urban spatial structure urban structure is increasingly characterized by decentralization dispersion and multiple employment centers much is known empirically about such patterns and about how the interplay between agglomerative and dispersive forces generates spatial structures that are complex and prone to multiple equilibria and dynamic path dependence these forces operate at different spatial scales many entail unpriced interaction and external scale economies deriving from product differentiation and endogenous technical change appear particularly important because these forces interact in complex ways inefficiencies in urban structure are resistant to simple policy interventions

land clearance and social capital in mountain agro ecosystems the case of opuntia scrubland in ayacucho peru abstract opuntia scrublands are important ecological economic systems in rural andean areas they provide goods for peasants diet and animal feed as well as cochineal insects a highly valued source of dyes land clearance on these scrublands promotes changes in land use from nonproductive wilderness to cochineal and fruit harvest areas grazing lands and fuel wood supply zones here we empirically explore the role of social capital on land clearance based on a case study of the humanga region of ayacucho peru the literature on social capital is showing evidence of the positive effect of social capital on development actions and on environmental conservation in rural areas of developing countries such as participatory forest management here the notion of social capital is captured by the idea that some features of social organization such as networks facilitate coordination and cooperation within the peasant communities that help in managing different economic activities both on and off farm the habilitation of the scrublands in the andean mountain environment could be generating negative externalities as a consequence of altering the vegetation cover such as soil erosion because the benefits arising from land clearance activities are obtained by cochineal collecting households and the negative environmental effects are costs imposed upon noncochineal collectors the social capital associated with scrubland habilitation could be perverse from an agro environmental viewpoint and a revision of some government policies and of some ngos actions for rural development through the promotion of various community networks in this deprived area could be needed

optimal control of a dual service rate m m 1 production inventory model we analyse a dual source production inventory model in which the processing times at a primary manufacturing resource and a second contingent resource are exponentially distributed we interpret the contingent source to be a subcontractor although it could also be overtime production we treat the inventory and contingent sourcing policies as decision variables in an analytical study and additionally allow the primary manufacturing capacity to be a decision variable in a subsequent numerical study our goal is to gain insight into the use of subcontracting as a contingent source of goods and whether it can fulfill real world managers expectations for improved performance we prove that a stationary non randomised inventory and subcontracting policy is optimal for our m m 1 dual source model and moreover that a dual base stock policy is optimal we then derive an exact closed form expression for one of the optimal base stocks which to our knowledge is the first closed form solution for a dual source model we use that closed form result to advantage in a numerical study from which we gain insight into how optimal capacity subcontracting and inventory policies are set and how effectively a contingent source can reduce total cost capacity cost and inventory cost we find that i the contingent source can reduce total cost effectively even when contingent sourcing is expensive and ii contingent sourcing reduces capacity cost more effectively than it does inventory cost

valuing fixed price supply contracts abstract this article considers the problem of valuing a supply contract that requires the manufacturer to deliver fixed quantities of a product according to a predetermined schedule at fixed prices given that the raw material costs fluctuate randomly the producer has capacity constraints production costs depend on production rates and that switching production rates result in additional charges the problem is to establish an optimal production and inventory policy such that the schedule is met and the value of the contract to the firm is maximized

small business and empirical perspectives in business ethics editorial in this editorial to a collection of papers on ethics in small firms the case is made for greater use of high quality empirical research on business ethics sociological perspectives have much to offer to the field of business ethics that continues to be dominated by normative moral philosophy the second contribution of the paper is to argue for a re orientation away from the large multi national firm as a benchmark subject of business ethics research one important point of view to be included is that of the small firm which remains the dominant organisational form throughout all the oecd countries

tax morale and prosocial behaviour evidence from a palestinian survey the first empirical investigation is conducted into the relationship between prosocial behaviour and tax morale in the context of state capacity building as in the palestinian territories we consider public spirit a positive attitude adopted by citizens for the benefit of the community and associational activity individuals engagement in voluntary activities two major expressions of prosocial behaviour and estimate their impact on palestinians tax morale intrinsic motivation to pay taxes the empirical analysis employs a unique palestinian public opinion survey conducted in 2007 in the west bank and the gaza strip by using a bivariate probit model we find that tax morale increases with public spirit but it is lower among palestinians involved in associational activities predicted conditional probabilities indicate that public spirit has more impact when the respondent has low confidence in the institutions and in the rule of law finally more public spirit is required for a self employed person in order to deal with tax compliance than for a worker in the public sector unless the worker in the public sector has lower confidence in the institutions and in the rule of law than the self employed person

household contributions to community development in indonesia summary critical to the success of community development is the degree to which citizens contribute their resources the paper develops regression models to examine the effects of household and community characteristics on household contributions of time and money to three types of participatory community development efforts governance social welfare and environmental infrastructure households with indicators of lower socio economic status generally contributed less time and money to community development integration into social networks was also a strong predictor of the amount of time a household contributed because most of the community development efforts analyzed rely on reciprocity where participants contribute resources in order to receive benefits the findings raise doubts about the extent to which these efforts help the poor and socially excluded

a generalized quantity discount pricing model to increase supplier s profits in this paper the joint problem of ordering and offering price discount by a supplier to his sole major buyer is analyzed the objective is to induce the buyer to alter his order schedule and size so that the supplier can benefit from lower set up ordering and inventory holding costs we generalize the quantity discount pricing model of monahan monahan j p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci 30 6 720 726 to 1 explicitly incorporate constraints imposed on the amount of discount that can be offered and 2 relax the implicit assumption of a lot for lot or order for order policy adopted by the supplier an algorithm is developed to solve the supplier s joint ordering and price discount problem

an inventory model embedded in designing a supply contract to reduce lead time and its variability modern supply and transportation contracts often specify the frequency of and volume available for future deliveries in advance even when final demand is somewhat uncertain yano and gerchak yano c a y gerchak 1989 transportation contracts and safety stocks for just in time deliveries manufacturing and oper management 2 314 330 we explore the joint optimization of contract parameters and inventory control policy in such environments we first model and derive the optimal periodic review inventory policy corresponding to a given supply contract which generates piecewise linear convex ordering costs the optimal policy has two critical levels and there is a range of stock levels for which the quantity ordered equals the contract volume to numerically compute the critical levels we model consecutive inventory levels as a markov chain whose steady state distribution is used to compute the holding shortage and transportation costs we then use the

a periodic review production planning model with uncertain capacity and uncertain demand optimality of extended myopic policies increasing product complexity manufacturing environment complexity and an increased emphasis on product quality are all factors leading to uncertainties in production processes these uncertainties are in the form of unplanned machine maintenance varying production yields and rework among others in planning for production an adequate model must incorporate these uncertainties into the representation of the production process this paper treats the aggregate planning problem for a single product with random demand and random capacity in the single period problem random capacity does not affect the optimal policy but results in a unimodal nonconvex cost function in the multiple period and infinite horizon settings order up to policies that are dependent on the distribution of capacity are shown to be optimal in spite of a nonconvex cost in the infinite horizon setting an intuitive description of the situation leads to the notion of a class of extended myopic policies requiring the consideration o

an s 1 s inventory system with emergency orders in this paper we develop an approximate model of an inventory control system in which there exist two options for resupply with one having a shorter lead time we assume that demand and the fixed ordering costs are small relative to the holding cost so that a one for one ordering policy is appropriate we consider a policy for placing emergency orders that uses information about the age of outstanding orders we derive the steady state behavior of this policy and present some computational results

criteria for responsible business practice in smes an exploratory case of u k fair trade organisations this paper develops a set of 16 criteria divided into four groupings for responsible business practice rbp in small and medium sized enterprises smes drawn from the existing sme rbp literature the current lack of a general set of criteria against which such activity can be judged is noted and this deficit is redressed in order to make an initial assessment in support of the criteria so derived an exploratory feasibility study of rbp in u k fair trade organisations was conducted the findings from this study show that most but not all of the rbp criteria seem to be applicable to u k fair trade organisations but it is recommended that the complete set of criteria continues to be used in further research until such time as there is a general consensus as to which criteria are appropriate implications for rbp in small businesses in general and for fair trade organisations in particular are drawn out and suggestions for further research are identified

optimal policies for multiechelon inventory problems with markov modulated demand this paper considers a multistage serial inventory system with markov modulated demand random demand arises at stage 1 stage 1 orders from stage 2 etc and stage n orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock the demand distribution in each period is determined by the current state of an exogenous markov chain excess demand is backlogged linear holding costs are incurred at every stage and linear backorder costs are incurred at stage 1 the ordering costs are also linear the objective is to minimize the long run average costs in the system the paper shows that the optimal policy is an echelon base stock policy with state dependent order up to levels an efficient algorithm is also provided for determining the optimal base stock levels the results can be extended to serial systems in which there is a fixed ordering cost at stage n and to assembly systems with linear ordering costs

social capital and entrepreneurial activity a pseudo panel approach abstract this paper uses a pseudo panel approach at an age based cohort level to investigate the extent to which social capital accounts for differences in entrepreneurial activities the findings suggest that trust measured by trust either in strangers or in public institutions facilitates entrepreneurship we also find that parents emphasis on individual achievement relative to interpersonal relations in raising their child is positively associated with entrepreneurship evidence suggests that both social norms and networks influence entrepreneurship these results do not change when we use social capital measured at the national level

