Entrepreneurial Freedom Research Articles

Innovation in the Swiss mail sector: deregulation versus liberalization

In this paper we discuss an incumbent postal operator's incentives to invest in an innovation in the face of upcoming liberalization and deregulation of the letter market. Our contribution is a short description of recent innovations in the Swiss mail market and their interpretation in light of an illuminative yet tractable model. Following the literature, we distinguish between product and process innovation. We characterize competitive pressure by a reduction in the incumbent's market share and an increase of his/her perceived price elasticity of demand due to consumers’ switching to competitors. This may result in adverse incentives to invest in an innovation. Likewise, deregulation leads to increased entrepreneurial freedom on the operator's side and possibly a lower burden of USO (universal service obligations), reflected in lower cost. This sustains incentives to invest in both product and process innovation.

Risk management by farmers, agribusinesses, and lenders

Producers and lenders seek to avoid agricultural production‐related risks through various managerial and institutional mechanisms. For individual farmers and agribusinesses, risk management involves choosing among alternatives for reducing the effects of risk on the firm, thereby affecting the firm’s welfare position. Risk management often requires the evaluation of tradeoffs between changes in risk, expected returns, entrepreneurial freedom, and other factors. Research on risk management issues in agriculture has been among the main topics of interest of the Regional Research Committee for Financing Agriculture in a Changing Environment: Macro, Market, Policy, and Management Issues, and its predecessors. This paper reviews and summarizes much of the Committee’s work and provides a discussion of related topics of interest for prospective future research.

The Common Law Character of English Charters: Spontaneous Order in the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164)

The Constitutions of Clarendon are presented as an illustration of the common-law character of English charters. Although formally renounced and abrogated shortly after ratification, the Constitutions remain a fundamental basis for the separation of church and state. Analysis of the historical literature reveals that spontaneous order subsumes many kinds of positive law and designed order. The emergence of spontaneous order in common law is described, defined, and contrasted with positive legislation. Spontaneous order allowed secular society to grow and flourish. It is acknowledged that charters played a secondary role in making positive law, and were precursors to modern positive legislation. The implications of positive versus spontaneously evolved law for economic efficiency are discussed. The historical context and aftermath of the Constitutions is presented, and their content is discussed and analyzed from an economic perspective. The key legal problem the Constitutions addressed was the relationship between competing secular and canon-law jurisdictions, which suffered from inherent conflicts-of-interest. This provided economic decision makers perverse incentives. Prior to the Constitutions, the Church was able to act as plaintiff and judge in civil disputes and intimidate litigants by exercising criminal jurisdiction. Finally, the Constitutions are discussed and presented as an example of spontaneously evolved law, which promoted greater entrepreneurial freedom and economic efficiency.

A Behavioral Decision-Making Modeling Approach Toward Hedging Services

This paper takes a behavioral approach toward the market for hedging services. A behavioral decision-making model is developed that provides insight into how and why owner-managers decide the way they do regarding hedging services. Insight into those choice processes reveals information needed by financial institutions to improve the design of their financial products. The key elements of the model are related to the characteristics of the owner-managers, thereby exploring the decision units' evaluations of the hedging services provided by futures exchanges. Using structural equation models and data from 467 owner-managers, obtained by means of computer- assisted personal interviews, we find that the elements "exercising entrepreneurial freedom," "perceived performance," and the "owner-manager's reference price" determine their attitude toward using futures. These elements are related to innovativeness, risk attitude, and level of understanding of futures markets.

Ronald Reagan's address at Moscow state university: A rhetoric of conciliation and subversion

This essay examines the rhetorical strategies utilized by Ronald Reagan in his address at Moscow State University on May 31, 1988. In part, Reagan adapted his rhetorical strategies to Soviet philosophies by adopting the language of Marxism‐Leninism: Reagan spoke the language of Marxism‐Leninism in order to de‐legitimize the credibility of Marxism‐Leninism. Reagan employed four rhetorical strategies to decrease international tensions while also increasing pressure for greater changes in the political and economic systems of the Soviet Union: (a) negate Marxist‐Leninist principles, (b) affirm democratic capitalism and entrepreneurial freedom, (c) construct a positive image of himself and the United States, and (d) democratize diplomatic discussions. Reagan's success with these strategies allowed him to achieve two disparate diplomatic objectives: conciliation and subversion.

