Global Reach. Global Knowledge.

Delgado, Mercedes, and Christian H.M. Ketels
May 2012

No abstract available

Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elger Publishing, Inc., 2012

Environmental Federalism in the European Union and the United States

Vogel, David, Michael W. Toffel, Diahanna Post, and Nazli Z. Uludere Aragon
April 2012

The United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy implications. This chapter compares the role of central and local authorities in the U.S. and the EU in formulating environmental regulations in three areas: automotive emissions for health-related (criteria) pollutants, packaging waste, and global climate change. Automotive emissions are relatively centralized in both political systems. In the cases of packaging waste and global climate change, regulatory policy-making is shared in the EU but is primarily the responsibility of local governments in the U.S. Thus, in some important areas, regulatory policy-making is more centralized in the EU. The most important role local governments play in the regulatory process is to help diffuse stringent local standards through more centralized regulations, a dynamic that has recently become more important in the EU than in the U.S.

Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elger Publishing, Inc., 2012

2010

A History of Irish Economic Thought

Boylan, Thomas, Renee Prendergast, and John D. Turner, eds.
September 2010

For a country that can boast a distinguished tradition of political economy from Sir William Petty through Swift, Berkeley, Hutcheson, Burke, and Cantillon through to that of Longfield, Cairnes, Bastable, Edgeworth, Geary, and Gorman, it is surprising that no systematic study of Irish political economy has been undertaken. In this book the contributors redress this glaring omission in the history of political economy, for the first time providing an overview of developments in Irish political economy from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Logistically this is achieved through the provision of individual contributions from a group of recognized experts, both Irish and international, who address the contribution of major historical figures in Irish political economy along the analysis of major thematic issues, schools of thought, and major policy debates within the Irish context over this extended period.
Routledge, 2010

Family Business in West Germany since the 1960s

Lubinski, Christina
September 2010

From small start-ups to global corporations, family-owned businesses were the main pillar of West Germany's economic growth after World War II. They continue to shape the corporate landscape to this day. This book offers a path-breaking historical analysis of the peculiarities of their corporate governance, placing them within the wider context of the economic and social history of Germany. Based on both quantitative data and archivally based case studies, this book explores how the relationship between the family and the firm changed in different industries over time. These changes did not-as often assumed-result in the decline of family businesses but instead gave rise to a different kind of competitive and internationally oriented "Mittelstand." The study integrates approaches from new institutional economics, cultural anthropology, and family sociology in order to understand this critical turning point in German family business history. The book analyzes changes in ownership and management, dynastic, and succession strategies, as well as the "psychology of ownership," with detailed case studies of large family businesses. The book offers a compelling explanation for the strong ownership concentration seen in German business and reveals the malleable relationship between family and business. It provides rich empirical evidence that offers a new interpretation of family-influenced businesses as a dynamic force embedded in the economic, institutional, and cultural setting of Germany.
C. H. Beck Verlag, 2010

Business Groups in Historical Perspectives

Book Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups edited by Asli M. Colpan, Takashi Hikino, and James R. Lincoln
Jones, Geoffrey, and Asli M. Colpan
August 2010

Business groups-collections of legally independent firms interconnected by multiple economic and social linkages that exhibit widely diversified product portfolios-are viewed as the prototypical large-enterprise form in contemporary emerging economies. By exploring the evolution of the diversified business groups organized around British trading companies from the late eighteenth century until today, this chapter demonstrates that such organizational forms were also present in developed economies historically, and even today. In analyzing this historical evidence, the chapter first shows how organizational forms of business groups were employed over long time periods to control large and diversified multinational complexes. It then shows that these British business groups possessed competitive advantages and management skills residing in contacts, knowledge, information, and relationships that sustained long-lasting and successful international businesses and that gave them genuine efficiency-enhancing roles. A major contribution of this chapter is to demonstrate that its theoretical conclusion based on the historical experiences of business groups built up by the British-based trading companies with their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins comes close to mainstream assessments reached by the research on business groups in contemporary emerging markets.

International Differences in Well-Being

Book Chapter in The New Perspectives on Regulation edited by Ed Diener, John Helliwell and Daniel Kahneman

Di Tella, Rafael, and Robert MacCulloch
March 2010

We test for whether, once "basic needs" are satisfied, there is happiness adaptation to further gains in income using three data sets. Individual German Panel Data from 1985 to 2000, and data on the well-being of over 600,000 people in a panel of European countries from 1975 to 2002, shows different patterns of adaptation to income across the rich and poor. We find evidence that for wealthy Germans, and for the rich half of European nations, higher levels of per capita income don't buy greater happiness. The reason appears to be adaptation. However even for the rich half of European nations such habituation may take over five years so the happiness gains that they experience, while not permanent, can still be relatively long-lasting. Finally we study a cross section of nations in 2005 from the World Gallup Poll and find that the past 45 years of economic growth (from 1960 to 2005) in the rich half of nations has not brought happiness gains above those that were already in place once the 1960s standard of living had been achieved. However in the poorest half of nations we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the happiness gains they have experienced from the past 45 years of growth have been the same as the gains that they experienced from growth prior to the 1960s.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2010

One Report: Integrated Reporting for a Sustainable Strategy

Eccles, Robert G., and Michael Krzus
March 2010

New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., forthcoming.

