls that arise with severe pension arrears and low retirement income

marginal income tax rates in the united states a non parametric approach abstract the objective of this paper is to estimate both the u s federal marginal income tax rate and the state and local marginal income tax rates we use the non parametric regression method and data on income and tax extracted from u s individual tax model files for the period 1985 1995 the flexibility of the non parametric approach and the information at the individual level enable us to construct a more reliable time series of the average federal marginal income tax rates and that of the average state and local marginal income tax rates our results suggest that the average federal marginal income tax rate varies from 18 2 to 21 8 and the average state and local marginal income tax rate varies from 4 7 to 5 6 we also find that the state and local income tax accounts for roughly 18 of the total income taxes paid during 1985 1995 moreover our analysis shows that stephenson journal of monetary economics 41 1998 pp 389 409 provides the most consistent tax rate series for use in applications that require estimates of tax rates for years prior to 1985

individual firm and market dynamics of csr activities this paper investigates how firms should plan corporate social responsibility short csr this dynamic analysis starts with a firm s intertemporal optimization problem and proceeds to analyze interactions with other firms which are crucial if csr is profitable for firm a then it is most likely also profitable for competitors b and c and these simultaneous decisions affect the gain each would achieve from trying to advance its own position we find that multiple equilibria exist irrespective of whether interactions with other firms are taken into account interactions can eliminate or create additional steady states and can lead to a situation in which history is insufficient to determine the long run outcome among multiple steady states so that coordination is beneficial

supply and demand factors for organic produce although the organic produce industry is growing dramatically little is known about market structure we estimate a system of reduced form equations to evaluate supply and demand factors that influence equilibrium farm price and quantity in wholesale markets for organic broccoli carrots and lettuce in the long run demand factors dominate supply factors reduced wholesaling costs increased margins by which organic wholesale price exceeds nonorganic price and higher consumer income stimulate both farm price and output increasing the nonorganic farm price decreases equilibrium quantity of organics market expansion strategies should target consumers and wholesalers

sustainable sc through the complete reprocessing of end of life products by manufacturers a traditional versus social responsibility company perspective abstract every item produced transported used and discarded within a supply chain sc generates costs and creates an impact on the environment the increase of forward flows as effects of market globalization and reverse flows due to legislation warranty recycling and disposal activities affect the ability of a modern sc to be economically and environmentally sustainable in this context the study considers an innovative sustainable closed loop sc problem it first introduces a linear programming model that aims to minimize the total sc costs environmental sustainability is guaranteed by the complete reprocessing of an end of life product the re use of components the disposal of unusable parts sent directly from the manufacturers with a closed loop transportation system that maximizes transportation efficiency secondly the authors consider the problem by means of a parametrical study by analyzing the economical sustainability of the proposed clsc model versus the classical forward supply chain model fwsc from two perspectives case 1 the traditional company perspective where the sc ends at the customers and the disposal costs are not included in the sc and case 2 the social responsibility company perspective where the disposal costs are considered within the sc the relative impact of the different variables in the sc structure and the applicability of the proposed model in terms of total costs sc structure and social responsibility are investigated thoroughly and the results are reported at the conclusion of the paper

nash equilibrium with mark up pricing oligopolists abstract if business managers formulate strategies in terms of mark ups then it is natural to think they will think of their rivals actions in these terms for a market characterized by constant elasticity of demand and supply the mark up equilibrium is derived and compared with the traditional monopoly cournot and perfectly competitive equilibria we also compute the revenue as strategy equilibria

distributional effects of general population prescription drug programs in canada canadian household prescription drug expenditures are studied using the statistics canada family expenditure survey masterfiles for periods that include the introduction of provincial general population prescription drug programs budget shares for non senior households are examined over time using non parametric regres sion parametric difference in difference techniques and quantile regression methods the evidence suggests that while program effects are muted when there are high deductibles a non senior prescription drug subsidy is more redistributive than an equal cost proportional income transfer in part because of differential private health insurance coverage by income this is in contrast to previous evidence on canadian senior prescription drug subsidies jel classification 118 j42

the effects of the gender of children on expenditure patterns in rural china a semiparametric analysis we analyse expenditure patterns for rural china focusing on differences between families with boys and girls the sample includes more than 5000 nuclear families from 19 chinese provinces following the existing literature we estimate engel curves for food and for alcohol a typical adult good we use a flexible partially linear specification and allow for endogeneity of total expenditures the results are similar to those of other studies not providing much evidence of gender differentials we then focus on the decision to send a child to school and on the budget share spent on educational goods using both parametric and semiparametric estimates we find evidence that boys are more often sent to school and that expenditures on a boy that goes to school are larger than for a school going girl of the same age copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

urbanization and co2 emissions a semi parametric panel data analysis this paper investigates the relationship between urbanization and co2 emissions in a sample of 20 emerging countries over the period 1992 2008 using the semi parametric panel data model with fixed effects proposed by baltagi and li 2002 we find little evidence in support of an inverted u curve and thus the kuznets hypothesis is not confirmed by our analysis our findings shed new light on the urbanization co2 emissions nexus

supply chain networks with corporate financial risks and trade credits under economic uncertainty abstract the focus of this paper is to provide an analytical framework which can be used to investigate how financial risks affect the values of interconnected supply chain firms from a network perspective and how financial risks affect the supply chain firms profitability as well as the cash and credit transactions in particular we develop a variational inequality equilibrium model in conjunction with capital asset pricing model capm and the net present value npv to determine the optimal supply chain prices profits and implicit equity values of supply chain firms under financial risks and economic uncertainty we illustrate the analytical framework with computational studies which yield interesting managerial implications to the following questions 1 how do financial risks and economic uncertainty affect the values of interconnected supply chain firms from a network perspective 2 how do financial risks and economic uncertainty affect the supply chain firms profitability as well as the cash and credit transactions 3 how does the effect of financial risks change under different competition scenarios

average crop revenue election a revenue based alternative to price based commodity payment programs this article develops a stochastic model of the average crop revenue election acre program which offers revenue based commodity payments under the 2008 farm act our analysis shows that adding acre revenue payments to gross revenue reduces downside revenue risk for corn wheat and soybean farmers in 2009 on average by 16 21 and 23 respectively results indicate that farms with higher expected yields and lower variance of yields tend to benefit the most from acre integrating federal crop insurance with acre lowers insurance premiums from 10 to 40 depending on the crop and location

unconditional quantile regressions wage growth and inequality in the philippines 2001 2006 the contribution of covariates i implement a two stage procedure to estimate the components of real wage change in the philippines along the wage distribution from 2001 to 2006 as well as the contribution of individual covariates to each component the methodology is based on re centred influence functions rif as suggested by firpo et al 2009 the advantage of this methodology is that it not only decomposes the unconditional wage change at any quantile of the wage distribution but also allows the characterization of the contribution of any single covariate on each component i find that real earnings of males in the philippines declined and the decline along the earnings distribution is generally higher at higher deciles for all males and higher at lower deciles in manila decomposition results are driven by the wage structure component while the composition effect is small and generally positive with education as the main contributor within the wage structure effect the main determinants are associated with changes in the r

risk and the value of bt corn a conceptual model is developed to evaluate the effect of bt corn on risk results highlight the importance of distinguishing between marginal and aggregate risk effects and demonstrate that the effect of bt corn on risk depends crucially on the price paid for the technology empirical results show that depending on the price bt corn can be marginally risk increasing or decreasing and can either increase or decrease corn acreage also depending on the price bt corn can provide a risk benefit to farmers even when bt corn is risk increasing bt corn is genetically engineered to produce a protein found in the soil bacterium bacillus thuringiensis bt the protein is toxic to lepidopterous insects such as the european