assessing social capital small and medium sized enterprises in germany and the u k social capital can be considered to be the product of co operationbetween various institutions networks and business partners it haspotential as a useful tool for business ethics in this article weidentify categories pertinent to the measurement of social capital insmall and medium sized enterprises smes by drawing on three differentsectors one business to business service one business to customerservice and one manufacturing we have enabled the consideration ofsectoral differences we find sector to play an important part inrelation to business practices and social capital our inclusion of smesfrom germany and the united kingdom has called attention to cultural institutional and economic aspects of two regions of europe and how theycan influence sme social capital social capital is found to beinfluenced by context and in particular institutional arrangements inanalysing the data we note particular areas of interest from the pointof view of smes and social capital as being formal engagement networking within sectors networking across sectors volunteerism andgiving to charity and finally a focus on why people engage we concludethat there is a considerable amount of further research needed on socialcapital sme s and business ethics

analysis of supply contracts with minimum total order quantity commitments and non stationary demands abstract in this paper we address a buyer supplier arrangement of particular importance total order quantity commitment toqc under the toqc contract that has been negotiated between the buyer and the supplier the former agrees to an obligation to procure a certain quantity of an item from the latter over the predetermined period of time additional quantity can be obtained maybe at a different price the optimal inventory replenishment policy is shown to be dual order up to levels under a given toqc and the optimal toqc is also demonstrated to be mathematically straightforward to obtain

the fair trade movement parameters issues and future research although fair trade has been in existence for more than 40 years discussion in the business and business ethics literature of this unique trading and campaigning movement between southern producers and northern buyers and consumers has been limited this paper seeks to redress this deficit by providing a description of the characteristics of fair trade including definitional issues market size and segmentation and the key organizations it discusses fair trade from southern producer and northern trader and consumer perspectives and highlights the key issues that currently face the fair trade movement it then identifies an initial research agenda to be followed up in subsequent papers

community renewable energy at a crossroads a think piece on degrowth technology and the democratization of the german energy system abstract degrowth activists and scholars have questioned society s current levels of material throughput and energy use the energy sector is at the core of any modern economy and germany serves as an international showcase for the transition of a large industrialized economy to a low carbon energy system diverse actors organizational models and technologies have contributed to the initiation of germany s energy transition through a wide range of community renewable energy projects the think piece investigates how far these diverse actors embrace the aims of the degrowth movement it also provides a critical account of on the ground realities through six hypotheses and contrasts them with claims made by the degrowth movement it is suggested that community renewable energy projects are at a crossroads while many projects have familiarized thousands of people with alternative economic models there is little evidence of a general change in attitudes towards technology consumption or equity in conclusion a major effort is needed to open initiatives to less affluent actors oppose recent trends of commodification and prevent community renewable energy projects from being engrossed by the dominant political and economic system

inventory control with markovian capacity and the option of order rejection we consider a stochastic inventory control problem with markovian capacity and the option of order rejection we show its optimal policy to be the combination of a capacity dependent modified base stock production policy and a capacity dependent critical point order acceptance policy when capacity is stochastically monotone we show that the policy parameters change over the current capacity level in an intuitive way all these results can be extended to the infinite horizon case with or without cost discounting our computational study substantiates the benefits from both exploiting the markovian behavior of the capacity and rejecting orders when necessary

risk sharing in supply chains using order bands analytical results and managerial insights abstract this work generalizes and extends a number of basic production inventory models we study a periodic review non stationary markovian production inventory model with stochastic demand and holding and penalty costs all state dependent where goods can be procured from up to two suppliers each supplier quotes a state dependent minimum order quantity moq order capacity c and unit price we concentrate on a base stock policy that is defined by a vector of numbers one for each lead time indexed by the states of the markov chain in certain cases our policy is optimal for the general case we show that there is no simple optimal policy we use infinitesimal perturbation analysis to compute inventory levels within this class for an application motivated by international trade for this application we find that the imposition of minimum and or maximum order quantities provides an effective mechanism for risk sharing the customer guarantees the supplier a minimum order every period at an increased unit price and in exchange the supplier grants an increase in capacity this can more effectively match supply with demand making the entire supply chain more profitable

an inventory system with two supply modes and capacity constraints abstract this paper analyses a periodic review inventory system with a main and an emergency supply mode where policies of the base stock type are used at both supply channels contrary to previously published models the capacity of the emergency channel is taken into account we examine two alternative ordering policies for that channel an early ordering policy that almost eliminates early stockouts in a replenishment cycle and a late ordering policy that delays the emergency order decision until more demand information has been accumulated approximate cost models are developed and properties of their optimal solutions are derived simulation results indicate that these solutions are near optimal conclusions are drawn about the relative effectiveness of the two emergency ordering policies

constraints on collective action in a transitional economy the case of bulgaria s irrigation sector abstract irrigation until recently a major water user in bulgaria has been drastically affected by the political and economic changes that came about after the collapse of the socialist system collective action might be a way for societies to overcome the well known common pool resource dilemma thereby securing sustainable water management this article questions whether measures to facilitate local self governance could be successful in bulgaria empirical results suggest that local actors use power asymmetries to maintain their opportunistic strategies and the governance of information plays an especially important role moreover distrust between community members plays a crucial role in constraining the evolution of social capital which is a prerequisite for collective action

