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Over the past six months, much of the commercial real estate activity across markets has been comprised of lease renewals, many with restructured terms to capitalise on the tenant’s favourable position in the marketplace. With mounting optimism of an economic recovery on the horizon, this trend is increasing as scores of corporate space users are renewing existing leases to take advantage of rates before the pendulum swings back in the landlord’s favour. Although a renewal and restructure could potentially deliver significant occupancy cost savings, only those carefully considered and effectively negotiated offer tenants the most significant long‐term benefits. This paper provides guidelines for corporate tenants to determine whether a lease restructure is feasible and offers strategies for negotiating the best possible terms.

Boric acid has been used for many years as a catalyst inhibitor and crosslinking agent to increase the glass transition temperature of epoxy resins for printed circuit boards (PCB), as well as in the glass fibre reinforcement. Recent regulation related to boric acid and its salts by the ECHA, a regulatory agency in the EU, may limit the use of these materials. The purpose of this paper is to describe the implications of this new regulation and to propose an analytical procedure that is relevant to PCB's.

Potential analytical procedures, including dissolution in acid and aqueous extraction followed by boric acid titration, are discussed and evaluated.

The use of acid for the digestion of prepreg, laminates and PCBs has the potential to greatly overstate the concentration of boric acid in PCBs.

An aqueous extraction method (German DIN 38414‐4) gives results that represent a worst‐case leaching process. It is proposed that it becomes the official analytical method for printed circuit boards in order to comply with the ECHA regulation.

Measures of personality and organizational climate were subjected to three different analytical methods that extract patterns from data: Discriminant, Classification and Regression Trees, and neural network classification analysis. Risk, openness, rewards, and neuroticism (rather than conscientiousness) emerged as key variables in differentiating among three similar work groups. Results of the analyses support the central hypothesis of ASA theory of greater variance in personality across compared to within organizations and an interactionist paradigm between person and environment. Implications for ASA theory and for personnel selection are discussed.

In this paper, I demonstrate an alternative explanation to the development of the American electricity industry. I propose a social embeddedness approach (Granovetter, 1985, 1992) to interpret why the American electricity industry appears the way it does today, and start by addressing the following questions: Why is the generating dynamo located in well‐connected central stations rather than in isolated stations? Why does not every manufacturing firm, hospital, school, or even household operate its own generating equipment? Why do we use incandescent lamps rather than arc lamps or gas lamps for lighting? At the end of the nineteenth century, the first era of the electricity industry, all these technical as well as organizational forms were indeed possible alternatives. The centralized systems we see today comprise integrated, urban, central station firms which produce and sell electricity to users within a monopolized territory. Yet there were visions of a more decentralized electricity industry. For instance, a geographically decentralized system might have dispersed small systems based around an isolated or neighborhood generating dynamo; or a functionally decentralized system which included firms solely generating and transmitting the power, and selling the power to locally‐owned distribution firms (McGuire, Granovetter, and Schwartz, forthcoming). Similarly, the incandescent lamp was not the only illuminating device available at that time. The arc lamp was more suitable for large‐space lighting than incandescent lamps; and the second‐generation gas lamp ‐ Welsbach mantle lamp ‐ was much cheaper than the incandescent electric light and nearly as good in quality (Passer, 1953:196–197).

