Understanding Corporate Life-Cycles

Understanding the “Corporate” in Corporate Social Responsibility

As progressives confront the problems of the twenty-first century, be they global poverty and increasing income inequality, the scourge of HIV and other diseases, educational disparities, or climate change, an increasingly popular strategy is to enlist corporations in the effort. Even as some progressives continue to launch attacks on corporate misbehavior, often excoriating corporations for ca...

Understanding corporate data models

Corporate data models are widely used to support data management within organisations. However, both IS professionals and business users ®nd them dif®cult to understand. This paper describes a methodology for designing and representing corporate data models that uses explanation and visualisation mechanisms to improve understanding, and reports a case study of the use of the methodology in the ...

Life Cycles

Understanding Business Cycles*

I. Why is it that, in capitalist economies, aggregate variables undergo repeated fluctuations about trend, all of essentially the same character? Prior to Keynes’ General Theory, the resolution of this question was regarded as one of the main outstanding challenges to economic research, and attempts to meet this challenge were called business cycle theory. Moreover, among the interwar business ...

Corporate Investment Over Uncertain Business Cycles

We present a dynamic model of irreversible corporate investment over the business cycle with uncertainty about the true state of the economy. We show that the firm’s optimal investment threshold, defined by the ratio of the current demand factor to the capital stock, is a concave function of the firm’s posterior probability of being in an expansion. Our model replicates some important features ...