an infinite horizon inventory model with periodic order commitment abstract this paper studies an infinite horizon inventory model of a buyer with a periodic order commitment the commitment requires the buyer to purchase at least a certain fixed amount on a periodic basis there is no extra adjustment cost should the buyer decide to order more than the basic amount we consider general discrete demand distributions we formulate a markov chain to represent the behavior of the inventory system stimulated by the solution approach to the classical gi m 1 queue we derive the steady state results and obtain the exact closed form cost function numerical examples are provided

efficient supply contracts for fashion goods with forecast updating and two production modes we examine the problem of developing supply contracts that encourage proper coordination of forecast information and production decisions between a manufacturer and distributor of high fashion seasonal products operating in a two mode production environment the first production mode is relatively cheap but requires a long lead time while the second is expensive but offers quick turnaround we focus on contracts of the form w1 w2 b wherewi is the wholesale price offered for production modei andb is a return price offered for items left over at the end of the season we find that such a contract can coordinate the manufacturer and distributor to act in the best interest of the channel the pricing conditions needed to ensure an efficient solution vary depending on the degree of demand forecast improvement between periods and the manufacturer s access to forecast information we also examine whether these conditions ensure a pareto optimal solution with respect to two traditional production settings

a capacitated production inventory model with periodic demand for a single product single stage capacitated production inventory model with stochastic periodic cyclic demand we find the optimal policy and characterize some of its properties we study the finite horizon the discounted infinite horizon and the infinite horizon average cases a simulation based optimization method is provided to compute the optimal parameters based on a numerical study several insights into the model are also provided

dynamic inventory management with total minimum order commitments and two supply options we study optimal policies for dual supply inventory systems where a firm commits to buying a total minimum quantity from both supplies or two separate total minimum quantities from each supply over a finite planning horizon the two supply options differ in their costs and lead times for the system under the joint commitment the optimal policy has a simple structure and can be fully characterized by three critical numbers in each period for the system under the separate commitments we show that the optimal order quantities in each period are monotonic in the starting inventory and the remaining commitments with bounded sensitivity moreover we establish convergence results on the optimal order quantities when the committed quantity from either supply approaches infinity these findings highlight the effects of order commitments on the optimal inventory policies on the basis of these results we develop a simple heuristic for the system under separate commitments and show numerically that it performs

value of information in capacitated supply chains we incorporate information flow between a supplier and a retailer in a two echelon model that captures the capacitated setting of a typical supply chain we consider three situations 1 a traditional model where there is no information to the supplier prior to a demand to him except for past data 2 the supplier knows the s s policy used by the retailer as well as the end item demand distribution and 3 the supplier has full information about the state of the retailer order up to policies continue to be optimal for models with information flow for the finite horizon the infinite horizon discounted and the infinite horizon average cost cases study of these three models enables us to understand the relationships between capacity inventory and information at the supplier level as well as how they are affected by the retailer s s s values and end item demand distribution we estimate the savings at the supplier due to information flow and study when information is most beneficial

regional social capital why it matters malecki e j regional social capital why it matters regional studies social capital refers to a culture of interaction among people with productive economic outcomes social capital promotes regional learning both within a region and beyond as it reinforces openness to the ideas of others regional cultures vary in the degree to which people individually and within their organizations trust and interact with one another which is why regional outcomes vary innovation learning and entrepreneurship key processes of regional development take place largely within and among people as members of companies and territorial organizations innovative milieus industrial districts and knowledge economies are among the regions with extraordinary pools of social capital malecki e j

inventory control in a fluctuating demand environment we present an inventory model where the demand rate varies with an underlying state of the world variable this variable can represent economic fluctuations or stages in the product life cycle for example we derive some basic characteristics of optimal policies and develop algorithms for computing them in addition we show that certain monotonicity patterns in the problem data are reflected in the optimal policies

adjustment strategies for a fixed delivery contract we consider a long term contractual agreement between buyer and seller in whichq units are delivered to the buyer at regular time intervals it must be true that the delivery quantity q is less than the mean demand per period in order to manage the inventory the buyer has the option of adjusting the delivery quantity upwards just prior to a delivery but must pay a premium to do so demand is assumed random and we model the system in a continuous review setting we show that the equations one must solve to find optimal adjustment strategies are intractable a diffusion approximation is developed which when coupled with the solution to an even simpler deterministic version of the problem yields very simple but effective approximations extensive computations are included to compare the performance of the optimal and approximate policies we also empirically derive a formula for computingq whose accuracy is established computationally we prove that the fixed delivery contract results in lower variance of orders to the seller we also include a computational study to find the unit cost discount that equalizes the expected costs for the fixed delivery contract and the base stock contract for a large parameter set

