Using Exemplary Business Practices to Identify Buddhist and Confucian Ethical Value Systems1

Initially, a brief history of Buddhism and Confucianism describes for the reader a framework developed to determine right versus wrong action and to guide followers of these religions to do the right thing in social or business practice. In addition, this article uncovers exemplary business practices grounded in Buddhist and Confucian ethical values system and practiced in the global business arena and uses these discoveries to describe an application of Buddhist and Confucian ethical values systems. The result is the recognition that these ethical values systems have an honorable and moral place in global business practice.     

ANDREAS HEINRICH VOIGT AND THE HICKS‐ALLEN REVOLUTION IN CONSUMER THEORY

In 1893, Andreas Heinrich Voigt argued that utility admits only an ordinal characterization. We discuss the apparent impact of Voigt's now forgotten early argument for an ordinal approach to utility on later economists. Edgeworth cited Voigt's ordinal‐cardinal distinction several times in the Economic Journal, bringing both the concept and the terminology into Anglophone economics. In 1927, Rosenstein‐Rodan, too, cited Voigt's argument for ordinal utility. Since Hicks apparently learned the cardinal‐ordinal terminology from Edgeworth, and discussed utility theory and complementarity with Rosenstein‐Rodan, it appears that Voigt's 1893 article is the original source of ordinal utility in economics. (JEL B13, B21)     

Organizations Have Opinions: A Redefinition of Publics

Random telephone interviews of organizations reveal that, contraryto popular belief, organizations do have opinions and that suchopinions can be obtained by use of traditional survey methods.In addition, when compared with a sample of individuals, theopinions of organizations differ from those of individuals onsome questions and not on others. It is suggested, therefore,that the omission of organizations from public opinion researchmay result in a misrepresentation of reality.     

Beyond deportation: researching the control of outward mobility using a space of flows logic

Manuel Castells (1996) famously argued that human processes are increasingly operating according to the logic of flows and it has now become commonplace to analyse movements of people, information and commodities in terms of flows. However, scholars have been slow to capture the dynamics of border enforcement practices in these terms. In this article, we argue that ‘deportation’ can best be understood, not as a discrete practice that is unidirectional, territorial and wholly controlled by individual states, but as a range of diverse practices used by states (and sometimes undermined by other parties) to try to control the circulation of people within a dynamic supra‐national space. By focusing on ‘mobility control continuums’ operating in selected countries at the peripheries of Europe, we capture the dynamics of state intervention in trans‐border flows and thereby contribute towards developing concepts and methodologies for the criminological study of border controls that are ‘sensitive to the complexities of the global’ (Aas 2007).     

Biases and Uncertainty in Climate Projections

Abstract. We study statistical procedures to quantify uncertainty in multivariate climate projections based on several deterministic climate models. We introduce two different assumptions – called constant bias and constant relation respectively – for extrapolating the substantial additive and multiplicative biases present during the control period to the scenario period. There are also strong indications that the biases in the scenario period are different from the extrapolations from the control period. Including such changes in the statistical models leads to an identifiability problem that we solve in a frequentist analysis using a zero sum side condition and in a Bayesian analysis using informative priors. The Bayesian analysis provides estimates of the uncertainty in the parameter estimates and takes this uncertainty into account for the predictive distributions. We illustrate the method by analysing projections of seasonal temperature and precipitation in the Alpine region from five regional climate models in the PRUDENCE project.     

CONSUMPTION SPENDING AND THE PAPER-BILL SPREAD: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

This paper explains recent findings that the paper-bill spread helps forecast consumption spending using an intertemporal optimizing model of consumption and portfolio allocation. The spread is simply the opportunity cost in terms of foregone future consumption of holding government debt rather than higher yielding private debt. Thus, if government debt appears along with consumption in the single period utility function, the spread appears in one of the Euler equations for consumption and asset accumulation. Empirical tests strongly support the model. Finally, including the spread in a rule of thumb model of consumption reduces the importance of non-optimizing behavior. ( JEL E21, E43, C22, C32)