The association between contractual arrangement and the marketing practices of export intermediaries and domestic supplies is examined. Based on data collected from a national sample of export management companies, the effect of structuring the export arrangement as a contractual, administrative, or conventional channel is analyzed. Prior research suggests that contractual form establishes the framework within which all the economic and sociopolitical interactions between the supplier and export middleman take place. Hypothesized relationship between export practices and channel structure are empirically tested, and the central role of structure in the operation of export channels is largely confirmed.

I analyze differences in the innovativeness of domestic firms and subsidiaries of foreign firms operating in the same country. I argue that domestic firms suffer a liability of localness in innovation, or a competitive disadvantage in product innovation relative to subsidiaries of foreign firms. I propose that this liability of localness is driven by the relatively lower levels of multiculturalism in employees of domestic firms in comparison with subsidiaries, which limit the identification, transfer, and integration of a large diversity of knowledge that supports product innovation. I also propose that managers of domestic firms can compensate for this liability of localness in two ways: by investing in the training of their employees and by exporting. Training modifies the mindsets and abilities of employees and enables them to become more cognitively multicultural, which facilitates product innovation. Exporting changes employees’ mindsets as they become exposed to new ideas available abroad, which also facilitates product innovation. I test these arguments on a sample of manufacturing firms and find that, although domestic firms introduce fewer new products than subsidiaries of foreign firms, they introduce more new products than subsidiaries at the same level of investment in language training and of exports.

This study does not support the generally accepted theory that transnational corporations (TNCs) use different criteria to evaluate managers based on their location (host or home country). If it is assumed that a major TNC strategy is to maximize profits, thus maximizing returns to shareholders, it follows that management decisions are made with this strategy as the desired outcome. Current theory does not address the more global view of the TNC where subsidiaries act in concert to maximize profits, and therefore can be evaluated in a similar fashion. There is some evidence, however, that specific performance evaluation criteria do vary in importance by country.

International trade intermediaries, such as export management companies, have long existed in the United States. Many studies and reports have provided “snapshots” of their activities and roles over time. Their evolution, however, has hardly been researched—mainly for lack of an appropriate dynamic model. This paper integrates various conceptual frameworks and theories to develop a useful mode of the evolution of the U.S. international trade intermediary in the 1980s.

Several years ago Donald Ball and Wendell McCulloch carried out an opinion survey of members of the Academy of International Business as to the ranking of international programs in U.S. business schools (JIBS, Spring/Summer 1984). It included 79 schools in the results.

This note reviews the results of four surveys related to the efforts of the AACSB to internationalize the curriculum of the business schools. The first, a survey of the 1071 participants in the 30 workshop/seminars which have been organized by the AACSB, showed that the workshops have been very beneficial for the participants and affected the courses they teach. The second survey, of all AACSB member schools, showed that most of them plan to internationalize their curriculums by introducing an international dimension into the core courses. But this raises the question of whether the faculty members are trained or prepared to do this. The third survey found that only 64 out of 564 AACSB member schools have one or more exchange programs with foreign business schools, and that only about 125 professors go overseas each year under the aegis of these programs. Finally, a fourth survey, of the 53 largest doctoral programs, indicated that only 17% of the graduates of our doctoral programs study any international courses during their graduate (masters and doctoral) studies. Thus, the next generation of faculty members will have difficulty in introducing any international content into the courses they teach.

The distributors of foreign exchange rates are important for model building and empirical analysis. For example, many studies have examined foreign exchange market efficiency and currency portfolio management under the assumption that foreign exchange rates are normally distributed. The statistical tests in these studies, and thus their conclusions, may not be reliable if the foreign exchange rates follow non-normal distributions. Realizing the importance of the distribution of exchange rates, Professors Calderón-Rossell and Ben-Horim (1982) (hereafter C-B) have conducted a study analyzing these distributions. Based on the skewness of the distribution, C-B have classified foreign currencies into three groups. In the first group, the skewness statistic was not significantly different from zero for all currencies and subperiods. In the second group, the distribution of changes in the foreign exchange rates was close to symmetric except for at least one subperiod. In the third group, the skewness statistic suggests strongly that all the distributions were asymmetric. Their results reveal that:

This paper shows the distorting effects of different tax regulations on the effective absolute and relative costs of long-term borrowing in different currencies. In particular, if expected borrowing costs are equal before tax, then the process of minimizing expected after-tax borrowing costs generally involves borrowing the weakest currency.