decomposing changes in wage distributions a unified approach over the last fifteen years many researchers have attempted to explain the determinants and changes of wage inequality i propose a simple procedure to decompose changes in the distribution of wages or in other distributions into three factors changes in regression coefficients the distribution of covariates and residuals the procedure requires only estimating standard ols regressions augmented by a logit or probit model it can be extended by modelling residuals as a function of unmeasured skills and skill prices two empirical examples showing how the procedure works in practice are considered in the first example sources of differences in the wage distribution in alberta and british columbia are considered in the second sources of change in overall wage inequality in the united states 1973 99 are re examined finally the proposed procedure is compared with existing procedures jel classification j3 la decomposition des changements dans les distributions de salaires une approche unifee au cours des quinze dernieres annees nombre d etudes se sont penchees sur les determinants et les changements de la distribution des salaires ce memoire propose une procedure pour decomposer les changements de la distribution des salaires en trois elements les changements dans les coefficients de regression la distribution des regresseurs et les changements residuels cette procedure ne necessite que l estimation de regressions par moindre carres ordinaires et d un modele probit ou logit l auteur montre aussi comment modeliser les residus en fonction de competences non mesurees la procedure proposee est mise en application dans le contexte de deux exemples la distribution des salaires en alberta et en colombie britannique et les changements dans la distribution des salaires de 1973 a 1999 aux etats unis le memoire examine aussi comment cette procedure se compare aux methodes proposees par d autres chercheurs

testing day s conjecture that more nitrogen decreases crop yield skewness whilecontroversysurroundsskewnessattributesoftypicalyielddistributions abetterunderstandingis importantforagriculturalpolicyassessmentandforcrop insuranceratesetting day 1965 conjectured that crop yield skewness declines with an increase in nitrogen use at low levels but not at higher levels employing four corn yield experimental plot datasets we investigate the conjecture by introducing a a flexible bayesian extension of the just pope technology to incorporate skewness and b a quantilebased measure of skewness shift bayesian estimation provides strong evidence in favor of negative skewnessatcommercialnitrogenratesandforday sconjecture therewasweakerevidenceinfavorof positively skewed cotton yield and little evidence in favor of the conjecture the results are confirmed by the quantile based measure we also find evidence that skewness becomes more negative upon moving from corn after corn to corn after soybean

a likelihood approach to estimating market equilibrium models this paper develops a new likelihood based method for the simultaneous estimation of structural demand and supply models for markets with differentiated products we specify an individual level discrete choice model of demand and derive the supply side assuming manufacturers compete in prices the proposed estimation method considers price endogeneity through simultaneous estimation of demand and supply allows for consumer heterogeneity and incorporates a pricing rule consistent with economic theory the basic idea behind the proposed estimation procedure is to simulate prices and choice probabilities by solving for the market equilibrium by repeating this many times we obtain an empirical distribution of equilibrium prices and probabilities the empirical distribution is then smoothed and used in a likelihood procedure to estimate the parameters of the model the advantage of this method is that it avoids the need to perform a transformation of variables if the tastes of consumers are independent across market periods our approach yields maximum likelihood estimates otherwise it yields consistent but not fully efficient partial likelihood estimates