corporate social and financial performance an investigation in the u k supermarket industry the comparison of corporate social performance with corporate financial performance has been a popular field of study over the past 25 years the results while broadly conclusive of a positive relationship are not entirely consistent in addition most of the previous studies have concentrated on large scale cross industry studies and often with a single variable for corporate social performance in order to produce statistically significant results this weakens the richness of understanding that might be obtained from a single industry study with multiple social variables which would also allow investigation of inter relationships between individual and sub sets of social performance measures and between individual and sub sets of social performance and financial performance measures there have also been criticisms that the results lack a rigorous theoretical basis and the paper demonstrates clearly how stakeholder theory must form the basis for this area of research following a review of the literature this paper presents the initial findings from a study of the u k supermarket industry which suggest that contemporaneous social and financial performance are negatively related while prior period financial performance is positively related with subsequent social performance positive relationships between both age and size of the company with social performance are also found

deconstructing the relationship between corporate social and financial performance for four decades research on the role and responsibilities of business in society has centered on the business case for corporate social responsibility csr and an increasing number of studies on the corporate social performance csp corporate financial performance cfp link emerged leading to controversial results heeding the call for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms linking certain csr efforts to certain performance outcomes this study provides a stakeholder based organizing framework rooted in an extensive review of existing literature on the link between csp and cfp in so doing we aim at guiding research and practice toward less simplistic understandings of the csp cfp connection thus advancing the debate over the consequences of voluntary integrating csr into business operations and into relationships with stakeholders by disentangling specific drivers and outcomes of the csp cfp link we underline the importance of setting clear boundaries and specifying levels of analysis to generate comparable results

supplier commitment and production decisions under a forecast commitment contract manufacturing firms in capital intensive industries face inherent demand volatility for their products and the inability to change their capacity quickly to cope with these challenges manufacturers often enter into contracts with their customers that offer greater certainty of supply in return for more predictable orders in this paper we study a forecast commitment contract in which the customer provides a forecast the supplier makes a production commitment to the customer based on the forecast and the customers minimum order quantity is a function of the forecast and committed quantities we provide a complete analysis of the suppliers decisions when there is a single customer facing uncertain demand we first show that the supplier has two dominant commitment strategies committing to the forecast or committing to the production quantity we then characterize the jointly optimal commitment and production strategy for the supplier and extend the results to consider a capacity constraint we show that the proposed contract can moderate the suppliers motivation to underproduce and due to the structure of the contract and the form of the suppliers optimal strategy also limits the customers incentive to overforecast we also provide results for a capacitated two customer example which show that the suppliers choice of production quantity for each customer is not necessarily nondecreasing in the total available capacity

a periodic review inventory model with demand influenced by promotion decisions in this paper we use a markov decision process mdp to model the joint inventorypromotion decision problem the state variable of the mdp represents the demand state brought about by changing environmental factors as well as promotion decisions the demand state in a period determines the distribution of the random demand in that period optimal inventory and promotion decision policies in the finite horizon problem are obtained via dynamic programming under certain conditions we show that there is a threshold inventory level p for each demand state such that if the threshold is exceeded then it is desirable to promote the product for the proportional ordering cost case the optimal inventory replenishment policy is a base stock type policy with the optimal base stock level dependent on the promotion decision

can an sme become a global corporate citizen evidence from a case study global corporate citizenship gcc continues to become increasingly popular in large corporations however this concept has rarely been considered in small and medium size enterprises smes a case study of a norwegian clothing company illustrates how gcc can be also applied to small companies this case study also shows that smes can be very innovative in exercising corporate citizenship without necessarily following the patterns of large multinational companies the company studied engages as partner in some voluntary labor initiatives promoted by the government employs people in marginal situations and exerts influence for the adoption of good working conditions in its supply chain environmental issues and actions of solidarity are also considered within a global scope ethics of care and concern for specific aspects of the common good seem crucial as gcc drivers in this company as do personal values character and leadership of the owner manager of the firm

shadow economies size causes and consequences using various methods the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing transition and oecd countries is estimated average size varies from 12 percent of gdp for oecd countries to 23 percent for transition countries and 39 percent for developing countries increasing taxation and social security contributions combined with rising state regulations are driving forces for the increase of the shadow economy especially in oecd countries according to some findings corruption has a positive impact on the size of the shadow economy and a growing shadow economy has a negative effect on official gdp growth

from resistance to opportunity seeking strategic responses to institutional pressures for corporate social responsibility in the nordic fashion industry using survey responses from 400 fashion companies in denmark norway sweden finland and iceland we examine the diversity of strategic responses to institutional pressures for corporate social responsibility csr within the nordic fashion industry we also develop and test a new model of strategic responses to institutional pressures that encompasses both resistance and opportunity seeking behaviour our results suggest that it is inconsistent pressures within rather than between stakeholder groups that shape strategic responses to csr pressures and that increasing pressures stimulates opportunity seeking at the expense of compliance

cooperatives and happiness cross country evidence on the role of relational capital why is the share of happy people higher in some countries than in their equally developed neighbours we conjecture that the apparent contradiction might depend on a country s endowment of relation

