Exploring the Personal Histories of the Top Executives of US Firms Using a Quantitative Approach: Is There a Geographical Relationship with Corporate Headquarters,and Does It Influence Firm Performance?

This paper analyses where top executives were born and where they attended university to uncover regional groupings of the most influential executives that shape corporate culture and strategy in the United States. Within the context of this paper, it is argued that the personal histories of top executives influence their decision‐making abilities, and thus corporate culture. It was found that intra‐regional, intra‐state, and intra‐city links were noteworthy factors in executive selection. Distances were higher, and percentages of intra‐regional links were lower for more profitable and higher growth firms. This indicates that more competitive firms acquire executives that have experienced different institutions during their lives and university educations. On the other hand, less profitable and lower growth firms are more likely to obtain executives embedded in similar institutions that already exist within the firm. The results suggest that key choices made by corporate America are influenced in part by geography far more complex than its own operations.     

Canada and the United States—Trading Partners and Transfer Pricing Opponents?

Given the significant trading relationships between Canada and the United States, their transnational corporations and their tax authorities share more than a border. However, differences in transfer pricing regulations, tax rates, and regulatory enforcement philosophies have exacerbated many existing risks, and created new risks for executives in these corporations. These risks must be managed proactively, yet attempts at risk management are often incompatible with one tax authority or the other. Assuming that an operational transfer pricing framework is in place, there are several proactive strategies available to mitigate transfer pricing risk and potentially satisfy both tax authorities. An operational framework and proactive strategies, including documentation and advance pricing agreements, are discussed from the Canadian and US perspective, including expert interviews.     

Dealing with globalisation at the regional and local level: the case of contemporary containerization

This paper considers the challenges that ocean container companies face in developing global operations in the ocean and land realms. The recent horizontal and vertical integration of the ocean carriers and the subsequent formation of global networks have taken place for the transport of goods at sea. Conformity in operations is to be expected in the globalisation process; however, there is less conformity of operations on land. The cooperation strategies at sea appear to break down when the goods reach the port. Each shipping company has its own network of agents and agreements with shippers, freight forwarders or land transportation companies to handle goods on land. Each also has varying logistics provision abilities. Moreover, the land areas vary according to simple geography, economic development, transport infrastructure and institutional constraints. Of these differences, we suggest that institutional constraints create the greatest challenge to the ocean carriers adopting a universal land strategy to service their customers. The paper focuses on three major areas for containerisation—East Asia, Northwest Europe and North America—and draws on interviews conducted with shipping industry executives in Norfolk (Va.), Rotterdam, Le Havre, Hong Kong and Singapore. The paper ends with a look at the land operations of Maersk Sealand as an example of a company with varying capabilities and strategies for the landward transport of containers.     

清代江南棉布字号的竞争应对之术

清代江南基本由徽商开设的棉布字号,谋求经营之道,单个字号运用各种竞争手段,慎选布师把好收布质量关,联号经营扩大和占有市场份额,品牌战略开拓和扩大销路;字号群体则从事前防范,到经营规范,到事后惩处,字号资本主依靠自身的力量、同业的约束和官府的权威,在应对字号商标的假冒方面,作了种种努力.而当与加工雇佣者发生矛盾形成冲突时,更是齐心协力,以谋求商业利润的最大化;与加工管理者踹坊主发生利益纠纷时,又坚持维护拥有自由选择加工作坊是权利,以掌握经营主动权.     

Economic conditions and forecasting of Australian elections revisited

In a recent paper in this journal, Jackman and Marks (1994) examine the relationship between economic conditions and election outcomes in Australia using data from 1949 onwards. Their analysis, however, is in my opinion technically inadequate because they seem to have overlooked the possible existence of autocorrelation in their models. In this paper, I present a re‐examination of some of their models which takes autocorrelation into account and which results in improvements in both the fit of the models and of their overall predictive accuracy. Inflation is shown to be a more definite influence on vote shares than are changes in unemployment rates. Also, I show that Jackman and Marks’ conclusion that the 1993 election was an exceptional one in the way in which economic conditions affected aggregate vote shares is incorrect, and that the election result was actually quite well within the normal range in the extent to which it was accurately predicted by economic conditions.     