do households prefer small school districts a natural experiment author affiliation h spencer banzhaf hsbanzhaf gsu edugarima bhalla gbhalla live unc edu acknowledgment we thank rajashri chakrabarti rob fleck jason fletcher john pepper jesse rothstein holger sieg david sjoquist todd sorensen christiana stoddard randall walsh anonymous referees and participants of a session at the 2006 southern economic association meetings and seminars at montana state university and the university of pittsburgh for valuable comments 1 introductionperennial discontent with the quality of public education in the united states is a constant motivation for new educational reforms one potential reform is to break up large urban school districts into smaller districts 1 this proposal emerges from two lines of logic first large districts may suffer from substantial diseconomies of scale a recent review of the evidence concludes that diseconomies may emerge in districts with as few as 15 000 students andrews duncombe and yinger 2002 see also barrow and rouse 2004 and duncombe miner and ruggiero 2005 by comparison the urban districts of new york city los angeles and chicago handle as many as 1 1 million 727 000 and 421 000 students respectively a second line of logic is that breaking up large school districts would provide more choice for households in particular the smaller districts may be differentiated horizontally with some emphasizing math others reading others specific extra curricular courses and so forth since smaller districts can respond better to parental input these differences can reflect local tastes additionally the new districts would have to compete with one another for students enhancing their incentive to improve their performance borland and howsen 1992 hoxby 2000 hanushek and rivkin 2003 sandstrom and bergstrom 2005 these reforms are subject to a market test following the logic of tiebout 1956 households should respond to exogenous changes in public goods by voting with their feet that is moving into improving communities and bidding up prices 2 consequently if households perceive that decentralizing large school districts is desirable for any of these reasons we would expect the ceteris paribus demand for housing to increase in school districts undergoing such reforms relative to nearby substitutes this article examines just such a market test studying the effect on local real estate markets surrounding the april 2000 breakup of the los angeles unified school district lausd into 11 subdistricts this breakup was only partial insofar as official authority remained vested in a single school board nevertheless the breakup delegated substantial power to a more local level creating 11 new superintendents and devolving authority over educational policy and curricula to the new subdistricts we employ a difference in differences hedonic methodology comparing changes in real estate prices before and after the breakup announcement within the lausd area to price changes in nearby districts our approach has three distinct advantages first the october 1999 announcement of the breakup plan was abrupt and surprising and was swiftly followed by official passage in april 2000 because the announcement was so abrupt and so well covered by the media we have an excellent proxy for households expectations and it is expectations after all that govern market behavior our proxies for expectations are based on the announcement date the implementation date and in some models an index of newspaper coverage second few of the benefits of the reform would be likely to spill over into other school districts making the lausd border a sharp boundary defining relevant control groups third the lausd area is not coextensive with the city of los angeles but rather includes some 24 cities this implies that any other potentially confounding political events over the period would affect real estate markets in only a portion of the lausd rather than the whole area a possibility that we can test

public versus private production and economies of scale the cost of producing the same good often differs substantially for public and private producers we investigate the effect of organization in a case where the production technology is simple the cleaning of danish schools three forms of organization are used decentral municipal central municipal or private for small schools the organizational form has little impact on cost for larger schools decentral municipal production is the most expensive on average centralization reduces costs by 5 while privatization reduces costs by 30 similar cost differences are reported in the literature for other cases but it is a new result that the cost differences are due to economies of scale public choice theories predict that cost differences are due to ownership or competition we find evidence that both theories help explain the cost differences

the effects of drug subsidies on out of pocket prescription drug expenditures by seniors regional evidence from canada abstract between 1970 and 1986 all canadian provinces introduced some version of a prescription drug subsidy for those aged 65 years or over and since 1986 all the provinces have increased copayments or deductibles to some degree employing a first order approximation to the welfare gains from a subsidy we find evidence that these subsidies have been less redistributive than an absolute per household cash transfer but slightly more redistributive than a transfer that would increase each household s income by the same percentage such evidence may have relevance for predicting the redistributive effects of a potential national prescription drug plan for seniors in the us

using repayment data to test across models of joint liability lending theories rationalising joint liability lending are rich in implications for repayment rates we exploit this fact to test four diverse models we show that the models repayment implications do not always coincide for example higher correlation of output and borrowers ability to act cooperatively can raise or lower repayment depending on the model data from thai borrowing groups suggest that repayment is affected negatively by the joint liability rate ceteris paribus and social ties and positively by the strength of local sanctions and correlated returns further the relative fit of the adverse selection versus informal sanctions models varies by region

understanding different migrant selection patterns in rural and urban mexico abstract the productive characteristics of migrating individuals emigrant selection affect welfare the empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally representative data this paper uses a dataset that addresses both issues the enet mexican labor survey which identifies emigrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non migrants this dataset presents a relevant dichotomy it shows negative selection for urban mexican emigrants to the united states for the period 2000 2004 together with positive selection in mexican emigration out of rural mexico to the united states in the same period three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested whereas higher skill prices in mexico than in the us are enough to explain half of the negative selection result in urban mexico its combination with network effects and wealth constraints fully accounts for positive selection in rural mexico

