Is Boston Becoming a Branch-Plant Town?

A decade ago, Boston appeared to be emerging as a headquarters city for a large number of world-class enterprises. Notwithstanding the recovery from the early-1990s recession, and a thriving entrepreneurial economy of business acorns, Boston today seems on its way to becoming largely a branch-plant town. None of the 1980s Massachusetts Miracle saplings or the more recent acorns have grown into mighty corporate oaks headquartered here. This article discusses the risks of having our current prosperity increasingly based on branch plants acquired or established by firms centered elsewhere. Its concern is based on the proposition that having big-business corporate headquarters here does matter, not only for longterm economic success and stability, but also for the vitality and funding of our cultural, art, philanthropic, and community service activities

U. S. Competitiveness in the Global Financial Services Industry

The World Trade Center Towers: they were the headquarters of Morgan Stanley, one of the world’s leading investment banks, and of Cantor Fitzgerald, the world’s leading trader of U.S. government bonds. They were also the work location of 9,000 Merrill Lynch employees. The Citicorp Building. The Prudential Tower. The New York Stock Exchange. These actual and recently uncovered potential terrorist targets in the United States are financial services companies and organizations. Add to them the threats to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and one could conclude that seven out of ten terrorists prefer financial services. This focus on financial services by those who envy and loathe America is surely no accident. It arguably betrays some of the Marxist, or more accurately Leninist, ideological underpinnings of Al Queda\u27s ostensibly Islamist ideology. The Koran is not the book that stresses the centrality of Finanzkapital, or of banking as part of the commanding heights of the economy

The Origins of Multinational Manufacturing by Continental European Firms

European multinationals followed a different path of development from that pursued by United States firms, but European multinational manufacturing began even earlier than did American, and its story is no less significant. Dr. Franko offers a range of relevant data and analysis about the evolution of direct foreign investment by Western European manufacturer

Recommendations for accelerating open preprint peer review to improve the culture of science

Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints