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Outlines the characteristics of Japanese keiretsu (vertically integrated firms interlinked through industrial groups) and reviews the history of financial keiretsu and associated research. Compares the performance of Japanese and US banks 1989‐2000; and examines Japanese bank profit inefficiency by developing a mathematical model and applying it to 1992‐1999 bank data. Shows a “zig‐zag” pattern of profitability change over the period and concludes that the Japanese banking industry is “barely holding its own in profitability”. Points out the particular importance of this to the real economy in Japan and briefly considers the implications for government policy.

Friedrich Althoff (1839‐1908), who created the “Althoff system”, has had a singularly important influence on shaping academic institutions in Germany for almost a generation. As a close collaborator of leading German scholars his influence lasted almost throughout the second empire (1882‐1907). He has been described as brilliant by some and disastrous by others. Recent advances in the new institutional economics and the economic analysis of the organization of inquiry, as well as better access to the archival materials, have created the possibility of arriving at a clearer picture of the Althoff system. Is a first attempt at an economic analysis of the Althoff system; therefore should be viewed as an exploratory essay. In particular, addresses three questions: What precisely was the Althoff system? How can we go about analysing the system? How did the system function and perform? The essay has five substantive parts: first, offers a brief introduction to science research as it is currently practised in economics; second, introduces the historical record and the main criticism levelled against the system and offers a stylized description of the Althoff system in terms of emphasizing key features; third, subjects the stylized features of the system to economic analysis, relying heavily on the property rights theory of the firm and treating the university as an economic institution; fourth, takes a slightly different approach by applying Gordon Tullock′s analysis of the organization of inquiry to the Althoff system; fifth, offers a summary of the findings and an economic definition of the Althoff system.

Winning market share in a major market from a deeply‐entrenched dominant competitor is a tough challenge. Uses Nielsen data on channel‐specific market shares for Brand A and its leading competitor in a major US market to suggest one strategy a marketing manager might use to accomplish that objective. The dependent variable is relatively market share. The independent variables, based on the reference price and advertising share of voice literatures, relate current levels of price and promotional activity for Brand A and the dominant competitor to historical levels of price and promotional activity for the two competitors. A multiple regression analysis of the data indicates that the independent variables are significantly related to the relative market share dependent variable. Provides examples of the effect as well as heuristics flowing from the analysis.

Develops and estimates efficiency and productivity measures in the US trucking and warehousing industry in the 48 contiguous states during the years 1994‐2000. The model, estimated via data envelopment analysis, accounts for both desirable outputs and undesirable outputs produced by a given vector of inputs. The model establishes an efficient frontier of operation for each year studied and can be used to determine, on an annual basis, which of the 48 states operate on the frontier. The findings indicate that the trucking and warehousing industry does not operate efficiently in all 48 states during the period studied. If the industry were to operate on the frontier of the feasible output set by using inputs to produce outputs efficiently, it could eliminate three to four fatal traffic accidents per state per year, while simultaneously increasing industry income by between $38 to $47 million per state per year. In addition, finds that traditional techniques of estimating efficiency that ignore traffic fatalities bias estimates of efficiency and total factor productivity growth.

The purpose of this paper is to model the tradeoffs among fatalities, CO₂ emissions and value generated by the truck transportation portion of supply chains with the goal of determining if efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions increase transportation‐related fatalities.

The joint production of CO₂, fatalities, and truck transport value in the 50 US states during 2002‐2007 is modeled using data envelopment analysis. The directional output distance function is estimated under two assumptions: strong and weak disposability of CO₂ emissions. This provides the means of calculating shadow prices that estimate the cost of reducing CO₂ emissions.

The authors' findings indicate that the transfer of resources to the reduction of CO₂ emissions will result in a statistically significant increase in fatalities and a statistically significant decrease in value of transport from truck transport.

The model presented is based on secondary data from the Federal Highway Statistics Series, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The model developed demonstrates tradeoffs among sustainability‐related variables.

The model presented in the paper uses shadow prices to assess sustainability‐related tradeoffs in supply chains. While this method has been used in other fields, this is its first use in supply chain studies.

Extends Mäler′s notion of weak complementarity between a private good and a public good to non‐homothetic demand functions which can be exactly aggregated. Aggregate demand functions depending on private prices, public good quantities and income distribution statistics can then be used to recover the private individual demand functions which reveal an individual′s willingness to pay for public goods.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the performance of 188 mutual funds relative to the risk/return frontier accounting for the transaction costs of producing a portfolio of investments.

The directional output distance function is used to estimate mutual fund performance. The method allows the data to define a frontier of return and risk accounting for the transaction costs associated with securities management and production of risky returns. Proxies for the transaction costs of producing a portfolio of securities include the turnover ratio, load, expense ratio, and net asset value. The estimates of mutual fund performance are bootstrapped to account for the unknown data generating process. By comparing each mutual fund’s performance relative to the capital market line the authors determine how the fund should adjust their portfolio in regard to risk and return in order to maximize the inefficiency adjusted Sharpe ratio.

The bootstrapped estimates indicate that the average mutual fund could simultaneously expand return and contract risk by 3.2 percent if it were to operate on the efficient frontier. After projecting each mutual fund’s return and risk to the efficient frontier the authors find that a majority of the mutual funds should reduce risk to be consistent with the capital market line.

Many researchers have used data envelopment analysis to estimate a piecewise linear frontier of risk and return to measure mutual fund performance. To the authors’ knowledge the research is the first to use a twice-differentiable quadratic directional distance function to measure the managerial performance and risk/return tradeoff of mutual funds.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of the 2008 SEC short‐sell moratorium on regional bank risk and return. The paper also examines the decline in “failures to deliver” securities in the wake of SEC short‐sell moratorium.

In total, six regional bank portfolios are derived and the beta coefficients from a CAPM model are estimated using the integrated generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (IGARCH) method accounting for the short‐sell moratorium. Data on 110 regional banks in six US regions from January 2002 to December 30, 2011 are used to estimate the model.

The ban on naked short selling and the SEC short‐sell moratorium significantly increased individual bank risk for a majority of banks in six geographic regions, but also increased return in three of three regions. There was also reduced naked short selling as failures to deliver securities declined sharply after the September 2008 moratorium took effect.

Regional banks have generally not achieved the size needed to be deemed “too big to fail” by policy‐makers. Thus, policy changes such as the SEC short‐sell moratorium might be expected to have larger effects on regional banks than on larger banks, which might be shielded from the policy change by having achieved “too big to fail” status. The authors' results are consistent with research that has shown that short‐sell restrictions increase risk by reducing liquidity and trading volume.

The “first generation” (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the “nuts and bolts” of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or “organizational attributes” (Blau, 1965, p. 326) – constitutive of the “technical core” of the organization, such as features related to the organization of the production process (Perrow, 1967) or the structure of allocation of discretion and authority (e.g., Etzioni, 1961), as the royal road to the development of a cogent approach to comparative analysis of organizations.