El logro del éxito en los mercados globales: una investigación sobre la fabricación en Estados Unidos y Japón

It summarizes the essential factors that explain competitive success according to both Japanese and North American manufacturers and outlines future manufacturing strategies to be developed in both countries. It is based on the results of a research carried out with approximately 900 North American and Japanese executives. In the development of the study, the manufacturing performance of companies in Japan and the United States is described, a vision of the key characteristics of Japanese manufacturing technology is presented, and strategies to improve the global competitiveness of manufacturing are proposed. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of Japanese "secrets" to achieve success, and what that means for American manufacturing in the next decade; the following are noted: technical-managerial intellectual capital, technology that replaces workforce and improves labor productivity, process orientation, customer and repair service, and factor productivity.Resume los factores esenciales que explican el éxito competitivo según los fabricantes japoneses y norteamericanos y describe las futuras estrategias de fabricación que se desarrollarán en ambos países. Se basa en los resultados de una investigación realizada con aproximadamente 900 ejecutivos norteamericanos y japoneses. En el desarrollo del estudio se describe el desempeño manufacturero de las empresas de Japón y Estados Unidos, se presenta una visión de las características clave de la tecnología manufacturera japonesa y se proponen estrategias para mejorar la competitividad global de la manufactura. Finalmente, concluye con una discusión de los "secretos" japoneses para lograr el éxito y lo que eso significa para la industria manufacturera estadounidense en la próxima década; se destacan: capital intelectual técnico-gerencial, tecnología que reemplaza la fuerza laboral y mejora la productividad laboral, orientación a procesos, servicio al cliente y de reparación, y productividad de los factores

Disaster Operations Management: an Empirical Study from Thailand

Disasters have unpredictable and deleterious impacts on modern societies. While recent operations management research has increasingly focused on disaster operations, only a few studies have examined the recovery phase of post-disaster operations. This research presents an overview of Disaster Operations Management as well as an empirical study using econometrics analysis to examine the recovery phase of post-disaster operations. The results suggest that when resources are scarce, at a strategic level we need to understand where to begin when planning the recovery process. This study is an exploratory analysis of the question of how flooding affects per capita income in areas with different levels of industrialization. We developed multiple regression models using panel data from Thailand to examine this effect, finding that flooding in a previous year has a positive effect on areas with a low level of industrialization, but a negative one on highly industrialized areas, meaning the residents of the latter are affected differently. Our results suggest the level of industrialization impacts the effectiveness of the recovery process. Finally, we discuss the implications of the study as well as suggestions for future research

The 'Risk-Adjusted' Price-Concentration Relationship in Banking

Price-concentration studies in banking typically find a significant and negative relationship between consumer deposit rates (i.e., prices) and market concentration. This relationship implies that highly concentrated banking markets are "bad" for depositors. It also provides support for the Structure-Conduct-Performance hypothesis and rejects the Efficient-Structure hypothesis. However, these studies have focused almost exclusively on supply-side control variables and have neglected demand-side variables when estimating the reduced form price-concentration relationship. For example, previous studies have not included in their analysis bank-specific risk variables as measures of cross-sectional derived deposit demand. The authors find that when bank-specific risk variables are included in the analysis the magnitude of the relationship between deposit rates and market concentration decreases by over 50 percent. They offer an explanation for these results based on the correlation between a bank’s risk profile and the structure of the market in which it operates. These results suggest that it may be necessary to reconsider the well-established assumption that higher market concentration necessarily leads to anticompetitive deposit pricing behavior by commercial banks. This finding has direct implications for the antitrust evaluations of bank merger and acquisition proposals by regulatory agencies. And, in a more general sense, these results suggest that any Structure-Conduct-Performance-based study that does not explicitly consider the possibility of very different risk profiles of the firms analyzed may indeed miss a very important set of explanatory variables. And, thus, the results from those studies may be spurious

El logro del éxito en los mercados globales: una investigación sobre la fabricación en Estados Unidos y Japón

It summarizes the essential factors that explain competitive success according to both Japanese and North American manufacturers and outlines future manufacturing strategies to be developed in both countries. It is based on the results of a research carried out with approximately 900 North American and Japanese executives. In the development of the study, the manufacturing performance of companies in Japan and the United States is described, a vision of the key characteristics of Japanese manufacturing technology is presented, and strategies to improve the global competitiveness of manufacturing are proposed. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of Japanese "secrets" to achieve success, and what that means for American manufacturing in the next decade; the following are noted: technical-managerial intellectual capital, technology that replaces workforce and improves labor productivity, process orientation, customer and repair service, and factor productivity