economic efficiency effects of alternative policies for reducing waste disposal abstract reducing the amount of municipal solid waste that is disposed of has become an important policy goal previous research argued that a virgin material tax offered an efficient method of meeting this goal and it continues to be considered as a policy option today this paper demonstrates however that a virgin material tax is not an efficient method of reducing waste but that an alternative policy a combined disposal tax and reuse subsidy is the combined disposal tax and reuse subsidy is theoretically consistent with unit based household charges for waste disposal but may have advantages in some situations

scrap prices waste and recycling policy this study examines the effect of waste and recycling policy on scrap prices and the importance of scrap price feedbacks as a determinant of policy costs price effects and direct and indirect channels of waste reduction are decomposed for deposit refund advance disposal fee and recycling subsidies scrap price feedbacks decrease the cost of advance disposal fees increase the cost of recycling subsidies and have an ambiguous effect on the cost of deposit refund simulation analysis finds that scrap price feedbacks substantially affect the costs of the policies and alter the ranking of instruments jel q53 q58

efficient policies for green design in a vintage durable good model using a dynamic durable good model we investigate efficiency restoring policy schemes in case of free garbage disposal in the long run efficiency is attained by a subsidy on recyclability of the durable and a tax on the purchase of the durable on the short run adjustment path in contrast both policy instruments may change their signs such that the government harms recyclability by taxing it and promotes the demand for the durable good by subsidizing it a deposit refund system is shown to yield the efficient allocation both in the short run as well as in the long run

gender as a determinant of small business performance insights from a british study the performance of small businesses that is the ability of small firms to contribute to job and wealth creation through business start up survival and growth has been an important area of policy and academic debate in the 1980s surprisingly little has been written about gender and small business performance our literature search revealed only a small number of studies of any substance on this subject though over forty made some mention of it most studies shied away from direct examination of quantitative performance measures such as jobs created sales turnover annual growth tending to concentrate on qualitative measures of success or failure the paper examines small business performance and gender using data obtained from a survey of 600 300 women 300 men scottish and english small business ownermanagers part of a three year study on the impact of gender on small business management analyses suggest that the relationship between gender and small business performance is complex but that gender still appears to be a significant determinant even after other key factors are controlled for

gender differences in firm performance evidence from new ventures in the united states abstract prior studies examining the performance of female and male owned firms have generally reported that female owned firms underperform male owned firms however it is conceivable that the performance measures used by previous studies and or their inability to control for key demographic differences may have contributed to this finding for example few studies use size adjusted performance measures and yet we know that female owned firms tend to be smaller than their male counterparts similarly risk is typically not considered even though evidence suggests that women tend to be more risk averse than men we use a longitudinal five year database of more than 4000 new ventures that began operations in the u s in 2004 to determine whether potential differences in the performances of female and male owned firms disappear when appropriate performance measures are used and important demographic differences are controlled for in the models the performance measures we examine include 4 year closure rates return on assets roa and a risk adjusted measure sharpe ratio univariate test results confirm our expectation based on both liberal and social feminist theory that there is no difference in the performance of female and male owned new ventures provided performance is appropriately measured further these results are supported by our multivariate analyses which control for demographic differences such as industry experience and hours worked our findings should be of interest to researchers financiers advisors and policy makers perhaps more importantly our findings should also ensure that women who are contemplating starting a new venture are not discouraged from doing so by a false belief that new ventures initiated by women are less likely to succeed than those initiated by men

on the dynamics of recycling and natural resources we study the dynamic impact of recycling through its effect on the production set of the economy and its relationship with natural resources the contribution of renewable and recyclable resources for sustainability is studied although in the short run recycling may alleviate resource scarcity in the long run it is not enough to compensate for the exhaustibility of non renewable resources and the possibility of obtaining non decreasing output paths crucially depends on the extent to which production rests on renewable resources furthermore recycling interacts with natural resource growth surprisingly not always favoring sustainability the production and recycling function is a generalization of the traditional production function providing an integrated view of regular production and recycling and representing the production set of the economy when a recycling technology is available