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

the size of human capital externalities cross country evidence human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities however the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive the missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return by incorrect interpretations of regression coefficients or by an inappropriate level of aggregation our own estimates point to relatively robust empirical evidence for a human capital externality that is about twice as large as a benchmark estimate which is derived from a standard parameterization of a simple growth model we ponder a possible causal link from human capital to social capital in the context of alternative views of long run development and argue that the grand transition view paldam 2002 is compatible with the existence of a large human capital externality

institutional ecological economics abstract new institutional economics and its forerunners have we argue made important contributions to the evolving agenda of ecological economics the conceptualisation of environmental problems as instances of interdependence and the acknowledgement of positive transaction costs are key insights into the nature of environmental problems we also discuss how plurality of behavioural motivations and limited cognitive capacity have important implications for environmental decision making and its analysis we show how evolutionary and collective action theories offer complementary takes on the choice and change of environmental governance institutions and how the concept of social capital can enrich analyses of environmental governance we conclude that an emerging institutional ecological economics has the greatest relative advantage in analysing the design implementation and effectiveness of environmental governance solutions

effects of constrained supply and price contracts on agricultural cooperatives planning strategies depend in part on the supply flow structure of a supply chain in food supply chains many firms are constrained by raw material supply e g vegetables and milk this paper first examines the economic consequences of constrained supply in agricultural cooperatives secondly it deals with the effects of adding price contracts to the current cooperative contract this model combines an inventory policy approach and a monte carlo simulation to take into account price uncertainty we illustrate our results using the case of a dairy cooperative c 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

housing demand forces and land use towards urban compactness a push accessibility pull analysis framework this paper focuses on resolving a defect of population based urban sprawl analysis from a land use planning perspective this defect is indicated for a few metropolitan areas which have experienced a controversial phenomenon of population decentralisation but with potential household centralising force with the emphasis on household movement this paper first aims to clarify the role of populations households and employment that characterises urban sprawl and to check if unmet housing demand in city centres can be identified second we evaluate the influence of household distribution factors such as unmet housing and land use related factors on spatial structure based compactness sprawl taking time lag into consideration a new classification of urban forms is developed to identify potential residential centripetal market forces additionally the housing demand generation distribution push accessibility pull gd pap analysis framework is applied the results of an empirical study on the taipei

a production inventory system with markovian capacity and outsourcing option we study the optimal production inventory outsourcing policy for a firm with markovian in house production capacity that faces independent stochastic demand and has the option to outsource we find very simple optimal policy forms under fairly reasonable assumptions in addition when the capacity markov process is stochastically monotone the policy parameters decrease in the firm s current capacity level under additional assumptions all these results extend to the infinite horizon and undiscounted cost cases we analyze comparative statics and the necessity of some technical conditions and discuss when the outsourcing option is more valuable

new tools to foster corporate socially responsible behavior according to the green paper presented by the european commission in july 2001 corporate social responsibility csr is a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis commission of the european communities 2001b p 6 on this basis in 2002 the italian government and especially the italian ministry of welfare launched an initiative called csr sc social commitment in order to foster the proactive social role of italian enterprises with great attention on sme involvement the technical partner of the italian ministry of welfare for this initiative is bocconi university the goal of this contribution is to present the main results of csr sc research project developed by bocconi university the paper provides a detailed picture of the general scheme designed to carry out the research project and a review of the different methodologies used to support the solutions proposed

a model of incentive contracts for just in time delivery abstract a mathematical model is used to analyze how to structure on time delivery incentives in a contract between a buyer and a single supplier of raw materials when early shipments are forbidden the buyer s choice of incentives takes the supplier s cost minimizing response to incentives into account the least cost incentive a buyer can select is specified by a probability of on time delivery and an incentive scheme to achieve that probability these optimal solutions are characterized without specifying the flow time distribution a method of selecting incentives that can help buyers improve on time delivery performance is provided however the limitations of incentives are also considered achieving exactly 100 on time delivery is shown to be non optimal and only feasible under specific conditions when management can not specify the shortage cost their selection of a desired probability of on time delivery allows for the determination of an imputed shortage cost

a brownian approximation of a production inventory system with a manufacturer that subcontracts this paper considers a production inventory problem where a manufacturer fulfills stochastic stationary demand for a single product from a finished goods inventory the inventory can be replenished by two production resources in house production and a subcontractor which both have finite capacity we construct a brownian approximation of the optimal control problem assuming that the manufacturer uses a dual base stock policy to control replenishment from the two sources and that her objective is to minimize average cost a closed form expression is obtained for one optimal base stock policy and an analytical expression is derived from which the other optimal base stock can be computed numerically we show conditions under which the objective is convex in capacity and the unique globally optimal capacity can be computed numerically we thus provide a tractable approximation to the two source problem which is generally intractable we demonstrate the accuracy of this approximation for an m m 1 model we also draw managerial insight from the brownian optimal base stock results into how the optimal base stock policies control the inventory distribution and under what conditions the contingent source is used to build inventory or to resolve backorders