a new measure of horizontal equity in this paper we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures our starting point is the observation that a well behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global vertical equity differences in after tax income using the same weights it applies to local horizontal equity differences even though this constraint has been applied in the past following work on the structure of individual preferences we show that a social welfare function can imply different preferences toward horizontal and vertical equity adopting the general approach to the measurement of inequality developed by atkinson 1970 we use such a social welfare function to derive measures of inequality that are decomposable into components naturally interpreted as indices of horizontal and vertical equity in particular the former index measures deviations from the fundamental principle that equals be treated equally finally we apply our new measure to two tax return data sets evaluating the degree to which the horizontal equity of the us personal income tax has changed over time and how horizontal equity would be altered by one version of recent proposals to do away with the so called marriage penalty this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

supply chain network equilibrium with strategic financial hedging using futures abstract in this paper we develop a network equilibrium model for supply chain networks with strategic financial hedging we consider multiple competing firms that purchase multiple materials and parts to manufacture their products the supply chain firms procurement activities are exposed to commodity price risk and exchange rate risk the firms can use futures contracts to hedge the risks our research studies the equilibrium of the entire network where each firm optimizes its own operation and hedging decisions we use variational inequality theory to formulate the equilibrium model and provide qualitative properties we provide analytical results for a special case with duopolistic competition and use simulations to study an oligopolistic case the analytical and simulation studies reveals interesting managerial insights

increasing wage dispersion and the changes in relative employment and wages in mexico s urban informal sector 1987 1993 this study analyses the role of changes in informal formal relative employment wage levels and wage inequality in explaining increasing wage dispersion in mexico during the 1987 1993 period from 1987 to 1993 the variance of the log of hourly wages for mexican workers increased by more than 50 per cent using data from the encuesta nacional de empleo urbano we find that this increase in the overall wage dispersion was mainly driven by increasing wage dispersion in the formal sector coupled with a faster growth in formal sector employment as a percentage of total employment however compression in the distribution of wages within the informal sector contributed to substantially slowdown the increasing overall wage inequality about 60 per cent of the 1987 1993 4 65 percentage point reduction in the informal sector share of total employment is explained by changes in the structure that determines sectoral employment the rest is explained by changes in the composition of the labour force particularly in

supply chain networks electronic commerce and supply side and demand side risk in this paper we develop a supply chain network model in which both physical and electronic transactions are allowed and in which supply side risk as well as demand side risk are included in the formulation the model consists of three tiers of decision makers the manufacturers the distributors and the retailers with the demands associated with the retail outlets being random we model the optimizing behavior of the various decision makers with the manufacturers and the distributors being multicriteria decision makers and concerned with both profit maximization and risk minimization we derive the equilibrium conditions and establish the finite dimensional variational inequality formulation we provide qualitative properties of the equilibrium pattern in terms of existence and uniqueness results and also establish conditions under which the proposed computational procedure is guaranteed to converge we illustrate the supply chain network model through several numerical examples for which the equilibrium prices and product shipments are computed this is the first multitiered supply chain network equilibrium model with electronic commerce and with supply side and demand side risk for which modeling qualitative analysis and computational results have been obtained

nonparametric regression techniques in economics this introduction to nonparametric regression emphasizes techniques that might be most accessible and useful to the applied economist the paper begins with a brief overview of the class of models under study and central theoretical issues such as the curse of dimensionality the bias variance trade off and rates of convergence the paper then focuses on kernel and nonparametric least squares estimation of the nonparametric regression model and optimal differencing estimation of the partial linear model constrained estimation and hypothesis testing is also discussed empirical examples include returns to scale in electricity distribution and hedonic pricing of housing attributes

coordination of social responsibility and order quantity in a two echelon supply chain a collaborative decision making perspective abstract regarding globalization growing trend and sustainability concerns the need for paying attention to the issues of corporate social responsibility csr not only applies to individual firms but also extends to the whole supply chain sc networks assisting csr issues in one individual firm will thoroughly influence other supply chain members in this paper a supplier retailer sc is considered in a newsvendor setting it is possible for the supplier to invest in csr activities which could improve the popularity of products and subsequently market demand firstly both members decisions under decentralized and centralized decision making models are investigated afterwards a novel collaborative model is proposed to determine optimal order quantity and csr investment thus maximizing the whole sc profits and also motivating members to participate finally the results of decentralized centralized and collaborative models are compared and some managerial insights are provided numerical experiments indicate that under some circumstances alongside the increment of sc profits more csr investment and better csr performance level will be achieved through the collaborative model than other decision making structures