foreign direct investment and investment under uncertainty we show that in uncertain environments ownership and internalization advantages may be negatively rather than positively associated with fdi this reversal from extant theory occurs because ownership advantages often serve to make fdi delayable while internalization advantages often serve to make it less reversible when fdi becomes either more delayable or less reversible it is less likely to occur at a point in time our approach enriches the who where and why explanations offered by current fdi theory to incorporate the question of when

garbage recycling and illicit burning or dumping abstract with garbage and recycling as the only two disposal options we confirm prior results that the optimal curbside fee for garbage collection equals the direct resource cost plus external environment cost when illicit burning or dumping is a third disposal option that cannot be taxed directly the optimal curbside tax on garbage changes sign the optimal fee structure is a deposit refund system a tax on all output plus a rebate on proper disposal through either recycling or garbage collection the output tax helps achieve the first best allocation even though it affects the choice between consumption and untaxed leisure

exhaustible resources and secondary materials a macroeconomic analysis abstract in this paper we have developed an endogenous growth model to deal with exhaustible resources and secondary materials together under the assumptions that these two inputs are or are not technologically perfect substitutes of each other in order to compare the results obtained under both hypotheses we highlight the implication of these two assumptions on the rate of growth of total output and upon the flow of exhaustible resources extracted there are also some other interesting findings related to the spill over on welfare of the waste recycling process and the dynamics of shadow prices of both inputs considered finally some implications on hotelling s rule also emerge in our analytical framework

discontinuance among new firms in retail the influence of initial resources strategy and gender abstract women owned businesses represent one of the fastest growing segments of the u s economy their rate has increased more than six fold since 1970 despite this growth rate the number of firms owned by women still lags behind that of men and the sales and income of women owned firms are significantly lower than those of men owned firms the discrepancy between the number of businesses owned by women and men and their economic success has been a popular theme among researchers some have suggested that performance differentials result from disparate structural positions women and men occupy in work and society whereas others attribute the differences to deep rooted interpersonal orientations this study examines whether the performance differences can be explained by variations in initial resources and founding strategy we test whether women have fewer start up resources and if they do whether they can compensate for these deficiencies through their founding strategy recent work in social psychology argues that strategic choice is shaped by experiences to which individuals have been subjected and that women and men have fundamentally different socialization experiences we test the assumption that if the strategy that women owners adopt exploits the unique capabilities they derive from their socialization they can improve the performance of their firms and ward off discontinuance we examine the discontinuance pattern of 203 new firms in the retail industry this industry was selected because women entrepreneurs often choose to operate in this industry giving us a basis for comparing women owned and men owned firms we classify the firms into six strategy archetypes the arche types range from a broad focus where founders emphasize multiple strategic foci simultaneously to narrowly targeted differentiation strategies we assume that the experiential base of women entrepreneurs limits their successfully executing pricing strategies we hypothesize that women led firms decrease the odds of discontinuing by adopting one of two strategy types 1 narrow differentiation strategies that seek to satisfy a narrow segment of the market and that do not rely on pricing or 2 broad generalists strategies that emphasize service and quality but not pricing and take advantage of women s capability for handling multiple stakeholders simultaneously the results offer support for using an integrative model to explain the performance of women owned firms women owned firms have higher odds of discontinuing than men owned firms and women appear to have fewer resources to start their businesses women owners were less likely to have instrumental experience from working in the retail industry and start their businesses on a smaller scale then men but were no less likely then their male counterparts to have access to credit from formal financial institutions or to be disadvantaged by starting fewer other new businesses despite some apparent situational disadvantage resource deficiencies do not appear to affect the odds of women owned businesses discontinuing as much as they do men owned initiatives the findings indicate support for the supposition that women owners can use founding strategy to decrease the odds of discontinuing business a broad generalists strategy that represents a multi focused approach was found to benefit women owned businesses most overall the results suggest that men use prior business experience and human capital to affect the survival status of their businesses women appear to find strategic choice more beneficial future research is recommended to further elaborate the integrative model special attention should be given to developing alternatives to measures traditionally used in gender research many researchers charge that those typically used reflect male derived measures similarly greater attention should be given to understanding why the scale of women owned businesses at start up is substantially smaller than that of men since scale has been shown to be related to subsequent growth and survival

