R&D production in the United States: Rethinking the Snowbelt–Sunbelt shift

The Frostbelt–Sunbelt shift in the US, which is thought to have accelerated during the 1970s, corresponds with recent findings that invention and innovation in the Southern and Western parts of the country have come to rival the traditional manufacturing belt. Whether research and development (R&D), a key input to new technology, shows a similar pattern is the focus of this study. It is found, that there was a shift in R&D activity to the Sunbelt during some decades, but not all, and that the manufacturing belt has maintained a slight R&D lead in the country. Still, parts of the Sunbelt rivalled the Northeast for R&D already in 1963. Thus, any national shift in the location of R&D must have occurred prior to the 1960s and before it might be thought to have happened. In the US, R&D production associates well with places that have an educated, professional, and technically specialized labor force. Those states that continue to build on these and similar techno-societal conditions will arguably be in a better position to grow.     

The topology of collective leadership

Over the past decade, there has been a surge of both theoretical and empirical research to explore the possibilities of shared leadership, a reorientation of leadership away from understanding the actions and interactions of “leaders” to understanding the emergent, informal, and dynamic “leadership” brought about by the members of the collective itself. Naturally, this focus on topology (or structural patterning) has prompted researchers to leverage the advancements in network analytic methodology to understand this paradigm of leadership. Despite the recognition of the unique advantage of studying collective leadership using network analysis, there has been a translational gap. The current paper aims to fill this gap, bridging the core ideas that epitomize collective leadership to the social network metrics and analytics needed to fully understand its antecedents and consequences.     

Corporate Governance and Performance During Consolidation of the United States and European Defense Industries

Under a market-oriented corporate governance system, the United States defense industry consolidate quicker and gained a comparative advantage in simple measures of firm performance, including profit margin and market share, than the continental European defense industry, which is more oriented toward stakeholder relationships in corporate governance. The defense industry in the United Kingdom, also characterized by market-oriented governance, performed well. On a wider set of measures related to firm performance and other stakeholders, the evidence is less clear. Concerns have been expressed about the European defense industry's survival in its current form. Likewise, concerns have been raised about the increasing level of concentration in the United States, its potential effect on innovation, and the erection of trade barriers. This paper concludes that corporate governance concepts are useful in analyzing firm conduct and performance in the defense industry and other traditionally -- 'national' industries. It also concludes that policy concerns might successfully be addressed through increased Transatlantic cooperation, attention to the flexibility inherent in the Anglo-American system of corporate governance, and recommendations to modify public procurement policies.     

Heuristic Estimation of the Efficient Frontier for a Bi-Criteria Scheduling Problem

We examine a single-machine scheduling problem where the objective is to minimize the mean and the variance of the job completion times simultaneously. We seek to identify the efficient frontier which is obtained by parametrically solving a weighted combination of the two criteria. The identification of the true efficient frontier for this problem is notoriously difficult. To estimate the frontier, we propose a heuristic procedure which is quite general and can be applied to other bi-criteria problems as well. It involves repeated applications of a relatively new technique called beam search in an adaptive manner. To evaluate the proposed procedure, we introduce two measures of performance and conduct a computational study. The results of the study indicate that the procedure is highly effective.