Holding your Top Talent

OVERVIEW:As dot-com mania fades, its effect on job mobility lingers on. Star technical performers, once considered organizational loyalists, are more likely to jump ship for competing job offers. Employers are responding to the threat by introducing new policies and procedures designed to retain key personnel. The most visible and expected change is in compensation: Salary, equity participation and bonuses are on the upswing, as is the correlation of pay with performance and the frequency with which compensation is reviewed. But good pay is not enough to keep the best people, in a new environment characterized by talent raids by competing organizations. Star performers are demanding—and getting—more opportunities for career advancement, greater participation in leading-edge projects, and entrepreneurial freedom.

‘Entrepreneurial Freedom Versus Employee Rights’: the Acquired Rights Directive and EU Social Policy Post-Amsterdam

In attempting to reconcile the objectives of both employment security and labour market flexibility, the 1977 Acquired Rights Directive (ARD) represents the type of social legislation championed in the Treaty of Amsterdam. This article discusses the 20-year history of this Directive in order to examine some of the problems which arise when policy is driven by economic and social objectives which may be mutually inconsistent. In particular, we consider whether the continuing legal confusion associated with this Directive can be, in part, attributed to the conflict between these objectives. This examination concentrates particularly upon the impact of the ARD upon the attempts by EU Member States Government, particularly Britain, attempts to impose market-based reforms upon the public provision of services.

Capitalism, Slavery and Caribbean Modernity

Capitalism, Slavery, and Caribbean Modernity Hilary McD Beckles (bio) C.L.R. James’ 1938 seminal text, The Black Jacobins, and Eric Williams’ 1944 tour de force, Capitalism and Slavery, constitute much more than foundational works in West Indian nationalist historiography. 1 Both authors, born in colonial Trinidad and writing Caribbean history within its Atlantic context, made significant contributions to development discourse within the traditions of Enlightenment Idealism. As critical realists they considered popular historiography indispensable to any attempt to root philosophical ideals within recognizable terms of everyday living. In The Black Jacobins, James documents the struggles of the enslaved peoples of St. Dominique, the mercantile showpiece of French colonial capitalism in the West Indies for freedom and social justice. In addition, he details the transformation of this successful anti-slavery rebellion into something much more elaborate in terms of Atlantic history—the creation of Haiti, the Caribbean’s first nation-state. In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams expands and develops the paradigm of African labor enslavement and European capital liberation, first outlined by James in The Black Jacobins, that became the basis of the revolutionary reorganization of productivity for European economic development. The James-Williams paradigm has had an extensive discursive impact on thinking about the relationships between slavery, Atlantic modernity, and development discourse. In the Caribbean these works represent points of departure for studies in historiographical decolonization and the signal birth of an insider, creole, nationalist canon. Both texts have received considerable criticism and enormous acclaim; they continue, half a century later, to stimulate the most expansive areas of Caribbean historical writing. 2 James’ explicit attention was to locate the politics of black liberation within the philosophies of Enlightenment discourse. Williams’ related concern was to illustrate the contradictory and paradoxical nature of modernist rationality as expressed in the economic and ideological effects of the application of the principles of political economy to the relationship between colonial development and European industrialism. Conceptually, The Black Jacobins and Capitalism and Slavery situate the Caribbean as the primordial site of Atlantic modernity, and as one of several important locations where its contradictory tendencies were acted out as ideological contest. For James, the politics of bringing Enlightenment ideas nearer to reality is seen as a mandate taken up by the enslaved against colonizing men who sought to monopolize privilege 7and power. 3 The Caribbean in the aftermath of the Columbus enterprise is seen by Williams as culturally unique; Capitalism and Slavery is an economic study of Caribbean [End Page 777] modernity in action, while The Black Jacobins constitutes a statement of its exploding contradiction authored by subaltern people operating ideologically within the hegemonic philosophical paradigms of their oppressors. Columbus did not lie as Caribbean culturalists and historians often assert. He “did” discover the Caribbean. It was as real for him as any construction of knowledge within a specific cultural tradition could be. He believed that he had done so, and that Europeans would encounter a new and different environment within which they could collectively discover themselves as free individuals and citizens. Europe was liberated by the experience and its subjects became citizens while the colonized became natives. The conception and construction of the “Latifundia” and “plantation,” as the organizing principle of socio-economic life brought these worlds together. For the European they became a metaphor for renaissance economic rationality, civilizing modernity, and entrepreneurial freedom from the constraints of dehumanizing material poverty. The colonial mission then, was a missile that launched the Caribbean, its European commanders, and African cargo on the path to modernity on board the plantation enterprise that rose on the site of native ruins. Plantation culture was in every respect symbolic of the signs of the times. Capitalist political economy found expression during the 16th and 17th centuries in a proliferation of mercantilist tracts on trade, finance, and manufacturing; their authors preached the values of large scale production, surplus generation and the accumulation of wealth through foreign trade. The plantation developed as evidence of institutional commitment to these principles, and in opposition to the traditional culture of peasant production which was considered backward and ruinous to a modern nation. Large scale production required extensive resource mobilization and strategic entrepreneurial planning. The Caribbean planter...

