Economists From Germany

"A foreign visitor to the Berlin Stock Exchange would easily be deceived. There are announcements of daily quotations and price changes as though a free Stock Exchanged still existed, but nowhere would he find the former ‘public’— private buyers and sellers—as represented by independent brokers, bankers and ‘visitors.’"

"Japanese exporters are organized in export cartels by the State. The State restricts competition among exporters and importers. The same thing is done in Germany and Italy. Moreover, it is not only in totalitarian States that payments for imported goods have become dependent on governmental decisions."

"Of all businessmen the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the Party. The Party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or just around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Heer Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these man as ‘enemies of the State’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota or scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business license."

"In others cases, National Socialist officials were levying harsh fines of millions of marks for a “single bookkeeping error.”"

"You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain about it. The new State loans are nothing but confiscation of private property, because no one believes that the Government will ever make repayment, not even pay interest after the first few years."

"The totalitarian State does not tolerate any ‘second government,’ any challenge to the power of the all-wise dictator. [As the Nazi party has stated] ‘Within the constitution of the Third Reich any position independent of the will of the Fuehrer no longer exists. The principle of separation of power is a thing of the past. Only the Party has a privileged position.’"

"I must confess that I think as most German businessmen do who today fear National Socialism as much as they did Communism in 1932. But there is a distinction. In 1932, the fear of Communism was a phantom; today National Socialism is a terrible reality. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews' (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated… The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen."

"Fritz Nonnenbruch, the financial editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, states: ‘There exists no law which binds the State. The state can do what it regards as necessary, because it has the authority…. The next stage of National-Socialist economic policy consists of replacing capitalist laws by policy.’"

"Whereas in democratic countries the businessman may use his money to influence legislation and public opinion and thus operated as a source of power and corruption, in fascist countries he can exist only as the subject upon whom State power operates. The corruption in fascist arises inevitably from the reversal of the role of the capitalist and the State as wielders of economic power."

"The existence of a state within the State—the Party and the bureaucracy—is a phenomenon of the post-War world."

"[F]ascism is a new brand of feudalism in which the private capitalist has become merely a tool of the State—where absolute power has entirely taken the place of money power."

"The slightest formal mistake was punishable with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error. Obviously, the [Nazi] examination of the books was simply a pretext for partial expropriation of the private capitalist with a view to complete expropriation and seizure of the desired property later."

"Realistically, it will be a case of muddling through, struggling from one crisis to the next. It is difficult to forecast how long this will continue for, but it cannot go on endlessly. Governments will pile up more debt — and then one day, the house of cards will collapse."

"Cannon and Homburg (2001) have analyzed the customer firm costs, and concluded that lowering customer cost can be a key way to create value for customers and gain larger customer shares."

"Homburg and Pflesser [2000] develop a multilayer model of market-oriented organizational culture. Following the model by Schein [1984] and framing a construct consisting of the four latent variables (1) shared basic values supporting market orientation, (2) norms for market orientation, (3) artifacts of market orientation, and. (4) market-oriented behaviors, Homburg and Pflesser [2000] provide evidence that culture influences market performance and indirectly also financial performance."

"The notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained momentum and is currently of strategic importance for many companies. Among Fortune 500 companies, as many as 90% have explicit CSR initiatives, more than half publish a separate annual CSR report, and most have senior executives responsible for CSR (Luo and Bhattacharya 2009; McKinsey & Company 2009)."

"Despite the high relevance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in current business practice and the considerable research on CSR outcomes in consumer markets, investigations of its influence on organizational business relationships are scarce. Relying on instrumental stakeholder theory the authors develop and empirically test a framework of the influence of a supplier's CSR engagement on organizational customer outcomes. Findings from an examination of 200 cross-industry supplier-customer dyads reveal positive effects of two facets of a supplier's CSR efforts on customer loyalty through distinct mechanisms. Business practice GSR fosters customers' trust, whereas philanthropic CSR strengthens customer-company identification. The authors distinguish a supplier's actual GSR engagement and customers' perception of these GSR activities. In addition, they consider central contingency factors reflecting uncertainty and dependence in business-to-business relationships that determine the effectiveness of GSR."

"We define CSR as a firm's voluntary consideration of stakeholder concerns both within and outside its business operations."

"Little is known about the interface between separate marketing units and sales units. This article develops a multidimensional model of the marketing and sales interface. The model integrates a broad range of conceptual domains, including information sharing, structural linkages, power, orientations, and knowledge of marketing and sales. The authors empirically explore the conceptual model through a cross-industry study of 337 European Union–based companies. They identify five empirical archetypes of the marketing and sales interface. The taxonomy shows that the role and characteristics of marketing and sales vary a great deal. This finding challenges existing stereotypes about marketing and sales. Finally, the article explores organizational outcomes of the five configurations. The findings suggest that the most successful configurations are characterized by strong structural linkages between marketing and sales and a high extent of market knowledge in marketing."

"Marketing Management: A Contemporary Perspective provides a fresh new perspective on marketing from some of the leading researchers in Europe. The book offers students and practitioners the comprehensive coverage they need to make the right decisions to create and implement highly successful marketing strategies. This exciting new book combines scholarly international research with relevant and contemporary examples from markets and brands across the world."