corporate social responsibility and corporate governance role of context in international settings this research aims to explore the relationship between corporate governance and csr what are the major factors that play a direct role in the establishment of this relationship how does context and institutional background impact upon the relationship between csr and governance using in depth semi structured interviews from two types of governance systems in three countries over three years this study has demonstrated that in practice within different settings csr is being used both as a strategy as well as a reaction to different drivers we call this adaptive governance where governance can be defined as a flexible system of action incorporating strategic and monitoring activities that determines the way a company enacts its responsibilities to its shareholders and stakeholders and which is determined at any given time by the interrelationship of institutional drivers and behavioural norms governance systems and their interrelationships with csr are demonstrated as fluid according to the national and institutional context economic situation and industry impact in the eyes of practitioners corporate governance includes both structural and behavioural factors as well as responsibilities and actions towards shareholders and stakeholders contextual factors that this research highlights to be important to the incorporation of csr into governance include the economic environment national governance system regulation and soft law shareholders national culture behavioural norms and industry impacts hypotheses on the impact of institutional contexts industry impacts and economic situations on different types of csr actions are proposed for further research

empirical age earnings profiles the human capital earnings function in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics in spite of its widespread acceptance the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience the standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30 50 and overstates midcareer growth by 20 50 however simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available

thresholds in the process of international financial integration abstract the financial crisis has re ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth especially for developing countries the empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration indeed a new literature proposes that the indirect benefits of financial integration may be more important than the traditional financing channel emphasized in previous analyses a major complication however is that there seem to be certain threshold levels of financial and institutional development that an economy needs to attain before it can derive the indirect benefits and reduce the risks of financial openness in this paper we develop a unified empirical framework for characterizing such threshold conditions we find that there are clearly identifiable thresholds in variables such as financial depth and institutional quality the cost benefit trade off from financial openness improves significantly once these threshold conditions are satisfied we also find that the thresholds are lower for foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities compared to those for debt liabilities

calvin s restrictions on interest guidelines for the credit crisis calvin s view on the legitimacy of interest has had a great impact on the economic development of western society although calvin took a fundamentally positive attitude to interest he also proposed several restrictions on the charging of interest in this article we investigate the relevance of these restrictions to the current credit crisis we find that each of them provides a relevant interpretation of what went wrong in the buildup of the credit crisis and gives directions to improve policies of banks and governments as well

scale economies in electricity distribution a semiparametric analysis we estimate the costs of distributing electricity using data on municipal electric utilities in ontario canada for the period 1993 5 the data reveal substantial evidence of increasing returns to scale with minimum efficient scale being achieved by firms with about 20 000 customers larger firms exhibit constant or decreasing returns utilities which deliver additional services such as water sewage have significantly lower costs indicating the presence of economies of scope our basic specifications comprise semiparametric variants of the translog cost function where output enters non parametrically and remaining variables including their interactions with output are parametric we rely upon non parametric differencing techniques and extend a previous differencing test of equality of non parametric regression functions to a panel data setting copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

dynamics of supply chain networks with corporate social responsibility through integrated environmental decision making in this paper we develop a dynamic framework for the modeling and analysis of supply chain networks with corporate social responsibility through integrated environmental decision making through a multilevel supply chain network we model the multicriteria decision making behavior of the various decision makers manufacturers retailers and consumers which includes the maximization of profit the minimization of emission waste and the minimization of risk we explore the dynamic evolution of the product flows the associated product prices as well as the levels of social responsibility activities on the network until an equilibrium pattern is achieved we provide some qualitative properties of the dynamic trajectories under suitable assumptions and propose a discrete time algorithm which is then applied to track the evolution of the levels of social responsibility activities product flows and prices over time we illustrate the model and computational procedure with several numerical examples