Creating Value through Corporate Restructuring: Case Studies in Bankruptcies, Buyouts, and Breakups

Gilson, Stuart C.
January 2010

A collection of case studies illustrates real-world techniques, implementation, and strategies on corporate restructuring. Over the period 1981-1998, public companies with combined assets of over half a trillion dollars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Over the same period, over 400 public companies underwent corporate spin-offs, divesting businesses valued at more than $250 billion. Each of these companies, and all of these dollars, were in some way or another involved in corporate restructuring. Gilson's case studies have been used extensively in executive programs and are perfect tools to refer to when faced with real-world corporate restructuring issues.

2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.

2009

Of Gods and Small Things: Closing the Gap in Corporate Entrepreneurship

Book Chapter in India 2010

Chakravorti, Bhaskar
December 2009

Entrepreneurship is frequently associated with a "small thing"-a venture that challenges the status quo and relentlessly pursues opportunity. The large established firms, the "gods," have forever coveted these small things-through incubation, financial support, or acquisition-in their quest for the Next Big Thing. The problem with corporate entrepreneurship, of course, has been that the entrepreneur must deal with the challenges of securing resources and support within an organization focused on operations that are "at scale." Entrepreneurs with miniscule, and often negative, financial contributions compete with mature businesses that are the primary revenue generators for the firm. Revenue is power, and for senior management taking their eyes off the mature businesses can be extremely costly. As a result, corporate entrepreneurship languishes despite its importance to the company's future. I argue that there may be a geographic solution to this dilemma. In such a solution, a fast-growing emerging market plays a central role in orchestrating a complete strategy for corporate entrepreneurship. I also argue that it is time to go beyond the traditional framing of an emerging market. The prescription of this chapter is to think about a more ambitious role for such markets: establish a strategic business unit, designated as a "disruptive innovation hub," that is charged with first penetrating the emerging market with products tailored to local needs and conditions and then leveraging that experience to develop disruptive innovations targeted at a global market. Scale and entrepreneurship-god and small things-can, indeed, cohabit and thrive in the developing world. This combination can become one of its major contributions to the global economy.

Business Standard Books, 2009

Mental Health in the Aftermath of Conflict

Book Chapter in Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict, edited by Michelle Garfinkel and Stergios Skaperdas

Do, Quy-Toan, and Lakshmi Iyer
December 2009

We survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. We highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual exposure to conflict, and the issues related to making causal inferences from observed correlations. We illustrate how some of these issues can be overcome in a study of mental health in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mental health is measured using a clinically validated scale; conflict exposure is proxied by administrative data on war casualties instead of being self-reported. We find that there are no significant differences in overall mental health across areas that are affected by ethnic conflict to a greater or lesser degree.

Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Book chapter in Producer Dynamics: New Evidence from Micro Data, edited by Timothy Dunne, J. Bradford Jensen, and Mark J. Roberts.

The paper investigates the U.K. retail sector using store and firm-level data between 1998 and 2003. First, we present the first exhaustive description of the U.K. retail sector using micro data sources. Second, in the spirit of Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (2002), we look at the contributions of firm entry and exit for the productivity growth of the sector. Third, we provide some new evidence of the recent shift of large U.K. retailers toward smaller retail formats, which followed the introduction of new and more restrictive planning constraints for the opening of large retail stores. We suggest that this change in the store configurations of the major retailers might be one of the factors behind the recent TFP slowdown experienced by the industry in the U.K.

The University of Chicago Press, 2009

Global Capital and National Institutions: Crisis and Choice in the International Financial Architecture

