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.

This paper analyses the usage and contents of corporate codes of ethics. The results from a sample of 600 large European companies are contrasted with findings reported for similar U.S. firms. The comparison reveals that significantly fewer European than U.S. firms adopted codes of ethics. In Europe, the large majority of codes have been introduced only very recently and there are indications that codes made their way into Europe via subsidiaries of U.S. firms. However, there are striking differences in content between U.S. and European codes of ethics pointing to the existence of a distinctly European approach to codifying ethics.

A Brown and Warner [1980, 1985] event study methodology is applied to the foreign exchange area. Comparisons of the performance of four abnormal return models are examined with simulations under different experimental conditions, such as choice of foreign currency or numeraire, level of abnormal shock, sample size, length of estimation period, market return proxy, and time period examined. The results provide practical suggestions on the selection of an event study methodology and demonstrate that some of the findings of Brown and Warner are not generalizable to the foreign exchange area.