a comparison of public policies for lead recycling policies that encourage recycling may be used to reduce environmental costs from waste disposal because direct restrictions on disposal are difficult to enforce four recycling policies have been advanced i taxes on the use of virgin materials ii deposit refund programs iii subsidies to recycled material production and iv recycled content standards in this article i analyze the structure of these policies and their cost effectiveness in achieving reductions in disposal i then examine the policies in the empirical context of the recycling of lead from automobile batteries in order to calculate the effects of recycling programs i estimate the elasticities for primary and secondary lead supply and demand my results suggest that price based policy mechanisms can be successful in increasing lead recovery and that the difference in efficiency between the four approaches is similar

knowledge transfer in international acquisitions this paper reports on a multimethod study of knowledge transfer in international acquisitions using questionnaire data we show that the transfer of technological know how is facilitated by communication visits meetings and by time elapsed since acquisition while the transfer of patents is associated with the articulability of the knowledge the size of the acquired unit and the recency of the acquisition using case study data we show that the immediate post acquisition period is characterized by imposed one way transfers of knowledge from the acquirer to the acquired but over time this gives way to high quality reciprocal knowledge transfer

does international harmonization of environmental policy instruments make economic sense harmonization of the instruments used in environmental policy has beenconsidered necessary to guarantee fair competition in internationalmarkets we examine the economic costs of harmonizing paper recyclingstandards in countries where the urgency of the waste disposal problemsdiffer using data of seven european countries we estimate thetechnologically feasible input combinations of pulp and waste paper forpaper production short term effects of two environmental policy measures minimum content requirement and utilization rate target are analyzed bytranslating the two administrative instruments into taxes and subsidies weshow that the shadow costs of the harmonization vary considerably betweencountries the difference in the domestic availability of waste may explainthe variation and a modification of the policy measures to incorporate thisaspect is suggested

women business owners in traditional and non traditional industries abstract small businesses continue to grow in importance to the national economy according to the small business administration america s 22 million small businesses generate more than half of the nation s gross domestic product and are the principal source of new jobs the national foundation for women business owners reported that between 1987 and 1994 the number of women owned businesses grew by 78 and women owned firms accounted for 36 of all firms although the growth in the number of women owned businesses is encouraging the size of such businesses remains small in terms of both revenues and number of employees especially in comparison to male owned businesses one explanation for this disparity is that female business ownership is concentrated primarily in the retail and service industries where businesses are relatively smaller in terms of employment and revenue as opposed to high technology construction and manufacturing one of the most fruitful streams of research in women s occupational choice has been based on social learning theory specifically self efficacy has been found to relate to both type and number of occupations considered by college men and women and with regard to traditional and non traditional occupations entrepreneurship researchers have also used social learning theory to study entrepreneurial intentions this study builds on that background of women s career development and entrepreneurial intentions to examine differences between traditional and non traditional women business owners we examine 170 women business owners in various traditional and non traditional businesses in utah and illinois questionnaires were the primary method of collecting data in addition to 11 in depth interviews from a sample of the survey respondents using a careers perspective based on social learning theory we hypothesized that women in these two different categories of industries would differ on levels of self efficacy toward entrepreneurship or venture efficacy their career expectations and their perceived social support a second analysis was also done that explored the relationship between the same independent variables and success or performance of the business the results offer support for using this integrative model to understand differences between women in traditional and non traditional industries the first analysis revealed that significant differences exist between the two groups on several of the independent variables traditional business owners had higher venture efficacy for opportunity recognition higher career expectations of life balance and security and they reported that the financial support received from others was more important to them than those in non traditional businesses on the other hand the non traditional owners had higher venture efficacy for planning and higher career expectations for money or wealth than the traditional group the second analysis explored whether success as measured by sales was affected by differences in venture efficacies career expectations or perceived support received by women in traditional businesses as compared to those in non traditional ones this analysis revealed that traditional women business owners might have different factors that contribute to their success than non traditional owners specifically for the traditional owners venture efficacies for opportunity recognition and economic management as well as the career expectation of autonomy and money or wealth were positively related to sales for the same group efficacy toward planning and the need for security were negatively related to sales for the non traditional women venture efficacy toward planning and the career expectation of autonomy were positively related to sales while the expectation of money or wealth was negatively related also for the same group the perceived importance of the emotional and financial support was negatively related to sales in the past most of the entrepreneurial research has used predominantly male samples of entrepreneurs those that include women entrepreneurs generally are comparative between men and women this study s comparison of two groups of women entrepreneurs offers a unique contribution to the field future research is recommended to further understand how venture efficacy and career expectations affect the decision to start a new business in a particular industry it would be particularly beneficial to study venture efficacy and career expectations of prospective women entrepreneurs prior to the start of the business similarly greater attention should be given to understanding how venture efficacy develops in different individuals