Authoritarian power in space,time and exile

Autocrats have been shown to exert influence over their populations and dissidents abroad through strategies such as ‘transnational repression’ or ‘diaspora engagement’ policies, demonstrating that authoritarian power carries across borders. But existing work on extra-territorial authoritarian power has tended to view state power as a stand-alone variable that endows regimes with a relatively free hand to make their own diaspora policies. This is despite that studies of authoritarianism inside states, including those observing the ‘dynamics of contention,’ have consistently highlighted the relational and contingent nature of authoritarian power. This paper asks whether the iterative dynamics of contention that describe regime-opposition relations within state boundaries endure between authoritarian regimes and their exiles? It brings together the literatures on extra-territorial authoritarian power and the topology of power with that on contentious politics in authoritarian regimes to undertake a case study on the relationship between the Syrian government and the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. It finds that extra-territorial authoritarian is relational and contingent on the political context and its recipients, and shares many of the characteristics of authoritarian power inside state boundaries.     

Geographical Leadership Mobility and Policy Isomorphism: Narrowing the Regional Inequality of Social Spending in China

The link between geographical leadership mobility and policy isomorphism is rarely discussed in the extant literature. We argue that the geographical leadership mobility encourages local executives to converge their development experiences in their original working jurisdictions and their current positions. The distinct Chinese political personnel system provides an ideal environment that allows researchers to examine the isomorphic effects of geographical leadership mobility. This research builds a dataset of local social spending between 1998 and 2011 as well as a database of the leadership mobility history of provincial executives in China. Results of the spatial panel analysis (SPA) demonstrate that the geographical leadership mobility (i.e., horizontal, top-down, and bottom-up) of governors stimulates the regional isomorphism of provincial education and health care spending. The empirical findings affirm the effectiveness of the effort of the Chinese central government in narrowing the regional inequality of social welfare provision through the geographical mobility of local leadership.     

Geographic earnings inequality by race, 1960–2016

Geographic inequality and racial disharmony are considered major factors in America's political divergence. This paper calculates geographic earnings inequality from 1960 to 2016 separately by race. From 2000 to 2016, White geographic inequality was significantly higher, and Hispanic geographic inequality was significantly lower, than Black and Asian geographic inequality. White geographic inequality rose from 1980 to 2008. Black and Hispanic geographic inequality fell from 1960 to 1980. Rural controls explain substantial shares of White geographic inequality in all years. Region and rural controls account for large shares of Black geographic inequality, especially from 1960 to 1990. Post-1990, geographic inequality changes are largely explained by changes in overall earnings inequality, but 1960–1990 changes are not. Between-race differences in geographic inequality translate into high-income metropolitan statistical areas having had, since 1980, significantly smaller shares of Whites among their low-income residents.     

Topping Off and Bottoming Out: Setting Budget Priorities Through Executive Power

This article examines the role of the institutional power of executives in public budgeting; specifically, how executives change spending on particular budget items. Leveraging extant theories of the policy process concerning preference expression, attention, and institutions, we argue that executives deepen large cuts and boost large increases in budgetary change. The strictures of the budgetary process force trade-offs for executives in preference expression such that increases to preferred categories typically require decreases in other categories. Literatures in public policy and political representation suggest that all executives would like to express fiscal preferences, thereby contributing to categorical budget oscillations; however, not all executives are created equal. We employ quantile regression to examine whether the institutional strength of governors determine cuts, stasis, and expansion in spending across all budget functions in the American states between 1985 and 2009. Our model includes a host of political and economic variables found in the literature of fiscal policymaking, such as partisanship and divided government. The desire to change policy may be widely shared across executives, but we find that the ability to “top off” categorical increases and bottom out categorical decreases is a function of an executive's capacity to call attention to preferred categories via agenda-setting power and to secure those changes via veto power. The findings show strong governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process.     

Layering,Administrative Change and National Paths to Europeanization: The Case of the Water Framework Directive

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) can be seen as a reform effort that intervenes in the member states' domestic administrative system by obliging “whole of government” measures across sectoral lines of authority and levels of government. This puts pressure on the sectoral authorities to coordinate their activities. In this article we ask the following questions: How do the state executives respond to the WFD? How can we understand their behaviour and action choices in the implementation of EU law? And third: What can our findings tell us about changes to the European administrative system? This article reveals that despite resistance and strong cognitive priors among the state executives, the WFD logic of ecosystem-based management is gaining a foothold as an administrative principle. Thus, in order to explain changes in the administrative system, we need to take the regional level into account. Our findings suggest that attention needs to be paid to the role of complex, multi-level structures, which includes the regional, river basin district level in the development of a European administrative order.     