The institution of an annual series devoted to current and ongoing research in economics and business should be considered one of the notable developments during the period under review. Long standing need for such a reference not withstanding, there has been until this year no systematic attempt to organize a continuing series which concentrated on selected areas of ongoing research, especially adapted to the Jahrbucher format. By facilitating the publication of research papers which are longer than the conventional journal‐length article yet shorter than a monograph, publishing outlets available to scholars in the field have been infinitely expanded. Two years ago, the Royal Economic Society and the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain, developed an experimental series, published by Macmillan, entitled Surveys of Applied Economics. The JAI Press, Greenwich, Conn., has now come out with an annual series, which is expected to fill the gaps in at least seventeen areas of economic theory and business. These are briefly listed below, with pertinent bibliographical citations: Research in Economic Anthropology: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, George Dalton. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.00 ISBN 0‐89232‐040‐9; Research in Economic History: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul Uselding. vol. 1. Sept. 1976‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐001‐X; Research in Health Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Richard M. Scheffler. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐042‐7; Research in Human Capital and Development: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Ismail Sirageldin. vol. 1. June/July 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐019‐2; Research in International Business and Finance: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Robert G. Hawkins. vol. 1. May/June 1977‐ $23.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐031‐1; Research in Labor Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Ronald G. Ehrenberg. vol. 1. March 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐017‐6; Research in Law and Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Richard O. Zerbe. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐028‐1; Research in Marketing: An Annual Compilation in Research. Series editor, Jagdish N. Sheth. vol. 1. June 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐041‐9; Research in Philosophy and Technology: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul T. Durbin. vol. 1. March 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐022‐2; Research in Political Economy: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Paul Zarembka. vol. 1. Sept. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐020‐6; Research in Population Economics: An Annual Compilation of Research. Series editor, Julian L. Simon. vol. 1. April 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐018‐4; Applications of Management Science. Series editor, Matthew J. Sobel. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50. ISBN 0‐89232‐023‐0; Research in Econometrics. Series editor, Dennis J. Aigner. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐039‐7; Research in Experimental Economics. Series editor, Vernon L. Smith. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐030‐3; Research in Finance. Series editor, Haim Levy. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐043‐5; Research in Organizational Behavior. Series editor, Barry Staw. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐045‐1; Research in Public Policy and Management. Series editor, Colin Blaydon. vol. 1. 1977‐ $22.50 ISBN 0‐89232‐044‐3.

Reviews previous research on the announcement effects of changes in US Federal Reserve policies and presents a study of the impact of federal funds rate and discount rate changes since the current chairman took office (1988) on the treasury bills/bonds and stock markets. Uses event study methodology to show that there is no significant effect on cumulative excess returns for any of the three markets, although the treasury bill market displayed the greatest reaction; and that market reactions were similar for either type of rate change.

Despite considerable research on psychic distance (PD), research into the topic is confounded by a general failure to precisely define and fully operationalize the construct. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new measurement scale to assess psychic distance (the PD scale), and also to investigate the impact of the PD scale on the adaptation of international marketing strategies.

The paper uses data collected by mail questionnaire in a sample survey of 301 export firms. The results were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Various statistical tests show that the results are reliable and valid.

Findings reveal that psychic distance is a higher‐order construct composed of two dimensions: country distance and people distance. The results also indicate that both dimensions of the PD scale are positively and significantly associated with cultural distance and the adaptation of product, promotion, pricing and distribution strategies to the foreign market.

The paper develops a new scale, the PD scale, which is a measure of psychic distance and addresses a gap in the literature by testing its impact on the adaptation of the international marketing strategy.

Analyses the structural behaviour of money and capital market interest rates 1999‐2001 in the European Monetary Union. Finds that the positive correlations between interest rates of different time periods get stronger as the time periods get closer, derives the principal components which explain most of the variability and applies time series analysis to the model to produce forecasts which come very close to actual values. Develops a model of the Down Jones EURO STOXX financial sector index which also shows reliable forecasting power except for the Feb 2001 period when stock markets were “in turmoil”. Compares the returns for one‐month holdings of zero‐coupon European government bonds with different maturities for various return, risk and risk‐return measures; and finds that a one‐month holding of a two‐year bond is the best investment.

Somehow, without loading up on games or owning a sound card, the author has 28 CD‐ROMs at home, with more on the way. How did all these discs get there and what do they say (if anything) about the CD‐ROM marketplace? When are CD‐ROMs marvelous new publishing media, when are they essentially compact diskette replacements, and when are they wastes of good polycarbonate? The author goes through his motley collection, noting some highlights and some messy situations. After all this grumbling, the author adds notes on the personal computing literature for April through September 1994.

Although corporate structures in Japan and, to a lesser extent Korea, have been examined in the literature, in most cases the framework is not comparative. In other cases the framework is comparative, with keiretsu and chaebol compared to US conglomerates. A third foreign conglomerate, the Mexican grupo, has thus far escaped much serious attention by scholars. Attempts to compare the structure of keiretsu, chaebol, and grupo in terms of the other. Aims to identify what can be learned from comparing foreign corporate structures with other foreign corporate structures, rather than with corporate structures in the USA.