a reconsideration of the fatherhood premium marriage coresidence biology and fathers wages past research that asserts a fatherhood wage premium often ignores the heterogeneity of fathering contexts i expect fatherhood to produce wage gains for men if it prompts them to alter their behavior in ways that increase labor market productivity identity theory predicts a larger productivity based fatherhood premium when ties of biology coresidence with the child and marriage to the child s mother reinforce one another making fatherhood and the role of financial provider in particular salient high in commitment and clear employer discrimination against fathers in less normative family structures may also contribute to variation in the fatherhood premium using fixed effects models and data from the 1979 cohort of the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy79 i find that married residential biological fatherhood is associated with wage gains of about 4 percent but unmarried residential fathers nonresidential fathers and stepfathers do not receive a fatherhood premium married residen

recovery decisions of a producer in a legislative disposal fee environment the main objectives of the environmental legislation originating from extended producer responsibility epr principle are to lead producers to undertake recovery initiatives for their end of use products and to promote environmentally desirable product design it is still controversial whether current implementations of epr principle are effective in attaining these objectives this study seeks to answer the following questions 1 what is the impact of epr legislation on the product recovery decisions of producers 2 how do the redesign opportunities i e design for disassembly affect the willingness of producers for product recovery 3 how do the investment needs to start recovery practices and the reluctance of producers to allocate sufficient funds for this purpose affect the optimal recovery decisions we use stylized economic models to represent the implementation in practice and solving our models we obtain closed form and numerical solutions that help us to see the impact of various parameters on the optimal decisions of a producer our findings indicate that redesign opportunities encourage producers for more recovery however the reluctance of producers to cover the initial investments may substantially reduce the effectiveness of the legislation and the recovery amounts

failure or voluntary exit reassessing the female underperformance hypothesis abstract we reevaluate the female underperformance hypothesis by challenging the assumption that female owned ventures are more likely to fail instead of equating exit with failure we draw on exit literature and feminist theories to argue that female entrepreneurs are actually more likely than males to exit voluntarily we argue for further gender differences by using an even more fine grained conceptualization of entrepreneurial exit failure exit for personal reasons and exit for other professional financial opportunities post hoc analyses also point to within gender heterogeneity depending on family status a sample probe of 219 spanish entrepreneurs who had exited their business supports our overall reasoning

one without the other behavioural and incentive policies for household waste management this paper provides a review of economic studies that analyses the use of multiple policies to cope with waste management problems we discuss the factors that influence selective sorting behaviour and the most appropriate policies for their promotion based on the works analysed our survey shows the original features of waste as an environmental problem requiring regulation the traditional approach in which decisions respond to rational behaviour particularly cost savings has some limits although not all public policies seem justified we argue that there might be a need for specific policies to promote recycling preferably based on the provision of information to consumers or on behavioural instruments indeed personal factors specific to each individual such as emotions and the influence of social interaction should be taken into account in the development of public policies we review the literature related to different rationales and identify some avenues for future research

greenhouse gas emissions waste and recycling policy abstract this paper examines least cost policies for waste reduction incorporating upstream greenhouse gas externalities associated with the production of consumption goods from various materials in particular we decompose the effect of deposit refund advance disposal fees and recycling subsidies on upstream greenhouse gas emissions we find that the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions are of the same order as or larger than the benefits of reducing solid waste disposal implying larger optimal total waste reduction than previous studies furthermore the least cost intervention levels will be material specific and vary substantially across materials finally despite the reductions in emissions implied by increased recycling rates direct recycling subsidies are more costly and generate less emissions reductions than a deposit refund or advance disposal fee