social issues in supply chains capabilities link responsibility risk opportunity and performance abstract social issues in the supply chain are defined as product or process related aspects of operations that affect human safety welfare and community development drawing from related literatures basic constructs related to capabilities and risk are defined and used to underpin case research in five multinational firms this data extended our understanding of three key social management capabilities monitoring collaboration and innovation moreover the field research revealed four key linkages that detail how managers actively can work toward mitigating social risks creating new opportunities and improving firm performance collectively these capabilities and linkages establish the basis for an integrative framework and five research propositions

nonparametric efficiency estimation in stochastic environments this paper develops a new nonparametric model for efficiency estimation in contrast to data envelopment analysis dea it does not impose debatable production assumptions like free disposability and convexity and it does not assume that the data are measured without error the estimators are asymptotically unbiased and have an asymptotic variance that is comparable to that of stochastic frontier estimators provided the latter use a correct specification of the functional form for the production relationships in addition the estimators can be computed using a simple enumeration algorithm

the second engel law is it a paradox abstract the second engel law says that the engel curve for food moves out as family size increases thus showing a decrease in welfare what is puzzling though is that this regularity does not hold for equivalent income functions expressed in per capita terms deaton and paxon 1998 economies of scale household size and the demand for food journal of political economy 106 5 897 930 show that holding per capita total household expenditure constant per capita expenditure on food falls with the number of heads deaton and paxson s empirical evidence from developed and less developed countries seems to invalidate the claim of the second engel s law the main objective of this paper is to understand such paradoxical relationship between food consumption and household size our nonparametric empirical evidence drawn from the colombian 1985 urban survey shows that the food share is negatively related to total household per capita expenditure in line with deaton and paxson s claim but equivalent incomes shift to the right as theory predicts the regularity of our nonparametric results is an indication of a problem in the parametric specification of the engel curve modified by family size in fact using also the surveys of italy nepal djibouti and bangladesh we show that a theoretically plausible modified engel curve is coherent with the claim of the second engel law and explains deaton and paxson s paradox

economies of scale and gender discrimination in transition the case of the republic of tajikistan this article tests for economies of scale and for evidence of discrimination based on gender lines in intra household consumption allocations using data from the living standards survey in the republic of tajikistan tlss overall results support the existence of household economies of scale in tajikistan however empirical evidence supporting boy girl discrimination is limited despite anecdotal evidence otherwise

the effects of cognitive ability and high school quality on college entry decisions nonparametric estimation of parameters of interest the decisions to attend college are analysed and nonparametric predictions compared to those obtained from the widely used logit model the impacts of measured cognitive ability and proxies for high school quality on the decisions to attend college are examined for a sample of white and black males and females from the usa two different parameters of interest which isolate the effects of ability and high school quality on college entry decisions are described and estimated by integrating out the effect of other covariates it is found that measured cognitive ability is an extremely important determinant of college entry for all race and gender groups at the same point in the ability distribution blacks are more likely to select into college than whites and females more likely than males of the same racial group proxies for high school quality such as teacher education student teacher ratios school enrolment and library size are shown to have little or no effects on the likelihood of college entry

exploring the effects of social responsibility on coordination and profit division in a supply chain abstract this paper explores channel coordination and profit division in a socially responsible manufacturer retailer chain through sub game perfect equilibrium and extended alternative offer bargaining the channel members jointly intend to swell stakeholder s welfare by exhibiting corporate social responsibility csr in a proportion it is found that i the channel s non profit maximizing motive through csr practice generates higher profit margin than would the profit maximizing objective ii the manufacturer s wholesale price is below its marginal cost or negative above some thresholds of csr and csr sharing fraction iii the csr and csr sharing fractions are key determining factors for the pure profits of the channel members because variations in choosing these two factors can lead to increment or decrement even negative pure profits on the other hand for the csr manufacturer the wholesale price is less than the marginal cost for csr practice above a threshold and is negative for heavy csr practice though always larger than the marginal cost for the csr retailer so the manufacturer s pure profit may be negative moreover a channel member always prefers the other s csr practice thus in cooperative environment equitable share of csr may be a compromise solution