Costs of dismissal: An analysis in community justice and efficiency

The problem of collective dismissal-dismissal in the context of technological change, reorganization, or plant closure-has received much attention in recent years in both Europe and the United States. Statutory measures as well as collective bargaining arrangements have been introduced to alleviate employee suffering through payment of severance compensation, and provision has been made for consultation with unions or employee committees and for placement or retraining schemes run by state or employer/union agencies. The purpose of this paper is not to discuss the various measures but, rather, to explain the theoretical basis for allocation of the costs of dislocation engendered by collective dismissal. There has been little systematic, theoretical identification of the basic theoretical question: Should the employer, society, or the employee bear the costs of dismissal? In the case of individual dismissal, a theory of job security has been invoked, justifying an employer’s responsibility for unjust dismissal on grounds of the employee’s property right in the job. Accordingly, the employer is required to bear responsibility for the costs engendered by its unjustified unilateral termination of the employment relationship. No parallel theory has been developed for collective dismissal. On the contrary, the employer’s entrepreneurial freedom to make economic decisions that entail collective dismissal has generally been regarded as unassailable. European courts have described the employer as “sole judge and uncontested master of the economic destiny of his property.“’ Similarly in the United

Performance contracting: the Colorado model.

Through a process of negotiation between a community mental health centers association (CMHCA) and the state division of mental health (DMH), a performance contracting system has created entrepreneurial freedom for the mental health centers while still providing adequate controls by the DMH.

Big business vs big government—A new social contract?

The author describes how the conflict between the two ideologies of liberalism and conservatism may be resolved to produce an economic system that increases both social welfare and entrepreneurial freedom. After summarizing the limitations of the left and right wing positions, he describes research studies on a ‘Return on Resources Model’ that suggest a third perspective called the ‘social contract’ which reconciles both views to create a more powerful synthesis. An intriguing possibility is that the social contract could produce a ‘decentralization strategy’ in which control of the economy would shift downward from government to a self-regulating and more productive private sector. Some speculations are offered on how these possibilities seem likely to unfold during the next decade or so, as well as suggestions on how politicians and corporate executives could foster this ‘New Capitalism’.

Internal Financing of Economic Development

THE DETERMINATION of a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to accelerate their rate of economic growth is a fact of prime significance in the second half of the present century. Several of these countries are anxious to explore ways and means of financing economic development from internal sources that would enlist the cooperation of the private sector of the economy and preserve a range of entrepreneurial freedom.