efficient implementation of collective extended producer responsibility legislation extended producer responsibility epr is a policy tool that holds producers financially responsible for the post use collection recycling and disposal of their products many epr implementations are collective a large collection and recycling network crn handles multiple producers products in order to benefit from scale and scope economies the total cost is then allocated to producers based on metrics such as their return shares by weight such weight based proportional allocation mechanisms are criticized in practice for not taking into account the heterogeneity in the costs imposed by different producers products the consequence is cost allocations that impose higher costs on certain producer groups than they can achieve independently this may lead some producers to break away from collective systems resulting in fragmented systems with higher total cost yet cost efficiency is a key legislative and producer concern to address this concern this paper develops cost allocation mechanisms that

competitive advantage of qualified weee recyclers through epr legislation abstract most of waste appliances in china are handled by unqualified recyclers rather than by qualified ones equipped with advanced but costly technology to address this problem china implements a series of take back legislations in the framework of extended producer responsibility epr with a self financing subsidy scheme to analyze the performance of the legislations we develop a two period model with a selling period run by a manufacturer and a recycling period conducted by two recyclers we show that the self financing condition gives an upper limit for the subsidy we also show that this limit is not monotone in the recyclers competitiveness difference and there may be a gap between the upper limit and the optimal subsidy that maximizes the social welfare i e a larger subsidy does not necessarily render a larger welfare further we numerically show that the legislations improve the environment performance but decrease the total profits of the manufacturer and recyclers interestingly the legislations may or may not decrease the consumer surplus

economic instruments and induced innovation the european policies on end of life vehicles abstract the paper addresses the mechanisms by which specific economic instruments based on the producer responsibility principle prp can influence innovation when environmental policy has impact on very complex industrial subsystems we consider the eu policy on end of life vehicles directive 2000 53 ec on elvs as a representative case study of multiple industry prp instrument dynamic efficiency problems in order to achieve ambitious policy targets on elv recovery recycling reuse interrelated sequences of single innovations in both upstream car making and downstream car recycling recovery should take place we explore the extent to which the introduction of a free take back ftb instrument can influence industrial actors in contributing to innovation paths that are still marked by technological uncertainty evolving capabilities and different cost benefit balances for actors themselves we conclude that differently from static approaches in which the ei and its formulation is neutral with respect to policy effectiveness the dynamic efficiency of eis in elv like problems depends both on where along the production to waste chain and how in terms of net cost allocation the specific incentive is introduced consequently in order to generate a policy desired innovation path the way in which the ei related incentive allocated to a certain industry is transmitted to other industries whether upward or downward along the chain is also relevant disregarding these effects can imply a dissipation of innovation incentives and the generation of regulation induced rents for some actors cannot be ruled out policies based on prp should consider eis in conjunction with enforceable voluntary agreements

self employment wealth and job creation the roles of gender non pecuniary motivation and entrepreneurial ability this paper uses national child development study data for a large cohort of british individuals to explore the influence of education inheritance and other background characteristics on the propensity to become self employed and also on subsequent success as measured by job and wealth creation for the first time we study the effects of our regressor variables on our success measures via disaggregation of our sample by gender and in this way reveal striking differences between the determinants of male and female entrepreneurial performance

creative destruction and destructive creations environmental ethics and planned obsolescence three decades ago planned obsolescence was a widely discussed ethical issue in marketing classrooms planned obsolescence is topical again today because an increasing emphasis on continuous product development promotes shorter durables replacement and disposal cycles with troublesome environmental consequences this paper offers explanations of why product obsolescence is practiced and why it works it then examines the ethical responsibilities of product developers and corporate strategists and their differing responses to this problem pro environment product design and marketing practices and innovative government policies may alleviate the problem over time however given the current lack of understanding about consumer replacement and disposal behavior it is questionable as to whether these practices and policies will be sufficiently informed to be effective thus marketing scholars have a significant opportunity to contribute to sustainable durables product development

consumer discrimination and self employment self employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race we show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller equilibrium income distributions have two properties mean black incomes are lower than mean white incomes and the returns to ability are lower for black than for white sellers able blacks therefore are less likely to self select into the self employment sector than able whites using the 1980 census data we find that observed racial differences in the self employment income distributions are consistent with the theoretical predictions

