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There continues to be much interest in the impact of internal funds on the level of corporate investment activity. While some studies provide evidence that investment decisions of firms that are financially constrained are more sensitive to the availability of internal funds than those of less constrained firms, other studies show the opposite, i.e. investment decisions of the most credit-worthy firms are most sensitive to internal funds availability. This paper tests these opposing propositions for U.S. firms using data for a longer and more recent period than in prior studies. The results support the latter view, i.e. investments at financially constrained firms are less sensitive to internal cash flows than in financially less constrained firms. Regardless, investments levels are found to be positively related to internal cash flows for all types of firms and for all periods examined indicating a pecking order in financing (firms prefer first using internal funds and only then go to external funds).

The purpose of this paper is to present the three critical changes needed to reform the US health care system – these changes will drive cascades of other beneficial changes. These three changes include the use of transparent market prices, alignment of incentives and systematic assessment and ratings of quality.

The paper used an analysis based on the literature on the comparison between non-market and market systems. The current US health care system is similar to the Soviet economic system, and the paper proposes moving it gradually to where it can respond to market-based signals.

The US health care system needs to adopt transparent and real pricing, independent quality assessment of health provider organizations and portable electronic patient records. These changes will lead to continuing cascades of innovation and improvement.

The recommended changes will be opposed by vested interest groups, and so will be easier with regulatory guidance and encouragement. It would also be useful to protect against “regulatory capture” by interested parties during the change process.

Health care in the USA will gradually become better and cheaper. Health organizations will become more transparent. Regulators would have to set up and supervise private quality ratings agencies.

Social implications of this paper include greater labor mobility and higher productivity, as well as increased competitiveness of the USA.

In spite of numerous writings on the subject, this issue has not been analyzed in this way. This paper is unique in the way in which it layouts the process of movement to a market-based system for the US health care system.

This chapter complements the one that appeared as “History of the AIB Fellows: 1975–2008” in Volume 14 of this series (International Business Scholarship: AIB Fellows on the First 50 Years and Beyond, Jean J. Boddewyn, Editor). It traces what happened under the deanship of Alan Rugman (2011–2014) who took many initiatives reported here while his death in July 2014 generated trenchant, funny, and loving comments from more than half of the AIB Fellows. The lives and contributions of many other major international business scholars who passed away from 2008 to 2014 are also evoked here: Endel Kolde, Lee Nehrt, Howard Perlmutter, Stefan Robock, John Ryans, Vern Terpstra, and Daniel Van Den Bulcke.

Effective mechanisms for corporate governance are essential for market-based economic systems. This chapter addresses the necessity of corporate governance research to address the competing goals of various stakeholders in the firm: managers, suppliers of financial capital, and other stakeholders. The review of literature reveals that firm-level complexity, as well as diversity of national business systems, are important for understanding corporate governance practices and regulations around the world.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

Using recent panel data on U.S. and Japanese firms and time-series, cross-sectional analysis, this study documents that in both countries controlling for the investment opportunity set, investments are significantly positively influenced by internal cash flows. This relationship strengthens with the degree of constraints faced in Japan but not in the U.S. Our findings indicate that firms in both countries operate in financially imperfect markets using a pecking order in financing. As expected for Japanese companies, investment by Keiretsu member companies was significantly less influenced by cash flow and more influenced by the investment opportunity set compared to investment by non-member companies.

The article attempts to determine whether academic research in the area of finance has a direct link to the practitioners in the field.

This paper used a survey of over 50 finance practitioners to ask their opinion on the relevance of academic finance journals to their respective jobs.

The results suggest that most business practitioners are more interested in proprietary research than in generally distributed academic research, the academic peer‐review process seems to reduce the interest of practitioners in academic research due to the time lag between the findings of research and their publication, and the statistical significance of academic research results does not interest practitioners as much as the immediate relevance of the research findings to their respective jobs.

A review of the literature suggests this might be one of the first papers to actually test the hypothesis that academic finance research has a direct transference to the finance industry.

While economic exposure is an important issue for the management of a multinational financial system, few models have been developed to measure this risk. The major challenge to measuring economic exposure is the interdependence of affiliate performances vis‐a‐vis changes in currency values. In this paper, a model has been developed that not only measures the sensitivity of the value of the firm to changes in currency values, but also recognizes the interdependence among the affiliates. The model takes a global view of the problem and also leads to guidelines for managing economic exposure. While the discussion focuses on geographically diversified multinational companies, the content of the paper is equally applicable to domestic companies.