Alfaro, Laura
October 2009

All managers face a business environment in which international and macroeconomic phenomena matter. International capital flows can significantly affect countries' development efforts and provide clear investment opportunities for businesses. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the world witnessed an explosion in capital flows at the global level. Gross foreign assets and liabilities stood at two or three times GDP for many countries, as compared to just two decades ago. This explosive growth, especially in emerging markets, has been fueled both by changes in world politics (e.g., the end of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, shifting political climate in China, and political changes in Latin America and Asia) and advances in technology. Private capital flows-debt finance, equity capital, and foreign direct investment (FDI)-became larger than current and past official capital flows. This new era of foreign capital mobility has also been characterized by low interest rates in industrial countries, growing external imbalances in the U.S. economy, and the rise of China, all of which posed new challenges to policy management. In 2009, the global economy remained mired in a deep crisis following the subprime meltdown in the U.S. The situation was also a true testimony of how intertwined individual economies had become over the years. The effect of policies to deal with the ongoing global crisis and new policy choices remain to be seen. Understanding these phenomena-the determinants of capital flows, the effects of foreign capital on host countries, the impact of exchange-rate movements, and the genesis of financial and currency crises-is a crucial aspect to making informed managerial decisions. The cases in this book have been designed to give students an appreciation of the critical role of institutions and policies in affecting patterns of international capital flows and the abilities of government to manage them effectively. The case studies are tied together by two broad themes: (1) the determinants and effects of international capital, and (2) policy-makers' management of these flows. The cases approach these themes by exploring institutional detail in deep local context. The cases expose students to recent key events that have shaped the way economists think about these subjects. The events covered have a clear global perspective as the cases are set in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the United States. The cases also cover events that occurred during the last three decades as not only do they affect the business environment that managers face today but they also hold important lessons. An important feature the cases reveal is the cyclical nature of international capital flows. Global Capital and National Institutions: Crisis and Choice in the International Financial Architecture is composed of three intellectual segments: (1) Determinants and Effects of International Capital Flows, (2) Policies and Strategies for Harnessing the Benefits of Financial Globalization, and (3) Challenges and Policies of Large Economies. Chapter I presents a detailed overview of the cases and readings in the module and relates the cases included to the main patterns of international capital flows in the last thirty years. Finally, the chapter also presents the key insights from the field of international economics covered in the cases as well as the current state of debate among policy-makers.

The Decline and Renewal of British Multinational Banking

Book chapter in Business in Britain in the Twentieth Century

Jones, G., and Lucy Newton
October 2009

This chapter discusses the renaissance of British multinational banking from the 1990s. British commercial banks had pioneered multinational banking during the 19th century, but they were unable to build on this legacy during the new wave of global banking that began in the 1960s with the advent of the Euromarkets. However, from the 1990s there was major restructuring and a much improved performance. The chapter explores the shifts in strategy and management that enabled HSBC and other British banks to become global leaders in contemporary multinational banking, at least until the global financial crisis, which began in 2007, raised fundamental questions about the future trajectory of the entire global financial system.

World Scientific Publishing Company

Company Strategy: Business Model Reconfiguration for Innovation and Internationalization

Casadesus-Masanell, Ramon, and Joan E. Ricart
September 2009

Competitiveness in Catalonia: Looking Ahead-A Report of the Center SP-SP at IESE Business School

2008

New Evidence on Cluster Organizations (pdf)

Preface to Automotive Clustering in Europe

Ketels, Christian H.M.
December 2008

Darmstadt, Germany: Europäischer Wirtschaftsverlag GmbH, 2008.

2007

Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance

Abdelal, Rawi
May 2007

The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy. In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s--trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies--had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier. How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, "managed" globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007

The Empire in One City? Liverpool's Inconvenient Imperial Past

Book chapter in Return to Imperial Trade? John Holt & Co (Liverpool) Ltd. as a Contemporary Free-Standing Company, 1945-2006

Decker, Stephanie
September 2007

John Holt & Co is one of a group of unlikely survivors from the imperial era: medium-sized firms that continue to trade between Europe and Africa and whose continued existence is only rarely commented upon. The Liverpool-based John Holt & Co with its Nigerian subsidiary John Holt PLC is an interesting case for a pilot study because the company returned in 2001 to an organizational form that is known as free-standing company in the historical literature on imperial business. These companies only had a small head office in the metropolitan country, often in major port cities or the capital, which supervised the operations in another, normally less developed, country, where all business and investment took place. Although frequently associated with imperialism, there is reason to believe that John Holt is not an isolated case of a company assuming this form. Holt and others function as intermediaries between global business, which rarely invests in small African markets and where commercial practices are often complicated, heavily based on personal contacts, and incompatible with the structures of large multinationals.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming

2006

UK Competitiveness - Old Labour Market Institutions, New Collaborative Roles

Book chapter in Productive Partnerships: The Role of Employment Relations in Growing the UK Economy, edited by Tony Pilch, 12-23
Ketels, Christian H.M.
August 2006

London: The Smith Institute, 2006

Consumer Capitalism: Politics, Product Markets, and Firm Strategy in France and Germany

Trumbull, Gunnar
May 2006
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006

Die vernachlässigte macht der altmodischen face-to-face Kommunikation in Unternehmen und Betrieb: BMW im Gespräch (The Neglected Power of Old-Fashioned Face-to-Face Communication in the Firm and Factory)

Book chapter in Ferrum: Nachrichten aus der Eisenbibliothek
Fear, Jeffrey
May 2006

Ferrum : Nachrichten aus der Eisenbibliothek