trade social values and the generalized trust author affiliation kenneth s chan department of economics and finance city university of hong kong 83 tat chee avenue kowloon hong kong and the department of economics mcmaster university hamilton ontario canada e mail kschan cityu edu hk acknowledgment i am indebted to two anonymous referees will coleman tom crossley lonnie magee and seminar participants at the city university of hong kong and at the national university of singapore for comments on earlier drafts the usual disclaimers apply 1 introductionthe present paper investigates empirically whether global economic integration can lead to national social disintegration as proclaimed by rodrik 1997 by social disintegration rodrik refers to the uprooting of social values of a nation without a suitable replacement nations do have legitimate reasons for worrying about what globalization does to their norms and social arrangement says rodrik 1997 rodrik s pronouncement is closely akin to if not part of those contentious trade issues arising from differences in national labor and environmental standards cultural practices and child labor for example to tackle this problem the present paper chooses the concept of social capital the stock of norms rules shared understandings and expectations etc in the literature as the basis of evaluation the choice of this particular framework is discussed in section 1 a useful function of social capital is to foster collective actions of the community the latter can be measured by the trust among members of the community one can perhaps conjecture that a drop in trust may signal a rise in social disintegration using the survey data on generalized trust provided by the world values surveys various predictions on trade and generalized trust reported in section 2 can be tested the present paper finds that the openness of a economy ceteris paribus does not always lead to a decrease in generalized trust income distribution is found to play an important role in this openness trust relationship maldistribution of income reduces the positive impact of openness on generalized trust hence when a more open economy raises the income inequality of a divided nation the chance of social disintegration may increase section 3 concludes with a discussion of results 2 theoretical analysis and predictionsrather than using the conventional utility or social welfare function to evaluate the aforementioned issues the present paper uses output performance as a criterion to evaluate the impacts of different social values in other words social values are considered here as part of the so called social capital discussed further that aids production 1literature surveyrecently it is increasingly common for social scientists to use the term social capital the stock of norms values civic traditions conventions etc that constrain a person s actions to explain collective action in a community coleman 1988 defines social capital as people s capacity to work voluntarily together similar to the concept of capital the stock of social capital is productive because it reduces market transactions cost 2 most researchers e g stiglitz 2000 agree that this kind of civic cooperation is the foundation of the nation s informal institution that governs market exchanges and glues the community together the previous discussion can be summarized by the following function forumla omitted see article image where v is voluntary cooperation k is social capital and is a country specific variable in the literature fukuyama 1995 and dasgupta 2000 ascribe the ability to cooperate voluntarily to the trust among the people fukuyama and dasgupta define trust as the common expectation of individuals that others behavior in the community will be cooperative

economic freedom and social capital this article brings together two growing literatures social capital and economic freedom to examine whether economic freedom contributes to social capital more specifically using us state level data from 1986 to 2004 and both ols and system gmm dynamic panel estimation we find that there is no clear trade off between economic freedom and either the level or growth of social capital

a continuous review model for an inventory system with two supply modes in this paper we develop an approximate model of an inventory control system in which there exist two options for resupply with one having a shorter lead time because the optimal policy appears to be extremely complex we consider a reasonable extension of the standard q r policy to allow for two different lot sizes q1 and q2 and two different reorder levels r1 and r2 expressions for the expected on hand inventory and the expected backorders are developed and a procedure for determining the policy parameters is given the model is validated by simulation and calculations are included which compare the average annual cost with and without emergency ordering

inventory control with information about supply conditions this paper presents an inventory control model which includes a markovian model of the supply system as that system evolves over time so do the replenishment leadtimes the optimal policy has the same structure as in standard models but its parameters change dynamically to reflect current supply conditions in this setting contrary to conventional wisdom a longer leadtime does not necessarily imply more inventory the leadtime is important but so is a concept we call order coverage

is trust the missing root of institutions education and development we report evidence that trust is the missing root relating education institutions and economic development we observe that more trust both increases education and improves legal and bureaucratic institutions which in turn spurs economic development we substantiate this intuition with a series of regressions that provide evidence that trust determines both education and the quality of institutions and that education and institutions in turn affect gdp per capita

a procurement decision support system in business volume discount environments emergence of a new discount pricing schedule called business volume discount becomes a major obstacle for procurement managers in finding the best purchasing strategy in the context of business volume discount a supplier offers discounts on total dollar amount of sales volume not on the quantity or variety of the products purchased from the supplier this paper describes a procurement decision support system pdss that has been successfully implemented to improve the purchasing activities of regional bell telephone companies in most purchasing operations a flexible procurement plan is considered a necessity because of the uncertainties associated with product demand and procurement budget pdss provides this flexibility by combining two different purchasing strategies purchasing on an annual commitment basis and on an as ordered basis although the development of the system is motivated by a particular application procurement of transmission plug in in one of the regional telephone companies the system is being used for a variety of procurement decisions involving business volume discount in the telecommunications industry the results of the implementation indicate that cost savings of up to 15 are achieved pdss use is not limited to the companies in the telecommunications industry the pdss model is applicable to any organization having a centralized procurement operation with business volume discount