nonparametric and semiparametric methods for economic research abstract developments in the vast and growing literatures on nonparametric and semiparametric statistical estimation are reviewed the emphasis is on useful methodology rather than statistical properties for their own sake some empirical applications to economic data are described the paper deals separately with nonparametric density estimation nonparametric regression estimation and estimation of semiparametric models

the essential economics of threshold based incentives theory estimation and evidence from the western states 100 abstract many public and private entities utilize incentive systems in which improvements in measured performance are rewarded only when the agent crosses some pre specified threshold this paper comprehensively analyzes the effects of these incentive systems on effort the net benefits of effort and the accuracy of information about agents performance and lays out methods for estimating each these methods are then used to reveal the motivations physiological limits and racing strategy of ultramarathoners trying to complete a one hundred mile race in under twenty four hours

estimating the benefits of targeted r d subsidies we study the expected welfare effects of targeted r d subsi dies using project level data from finland we model the application and r d investment decisions of firms and the subsidy granting decision of the public agency in charge of the program our model and institutional environment allow us to identify different benefits and costs of the r d subsidy program we find that expected effects of subsidies are very het erogeneous and estimated application costs low on average the social rate of return on targeted subsidies is 30 to 50 but spillover effects of subsidies are smaller than effects on firm profits

parametric and semiparametric model representations of the conditional mean of wages do they make a difference against nonparametric ones this study is concerned with the validation of parametric functional representations of the conditional mean of wages using philippine data this is done in the light of studies confirming relative

nonparametric estimation of exact consumers surplus and deadweight loss we apply nonparametric regression models to estimation of demand curves of the type most often used in applied research from the demand curve estimators we derive estimates of exact consumers surplus and deadweight loss which are the most widely used welfare and economic efficiency measures in areas of economics such as public finance we also develop tests of the symmetry and downward sloping properties of compensated demand we work out asymptotic normal sampling theory for kernel and series nonparametric estimators as well as for the parametric case the paper includes an application to gasoline demand empirical questions of interest here are the shape of the demand curve and the average magnitude of welfare loss from a tax on gasoline in this application we compare parametric and nonparametric estimates of the demand curve calculate exact and approximate measures of consumers surplus and deadweight loss and give standard error estimates we also analyze the sensitivity of the welfare measures to components of nonparametric regression estimators such as the number of terms in a series approximation

automobile prices in market equilibrium with unobserved price discrimination in markets where sellers are able to price discriminate or the buyers to bargain individuals receive discounts over the posted prices that are usually not observed by the econometrician this paper considers the structural estimation of a demand and supply model a la berry et al 1995 when only posted prices are observed we consider that heterogeneous discounts occur due to price discrimination by firms on observable characteristics of consumers within this framework identification is achieved by assuming that the marginal costs of producing and selling the goods do not depend on the characteristics of the buyers we also require a condition relating the posted prices to the prices actually paid for instance we can assume that at least one group of individuals pays the posted prices under these two conditions the demand and supply parameters as well as the exact discounts corresponding to each type of consumers can be identified we apply our methodology to estimate the demand and supply in the new automobile market in france results suggest that discounting arising from price discrimination is important the average discount is estimated to be 10 5 with large variation depending on the buyers characteristics and cars specifications our results are in line with discounts generally observed in european and american automobile markets

multiperiod effects of corporate social responsibility on supply chain networks transaction costs emissions and risk abstract this paper develops a framework for the analysis of the optimal levels of corporate social responsibility csr activities in a multiperiod supply chain network consisting of manufacturers retailers and consumers manufacturers and retailers determine their production quantities transaction quantities and the amount of social responsibility activities they want to pursue that maximize net return minimize emission and minimize risk over the planning horizon we investigate the interplay of the heterogeneous decision makers and compute the equilibrium pattern of product outputs transactions prices and levels of social responsibility activities the paper provides insights concerning the optimal allocation of resources to csr activities when considering a multiperiod time frame

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