How real estate became ‘just another asset class’: the financialization of the investment strategies of Dutch institutional investors

The managers of a growing wall of money are continuously searching for investment opportunities. The financialization literature describes how this mobile capital puts pressure on commodities, debt, public services and economic activities to transform into investable, tradable, financial products. Regarding real estate, these investigations show how opaque, local, non-standardized goods, highly depending on both local legislation and developments, have been transformed into liquid, globally traded financial assets. By analysing the real estate investment strategies of Dutch institutional investors since the 1980s, this paper shows how a quantitative framework increasingly provides the basis for institutional investors’ real estate investment strategies. Direct ownership of properties has been exchanged into shares of properties, that is, fictitious capital, creating an impetus for ‘objectified numbers’ to measure the performance of these indirect investments. As knowledge about real estate has been outsourced, Dutch institutional investors now perceive real estate increasingly as ‘just another asset class’, thereby increasing leverage and volatility. This paper not only shows how finance ‘financialized’ itself by adopting a quantitative investment perspective, but it also offers an empirical account on how investment properties are transformed into financial assets that put pressure on state agencies to mobilize urban planning to deliver more of such assets.     

Lawmakers' Preferences for Bureaucratic Discretion: The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996

Research on delegation stresses that chief executives are “privileged actors” well positioned to influence bureaucratic policy decisions. Therefore, legislative coalitions provide less authority to agencies when they disagree with executives about what policy should look like. Otherwise, executives would take advantage of voluminous agency discretion to direct bureaucrats to make decisions inconsistent with legislative coalitions’ policy goals. I stress that, in the U.S. lawmaking system, congressional committees are also privileged actors. As such—as with the president—those who experience policy disagreement with committees should wish to limit bureaucratic discretion. In addition, I examine individual lawmakers’ preferences for bureaucratic discretion to evaluate this perspective on agency design. As policy disagreement increases between senators and the Senate committee that oversees the agency/agencies receiving authority, senators prefer to limit the volume of discretion agencies receive.     

晚清苏沪民间资本组合与股份公司经营形态

晚清时期是中国民间资本重新组合的重要历史时期。在这一时期 ,集中于城镇的各种手工业组织对资本的需求增大 ,而拥有资金的商人又缺乏投资渠道。因此 ,在经济相对富裕的苏沪地区 ,民间资本开始通过招股与认股的方式组合成为股份公司。各股份公司成立后 ,在股金管理、红利分配和组织机构等方面均形成了新的体制。同时 ,随着股份公司的建立 ,传统的生产和销售等经营方式也开始发生转变     

TRANSNATIONAL COLLABORATIONS, LOCAL COMPETITIVENESS: MAPPING THE GEOGRAPHIES OF FILMMAKING IN/THROUGH HONG KONG

ABSTRACT. Through the Global Production Networks (GPN) analytical lens, this paper shows how politico-economic developments in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia are instrumental in developing Hong Kong as a premier filmmaking centre, and how Hong Kong-based filmmakers have to weave new cross-scalar production networks and target new markets so as to remain competitive. The broader objective of the paper is to contribute to extant debates on urban-based, cluster-driven policies by showing how cities, in developing their industrial capacities, need not necessarily be in competition with other places at different geographical scales. Rather, as the empirical materials evince, cities should collaborate to compete. Apart from the presentation of available historical and statistical materials, the discussion is informed by twenty-seven in-depth interviews with Hong Kong-based film workers, government agency executives and film industrial association heads, as well as an interview with a Singapore-based film producer with ongoing production linkages with Hong Kong-based film production companies.     

An empirical examination of shift-share instruments

Bartik's (1991, 1993) approach to identifying shocks in demand to regional economies has been used extensively for nearly 30 years. We chronicle the development of Bartik-type shift-share instruments and examine the empirical performance of alternative versions that use different combinations of national shift and local share variables in their construction. We offer three main findings. First, instruments constructed from shares that omit employment in nontraded sectors empirically dominate versions that include total employment. Second, industrial sectors with high average shares and low variation across areas are more likely to be nontraded and endogenous. This suggests placing large weights on nontraded sector shares worsens both relevance and potential endogeneity. Finally, we demonstrate national shifters other than employment, such as prices and wages, can be used to construct instruments with unique and relevant explanatory power.     

The changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector in metropolitan and rural regions, 1976–1997

This paper documents the changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector over a 22‐year period (1976–1997). It does so by looking at the shifts in employment and differences in production worker wages across different levels of the rural/urban hierarchy—central cities, adjacent suburbs, medium and small cities and rural areas. The analysis demonstrates that the most dramatic shifts in manufacturing employment were from the central cities of large metropolitan regions to their suburbs. Paralleling trends in the United States, rural regions of Canada have increased their share of manufacturing employment. Rising rural employment shares were due to declining employment shares of small cities and, to a lesser degree, large urban regions. Increasing rural employment was particularly prominent in Quebec, where employment shifted away from the Montreal region. The changing fortunes of rural and urban areas were not the result of across‐the‐board shifts in manufacturing employment, but were the net outcome of differing locational patterns across industries. In contrast to the situation in the United States, wages in Canada do not consistently decline, moving down the rural/urban hierarchy from the largest cities to the most rural parts of the country. Only after controlling for the types of manufacturing industries found in rural and urban regions is it apparent that wages decline with the size of place .     

The Waikato River: Changing Properties of a Living Māori Ancestor

In Māori cosmology, rivers and other waterways are conceptualised as living ancestors, who have their own life force and spiritual strength. The special status of rivers in Māori society also explains why they are sometimes separated from other Māori claims to natural resources of which they were dispossessed in the 19th century. Until recently, Māori were often eager to contend that ownership of rivers is not their prime interest, but instead, they argued that they feel obliged and responsible to keep rivers fresh, clean, and flowing. This perspective, however, changed under the impact of a new government policy of selling shares in energy corporations that use freshwater and geothermal resources for energy production. In this paper, I provide an ethnohistorical account of the Waikato River and show how conceptions of this ‘ancestral river’ changed in the course of colonial and postcolonial history, more specifically in response to a recent shift in government policy. In 2008, a joint management agreement was signed between the government and Waikato Māori for a ‘clean and healthy river’, leaving the issue of ‘ownership’ undecided. Only two years later, however, Māori felt forced to claim ownership when the government moved to sell shares of power‐generating energy companies located along the river, which effectively transformed their ‘ancestor’ into a property object.     

海外华商参与“一带一路”建设问卷调查研究

论文采用问卷调查方法,以董事长和总经理级别的华商作为主要调查对象,总结分析华商参与“一带一路”的态度、动机、需求及困难和风险。调查发现:第一,“一带一路”倡议得到了绝大多数华商的积极支持和热情响应。华商对“一带一路”倡议总体认识到位,但部分华商对“一带一路”性质认知存有偏差。第二,华商参与“一带一路”的主要动机是民族情感需求和经济利益驱动,两者得到满足或平衡时,参与动力最强,积极性最高。第三,华商参与“一带一路”普遍存在渠道不畅、项目对接难、融资难度大、跨境资金流动难、汇率波动大等实际困难。第四,华商在参与“一带一路”中主要面临政治、经济和法律三大风险。建议引导华商参与“一带一路”,要充分考虑华商的特殊性,注重情利等值原则,让华商在参与“一带一路”建设中情利双收,实现共赢。     

Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics

Gender bending has been a staple of the medium of shōjo manga, Japanese girls’ comics, as best exemplified by cross-dressing “girl knight” characters and “Boys Love” stories, whose plots focus on romance between effeminate beautiful young men. The imaginary space created through the representation of these figures shares many traits in common with another typical feature of shōjo comics, namely their exoticisation of Europe. Both have been used as simultaneously escapist and subversive strategies, as a refuge from contemporary social norms and a platform for critical reflection. In this article, I aim to problematise our understanding of the connection between gender bending and exoticism in shōjo manga through an analysis of the representation of one specific aspect of European culture – namely, the Christian religion – in the genre of Boys Love manga.     

Why Russian Peasants Remain in Collective Farms: A Household Perspective on Agricultural Restructuring

This paper seeks to understand what motivates collective farm employees-share-holders to remain in collective structures rather than exercise their legally sanctioned right to leave with land and property shares. On the basis of a 1999 survey of 181 collective farm households and analysis of regional agricultural policies in Leningrad and Saratov oblasts, the paper examines divergent overt and covert benefits that employees derive from association with market-oriented versus less reformed collective agricultural producers. The paper relates the structure of employee incentives to regional-level agricultural policies and to the divergent effects these policies have on the depth and pattern of structural transformations of agricultural production. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, Q10, Q15. 5 figures, 15 tables, 38 references.