Business Commons^™

North American Business Strategies Towards Climate Change, Charles Jones, David Levy

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

Business has become a key part of the fabric of global environmental governance, considered here as the network which orders and regulates economic activity and its impacts. We argue that businesses generally are willing to undertake limited measures consistent with a fragmented and weak policy regime. Further, the actions of businesses act to create, shape and preserve that compromised regime. We examine three types of indicators of business responses in North America: ratings by external organizations, commitments regarding emissions, and joint political action. We find business response to be highly ambiguous, with energetic efforts yielding few results.

Adr Characteristics And Performance In International And Global Indexes, Arindam Bandopadhyaya, Lal Chugh, James L. Grant

Financial Services Forum Publications

This study looks at the characteristics and performance of ADRs in international and global indexes. We find that ADRs in EAFE are tilted toward three common factors: giant cap, high dividend yield, and U.K. stocks. In terms of risk-adjusted performance, we find that ADRs provide inefficient diversification for US investors, as tradeoffs of return and risk are better with portfolio combinations of the S&P500 and the S&P Global 700, as compared with portfolio combinations of the S&P500 and an ADR breakout of the Global 700. Our findings on ADR characteristics are consistent with prior research, while our performance findings are …

Retaining Young Professionals In Massachusetts, Patricia Neilson

Emerging Leaders Program Team Projects

As part of the experience in the Emerging Leaders Program (ELP), Fellows, in teams of six to eight, work on team projects dealing with a civic issue that affects the greater Boston region. The 2007 cohort of the ELP has researched “Why Young Professionals Stay in Boston” and what works to attract and retain young professionals.

Evidence Of The Lack Of Effectiveness Of Low-Income Savings Incentives, Julia M. Camp, Teresa Stephenson, Stacy R. Wade

Financial Services Forum Publications

In view of the government’s propensity to develop programs to encourage savings, we examine a group of individuals to whom these programs are targeted: low- to moderate-income taxpayers. We show that saving for retirement is not a priority in the lives of these taxpayers. The low priority given to saving is often due to immediate necessary costs such as housing, food, and transportation. However, our study shows that even nonessential items and activities such as cable and internet services or travel are often considered more important than saving. We also show that most of the participants were not even aware …

A Survey Of Schema Matching Research, Roger Blake

College of Management Working Papers and Reports

Schema matching is the process of developing semantic matches between two or more schemas. The purpose of schema matching is generally either to merge two or more databases, or to enable queries on multiple, heterogeneous databases to be formulated on a single schema (Doan and Halevy 2005). This paper develops a taxonomy of schema matching approaches, classifying them as being based on a combination schema matching technique and the type of data used by those techniques. Schema matching techniques are categorized as being based on rules, learning, or ontology, and the type of data used is categorized as being based …

Active Investing In Strategic Acquirers Using An Eva Style Analysis, James L. Grant, Emery A. Trahan

Financial Services Forum Publications

Employing an EVA style classification, we examine whether active investors (such as hedge funds and other long-short investors) can develop an alpha-generating strategy by classifying acquisitions based on the pre-acquisition EVA style quadrant of the acquirers. Over a recent ten-year period, the announcement evidence suggests that acquisitions across all style quadrants generate negative risk-adjusted returns: wherein the magnitude of economic gains from shorting acquirers is determined by EVA style characteristics; namely wealth creators or wealth destroyers. Moreover, we find that the potential for longing gains on targets of acquiring firms is also captured by EVA style.

Uncertainty, Technical Change, And Policy Models, Erin Baker, Leon Clarke, Jeffrey Keisler, Ekundayo Shittu

College of Management Working Papers and Reports

Both climate change and technical change are uncertain. In this paper we show the importance of including both uncertainties when modeling for policy analysis. We then develop an approach for incorporating uncertainty of technical change into climate change policy analysis. We define and demonstrate a protocol for bottom-up expert assessments about prospects for technologies. We then describe a method for using such assessments to derive a probability distribution over future abatement curves, and to estimate random return functions for technological investment in different areas. Finally, we show how these analytic results could be used in a variety of energy-economic models …

Spreadsheet-Based Gis Models, Roger Blake, Jeffrey Keisler, Janet Wagner

College of Management Working Papers and Reports

Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which are computer-based systems that allow decision makers to incorporate geographically based data into their analyses, are widespread and powerful tools in many business and scientific settings today. In this paper, we present a tutorial discussing ways in which GIS functionality can be implemented within the spreadsheet environment. We show the straightforward and natural analogy between several GIS functions with spreadsheet functions, particularly for raster based data. We present two realistic examples meshing OR/MS methods with GIS methods --- an integration which is greatly enhanced by the “remarkable development platform” provided by spreadsheets. We discuss the …