efficient waste management policies and strategic behavior with open borders during the last decade waste management has been characterized by two main trends the growth of international trade of waste materials and the introduction of extended producer responsibility epr as a policy instrument in this paper a two country stylized model with imperfect competition in the recycling market is used to address two research questions first how do epr recycling targets interact with other policy instruments such as taxes on recycling residues and excise duties second how does strategic behavior of national policy makers influences the use of policy instruments the model demonstrates that a combination of epr with other instruments is needed to achieve the first best outcome when governments do not coordinate policies across borders strategic behavior may lead to a race to the bottom for taxes on recycling residues conversely strategic behavior may lead to a counter intuitive race to the top for excise duties and epr recycling targets it is shown that these instruments are not only used to stimulate waste prevention but also to extract rents from foreign recyclers

can downstream waste disposal policies encourage upstream design for environment design for environment takes place when firms explicitly incorporate environmental issues in their product design and manufacturing decisions joseph fiksel 1996 to reduce waste associated with consumer products for example firms can reduce product weight including the amount of packaging that comes with a product and make products easier and less costly to recycle the latter can be accomplished by changing the type of material used in a product avoiding mixing of materials in a single product coding and labeling when different materials are used and designing for ease of disassembly u s congress office of technology assessment 1992 fiksel 1996 an important debate centers around the question of whether design for environment dfe needs to be explicitly targeted using policy instruments focused upstream on producers or whether downstream instruments send sufficient signals back upstream one important downstream instrument is a disposal fee i e charging households a price per pound per bag or per can for their trash many observers feel that downstream instruments do not send appropriate signals back upstream some economists and others have suggested on the other hand that disposal fees can in theory send signals upstream to producers karen palmer and walls 1998 we find that disposal fees provide incentives for efficient dfe only when there is a fully functioning recycling market i e only when recyclers pay households a price for each of their recyclable items and that price varies with the degree of product recyclability in the real world transactions costs of paying households for each individual item recycled would be prohibitively high in a more realistic setting in which households may place some items in a recycling bin but are not paid for doing so a disposal fee by itself will not yield a social optimum it encourages households to place items in the bin but all items allowed in the bin are of equal value to the household i e there is no reason to prefer an easily recyclable aluminum can to a difficult to recycle plastic milk jug this means that there is no signal to producers to make products more recyclable if the government can set product taxes that vary with product recyclability the social optimum can be restored but this option is not practicable 2 we argue that the infeasibility of i paying households for recycling and ii taxing products according to their recyclability means that a first best outcome is no longer attainable instead we set up a constrained second best optimum and solve for policy instruments that achieve this outcome we find that a disposal school of economics and finance victoria university of wellington wellington new zealand walls is also a university fellow with resources for the future washington dc the helpful comments of karen palmer don fullerton and hilary sigman are greatlv appreciated 1 manufacturer take back requirements such as germany s well known packaging take back law were developed at least in part as a way to encourage dfe see www oecd org env epr index htm for updates from a series of oecd workshops held in 1997 1999 on the broader topic of extended producer responsibility in practice individual german producers do not actually take back their own products at end of life they have formed a consortium that arranges to collect members waste from households marked with a green dot and recycle it we do not address take back mandates in this paper 2 in calcott and walls 1999 we derive these taxes don fullerton and wenbo wu 1998 show that a direct subsidy to recyclability combined with other instruments can yield a social optimum this subsidy depends on production function parameters thus if firms differ the subsidy would vary across firms more i mportantly observing and measuring recyclability to determine subsidy payments would be virtually impossible

