"Mortgage-related hit worse than expected" has been a frequently cited phrase in recent months, and is usually followed by a list of victims consisting of banks and hedge funds. Although the current mortgage mess was caused by the subprime mortgage or bad credit mortgage, the broad impact of...

This dissertation empirically investigates macroeconomic fluctuations.In the first chapter, I study nontechnology shocks. It is popular to identify technology shocks as shocks permanently affecting labor productivity in SVAR. However it potentially misidentifies nontechnology shocks permanently...

The Product Life Cycle (PLC) concept is a well-known marketing strategy and planning tool. The concept is based on a simple biological analogy of stages over a product's "life," which is intuitively appealing, but unfortunately has limited utility in practice. For such a prominent marketing...

This paper empirically examines models of replacement sales for six electronic consumer durables ? TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Digital Cameras, personal and notebook computers ? using data from a large survey of 8077 German households. A new replacement model is developed that fits the empirical...

Human Resource Management (HR) as is known today is argued to have started as an approach which took naissance early in the 1900s from both the scientific management approach and the human relation approach (Grobler, Warnish, and Hatfield, 2002:5). These two approaches were considered at the...

This paper analyses the branding strategy of a leading French food producer in the fast growing Chinese market. The company, Danone Group (DG), has long been operating internationally with success. However, like several multinational enterprises, its initial entry into China was a failure....