The Rise Of Asian-Owned Businesses In Massachusetts: Data From The 2002 Economic Census Survey Of Business Owners, Michael Liu, Paul Watanabe

Institute for Asian American Studies Publications

Asian-owned businesses are following a very rapid growth trajectory in Massachusetts. In fact, Asian-owned firms increased by 44 percent in Massachusetts from 1997 to 2002. This growth is nearly double the national gain of 24 percent for all Asian-owned firms in the United States. Moreover, during the same time period, the number of all firms in the state expanded by only five percent. Similar comparisons can be made when looking at sales and receipts and number of paid employees. From 1997-2002, Asian-owned businesses in Massachusetts experienced an increase in sales and receipts of 20 percent. This was over three times …

Relational Space: Creating A Context For Innovation In Collaborative Consortia, Hilary Bradbury, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, John S. Carroll, Peter M. Senge, Edward H. Powley

College of Management Working Papers and Reports

Corporations are collaborating to meet complex global challenges heretofore considered beyond the mandate of business leaders. These multi organizational consortia are not philanthropic efforts but operate within market parameters with limited input from Non Governmental Organizations. In order to examine some dynamics of successful collaborative processes, we pursue an in-depth multi-method case study of “The Sustainability Consortium,” which has convened numerous Fortune 50 senior managers since 1999. We uncover the primacy of “relational space” – a rich context of trust and inquiry – within which participants create innovative projects for doing business in a sustainable way. Our analysis uncovers the …

Should Massachusetts Regionalize Public Health?, Eric W. Hayden

Financial Services Forum Publications

Amidst rising global concerns about bioterrorism and pandemic flu preparedness, the delivery capacity and effectiveness of public health service assumes increased importance and relevance. In the United States, the lack of a centralized, national public health system has meant that “public health” is the primary responsibility of state and local governments. Many states have established various types of intrastate regional structures to deliver the range of on-going, occasional, and/or episodic services that characterize the world of public health. However, Massachusetts is not among them. Despite its global reputation as a pre-eminent medical center, the state of Massachusetts has a highly …

Outsourcing Via Service Competition, Ehsan Elahi, Saif Benjaafar, Karen Donohue

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

We consider a single buyer who wishes to outsource a fixed demand for a manufactured good or service at a fixed price to a set of potential suppliers. We examine the value of competition as a mechanism for the buyer to elicit service quality from the suppliers. We compare two approaches the buyer could use to orchestrate this competition: (1) a Supplier-Allocation (SA) approach, which allocates a proportion of demand to each supplier with the proportion allocated to a supplier increasing in the quality of service the supplier promises to offer, and (2) a Supplier-Selection (SS) approach, which allocates all …

Community Rehabilitation Programs And Organizational Change: A Mentor Guide To Increase Customized Employment Outcomes, John Butterworth, Cecelia Gandolfo, W. Grant Revell, Katherine J. Inge

All Institute for Community Inclusion Publications

In 2002, the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) announced the availability of funds to support a National Training Technical Assistance for Providers (T-TAP) project. The goal of the project was to assist community rehabilitation providers (CRPs) in facilitating integrated employment / customized employment outcomes for individuals served by these programs. Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in partnership with the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at the University of Massachusetts Boston submitted a proposal and was awarded the cooperative agreement in October of 2002.

For the purpose of this Guide, customized employment is defined as a process …

The Institutional Entrepreneur As Modern Prince: The Strategic Face Of Power In Contested Fields, David Levy, Maureen A. Scully

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This paper develops a theoretical framework that situates institutional entrepreneurship by drawing from Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to understand the contingent stabilization of organizational fields, and by employing his discussion of the Modern Prince as the collective agent who organizes and strategizes counter-hegemonic challenges. Our framework makes three contributions. First, we characterize the interlaced material, discursive, and organizational dimensions of field structure. Second, we argue that strategy must be examined more rigorously as the mode of action by which institutional entrepreneurs engage with field structures. Third, we argue that institutional entrepreneurship, in challenging the position of incumbent actors and stable …

In Search Of Certain Earnings: Applying The Ace Portfolio Concept To Sectors, James L. Grant, Chris Rowberry

Financial Services Forum Publications

Sector composites that have highly stable earnings streams allow the portfolio manager or analyst to derive “earnings certain” sector risk premiums. ACE (Approximately Certain Earnings) Sectors represent such baskets. Since sector pricing is influenced by earnings variability, obtaining risk premiums from standard sectors is contaminated. With knowledge of an EPS Stability measure, a composite engine, and the proprietary G-Model (or like DCF framework), we can discover companies within each sector that exhibit highly certain earnings. In practice, ACE Sectors can be used to derive current/historical “earnings certain” sector risk premiums, enhance sector rotation strategies, obtain sector implied growth rates, make …