valuing operational flexibility under exchange rate risk in this paper we develop a stochastic dynamic programming formulation for the valuation of global manufacturing strategy options with switching costs overall we adopt a hierarchical approach first exchange rates are modeled as stochastic diffusion processes that exhibit intercountry correlation second the firm s global manufacturing strategy determines options for alternative product designs as well as supply chain network designs product options introduce international supply flexibility supply chain network options determine the firm s manufacturing flexibility through production capacity and supply chain network linkages third switching costs determine the cost of operational hedging i e the costs associated with reducing downside risks overall the firm maximizes its expected discounted global after tax value through the exercise of product and supply chain network options and or through exploitation of operational flexibility contingent on exchange rate realizations in this environment the firm must trade off fixed operating costs switching costs and the economic benefits derived from exploiting differentials in factor costs and corporate tax rates a multinomial approximation of correlated exchange rate processes is proposed that leads to a consistent and tractable lattice model for this compound option valuation problem we then demonstrate how the global manufacturing strategy planning model framework can be utilized to analyze financial and operational hedging strategies

periodic review production models with variable capacity random yield and uncertain demand we investigate a production planning problem in a periodic review environment with variable production capacity random yields and uncertain demand the implications of random yields and variable capacity for lot sizing previously have been explored separately but not jointly many production environments are likely to be subject to both types of uncertainties to minimize the total discounted expected costs production holding and shortage costs we formulate the problem as a stochastic dynamic program for the finite horizon problem we prove that the objective function is quasi convex and that the structure of the optimal policy is characterized by a single critical point for the initial stock level at each period that is if the initial stock is greater than this critical point the optimal planned production is zero otherwise it is greater than zero expressions for solving the critical point and the optimal planned production are obtained we further show that the solution for the finite horizon problem converges to that of the infinite horizon problem

the design of supply contracts as a problem of delegation we consider the design of a supply contract as a problem of delegation in a buying firm in general the agent who acts on behalf of a principal in the firm cannot be assumed to transform her information in probability estimates like the principal would do possessing the same information in the investigated case of incomplete information the design of contracts is affected by the beliefs about characteristics of the supplier therefore it is important to analyze in which way the expected profit depends on these probabilities in order to find the principal s optimal instruction the best instruction is determined by a trade off between the costs due to the time the principal spends on dealing with the problem and formulating the instructions and the costs due to a suboptimal menu of contracts offered by the agent

social capital one or many definition and measurement three families of social capital concepts are discussed fa1 trust fa2 ease of cooperation and fa3 network in the language of game theory social capital is the excess propensity to play cooperative solutions in prisoners dilemma games the three families lead to different definitions and thus to different measurement methods some measures are theory near while others are easy to use proxies it is shown that all definitions and measures are related the social capital dream is that all definitions try to catch aspects of the same phenomenon so that all measures tap the same latent variable it is discussed whether this dream is likely to come true

exchange rates and prices the adjustment of relative prices to exchange rate movements is explained in an industrial organization approach given labor costs in the respective currencies exchange rate movements change costs for firms selling in the home market and thus disturb the industry equilibrium the extent of absolute and relative price adjustment is shown to depend on market integration product substitutability the relative number of domestic and foreign firms and the market structure the impact of exchange rates on prices is illustrated in a variety of approaches including the cournot a dixit and j stiglitz 1977 and s salop 1979 models some empirical evidence is offered in support of the theory copyright 1987 by american economic association

causality in the suburbanization of population and employment abstract using the slope of the density function as a measure of centralization we find that suburbanization of the residential population is enhanced by rising income and suburbanization of employment in the transportation communication and public utilities and service sectors and by the failure of manufacturing to decentralize suburbanization of population is only a positive force in promoting decentralization of the service and retail sectors however there are a number of interesting interactions between decentralization of some industrial sectors and suburbanization of other sectors overall our results differ significantly from those of previous studies which failed to disaggregate employment by industry and which aggregated change over decennial rather than annual time intervals

influence of dependency between demands and returns in a reverse logistics system we consider two reverse logistics systems where returned products are as good as new for the first system the product return flow is independent of the demand flow we prove that the optimal policy is of base stock type and we establish monotonicity results for the optimal base stock levels with respect to the system parameters arrival rate production rate return rate production cost lost sale cost return cost and holding cost we also provide an efficient algorithm to compute the optimal base stock level for the second system demands and returns are strongly correlated a satisfied demand induces a product return after a stochastic return lead time with a certain probability when the return lead time is null we extend the results obtained for the first system when the return lead time is positive the optimal control problem is more complex and we do not prove that the optimal policy is of base stock type however we provide a framework to analyse base stock policies finally we carry out a numerical study on many scenarios to investigate the impact of ignoring dependency between demands and returns we observe that ignoring this dependency yields to non negligible cost increase