assessing the economic cost of greenhouse induced sea level rise methods and application in support of a national survey the potential cost of sea level rise has dominated many of the recent estimates of the economic damage that greenhouse warming might inflict on the united states over the course of the next century the cost of coastal protection and abandonment accounted for more than 80 of the early nordhaus estimate of likely damages part of a review of the then existing evidence which suggested that an effective doubling of atmospheric carbon concentrations might cost 0 26 of annual gdp the proportion of total cost attributed to sea level rise was a much smaller 11 in cline but the sea level rise costs that he quoted were among the most broadly accepted of his longer list of damages the relative importance of sea level rise in assessing the potential cost of greenhouse warming and thus in evaluating the potential benefit of any mitigating strategy has brought the original damage estimates under closer scrutiny a series of integrated assessments of aggregate damages has begun each has noted that the titus estimates were based on the assumptions that all developed property would be protected and that all undeveloped property including wetlands would be abandoned these assumptions were supported by comparisons of the economic vulnerability estimatesmore produced by yohe and protection cost estimates produced by weggel but they are clearly too simplistic some of each type of property will be abandoned though in which case the true future economic cost of sacrificed property must also be added to the damage calculus across an equally diverse collection of coastal sites moreover the decision of when whether and for how long to protect any piece of property will involve accurately weighing the tradeoff between the cost of its protection and the economic cost of its abandonment a balancing calculation which must be conducted on a site by site basis the key is to consider the world as it is likely to be and not necessarily as it is now 26 refs 1 fig 7 tabs less

pricing and quality decisions and financial incentives for sustainable product design with recycled material content under price leadership abstract design for recycling has been promoted by companies and governments around the world as one of the most important practices for achieving sustainability the success or failure of such a practice however depends heavily on the financial incentives for firms to design products with more recycled or recyclable material contents an interesting phenomenon that can be observed in many markets with products made predominately from either virgin or recycled materials is the existence of price leadership in this paper we utilize an interdisciplinary approach with both theoretical and empirical analyses to study the pricing and design decisions for products with virgin and recycled material contents in a duopoly market consisting of both the environmentally conscious green and non environmentally conscious brown consumers under price leadership our analytical results show that the brown segment s efficient quality provides an anchor product position for the price leader regardless of whether the price leader is a brown or green firm the price follower s financial incentive for becoming a green or brown firm will then lead to different cases of price leadership with very different environmental consequences specifically the arrangement where the brown and green firms are the price leader and follower respectively leads to more environmentally friendly design decisions than those under the other arrangement where the duopolists switch their pricing roles in addition we conduct an empirical analysis to explore the specific types of price leadership in the markets of aluminum cardboards and pet based on the equilibrium pricing and quality decisions we analyze the financial incentives for the more environmentally friendly case of price leadership to be realized and derive important insights to formulating strategies and policies to implement the practice of design for recycling from the interdisciplinary perspective

letter from the editor in chief the jibs decade award integrating international acquisitions the 2009 jibs decade awardthe first issue of jibs each year begins with a reprint of the articlethat won the previous year s jibs decade award followed bya retrospective written by the author or authors and one ormore invited commentaries the 2009 award winning article is knowledge transfer in international acquisitions by henrikbresman julian birkinshaw and robert nobel published in 1999 jibs 30 3 the jibs decade award recognizes the most influential articlepublished in the volume 10 years ago the 2009 selectioncommittee members were stephen tallman chair torbenpedersen 2009 aib program chair john cantwell 2008 aibprogram chair and the jibs editor in chiefasanexofficiomember the award is presented by palgrave macmillan duringa special session honoring the authors at the annual meetingof the academy of international business aib the 2009 aibsession in san diego was chaired by thejibs editor in chief julianbirkinshawspokeonbehalfoftheauthors andalainverbeke and udo zander provided commentaries after the conference the presentations were revised sent out forsingle blind review to selected jibs area and consulting editors and also circulated among the authors to encourage cross fertilizing of ideas the end product i believe is a wonderful setof papers that should and will be read together and i suspectoften assigned as a set for phd seminars i thank all the area andconsulting editors who read these manuscripts and provided suchthoughtful comments for the authors the first paper in this issue of jibs is a reprint of the decadeaward winning article by bresman birkinshaw and nobel thearticle is a qualitative study of the post acquisition integrationprocess in three international acquisitions by swedish multi nationals the authors argue that successful acquisitions createa social community where two way knowledge sharing occursbetween the acquirer and acquired firms the reprinted article is followed by knowledge transfer ininternational acquisitions a retrospective by birkinshaw bresmanand nobel the retrospective explores the origins of their award winning article situating it in the knowledge based view of themultinational enterprise mne kogut zander 1993 they arguethat their paper makes three contributions to the internationalbusiness ib literature mapping out the territory comparing the