"Much empirical work on marketing organization has not distinguished between marketing units and sales units. Traditionally, sales has been conceptualized as a subunit of the marketing department that reports to a marketing executive (Ruekert, Walker, and Roering 1985; Weitz and Anderson 1981). For example, Ruekert and Walker (1987a, b) and Dastmalchian and Boag (1990) speak about marketing as one whole and barely mention the word sales. This view of M & S as one unit is challenged by qualitative reports (Piercy 1986)."

"Stakeholder theory regards the firm as a nexus of stakeholders, commonly defined as groups or individuals who can affect or are affected by the achievement of the firm's goals (Freeman 1984). Depending on the ground for examining a firm's stakeholders, we can differentiate three approaches (Jones 1995):"

"Homburg, Workman, and Krohmer (1999) examine marketing’s influence within the firm and, in a survey of U.S. and German companies, find that marketing had substantial influence — at least ten years ago. They also find that marketing’s influence is related to (1) external contingency variables, such as the frequency and unpredictability of market-related changes; (2) competitive strategies; and (3) institutional determinants, such as whether the chief executive officer (CEO) has a marketing background."

"[Key Account Management is] the extent to which an organization achieves better relationship outcomes for its Key Accounts than for its average accounts."

"[Strategic account management programs include] special activities... such as pricing, products, services, distribution, and information sharing’ and that they involve ‘in addition to marketing and sales, functional groups such as manufacturing, research and development, and finance."

"Cross-functional KAM companies stand out with respect to both performance in the market and adaptiveness."

"Norms guide market-oriented behaviors within organizations. More specifically, we focus on market orientation as the concrete object of these norms. If, for example, the members of an organization share the value of openness of internal communication, a specific norm related to that value is the openness of market-related internal communication. As another example, the norm of market-related responsibility of employees is a specification of the more general shared value of responsibility of the employees... The difference between values and norms is that norms guide behaviors in a specific context, whereas values represent general guidelines."

"Organizational culture consists of four distinguishable but interrelated components. They include shared basic values, behavioral norms, different types of artifacts, and behaviors... Values can be defined as "a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action." Norms differ from values by a higher degree of specificity and a higher relevance for actual behaviors (Katz and Kahn 1978, p. 43). The shared values within an organization form the basis for the development of these norms, which legitimate specific behaviors. More specifically, we define norms as expectations about behavior or its results that are at least partially shared by a social group (O'Reilly 1989; Thibaut and Kelley 1959). Artifacts include stories, arrangements, rituals, and language that are created by an organization and have a strong symbolic meaning (Schein 1992; Trice and Beyer 1993). The symbolic meaning of artifacts is more important than any instrumental function (Hatch 1993). In contrast, behaviors refer to organizational behavioral patterns with an instrumental function."

"The greater the extent of market dynamism, the greater is the positive impact of market-oriented behaviors on market performance."

"Industrial marketing should be understood as a relationship-specific rather than a transaction-specific construct."

"People define themselves in terms of both unique individualizing attributes and collective attributes of the groups to which they belong."

"This paper reviews prior applications of in four major marketing journals (the ', ', ', and the ') between 1977 and 1994. After documenting and characterizing the number of applications over time, we discuss important methodological issues related to structural equation modeling and assess the quality of previous applications in terms of three aspects: issues related to the initial specification of theoretical models of interest; issues related to data screening prior to model estimation and testing; and issues related to the estimation and testing of theoretical models on empirical data. On the basis of our findings, we identify problem areas and suggest avenues for improvement."

"Previous research addressing market orientation from a cultural perspective typically has used behavioral measures of this construct. Drawing on literature in the fields of organizational theory and marketing, the authors develop a multilayer model of market-oriented organizational culture. They draw an explicit distinction among values that support market orientation, norms for market orientation, artifacts indicating high and low market orientation, and market-oriented behaviors. On the basis Of qualitative research and a subsequent survey, the authors develop scales for measuring the different layers of market-oriented culture and analyze relationships among the different components of market-oriented culture. Findings indicate that artifacts play a crucial role in determining behavior within organizations. Results also indicate that a market-oriented culture influences financial performance indirectly through market performance and that this relationship is stronger in highly dynamic markets."

"Activities for complex customers cannot be handled by the sales function alone but requires participation from other functional groups."

"Walter Eucken was a valuable friend for me. In the late 1930s, before the outbreak of the war, when I first acquired a car and made the trip from London to Austria by automobile, I regularly made a stopover in Freiburg just to visit Eucken and to keep in touch with him. Although Eucken had little time left in which to take part in our efforts to defend liberalism, our contacts later had an important consequence."

"The future [...] looks bright, if only we learn to accept the spontaneous character of the underlying public discourse without venturing to “show it the way” and without succumbing to still another pretense of knowledge."

"Unlike Kenneth J. Arrow or Robert M. Solow, Buchanan is not a puzzle solver, but rather a system builder, someone who has come up with a whole new paradigm, an innovative way of looking at the world in general and at politics or collective choice in particular (see Horn, 2009, pp. 85–90.) As mentioned, the roots of this are to be found largely in his personal background and his experience and cultural inheritance as a Southerner. From the outset, what interested him more than anything else was how it is possible for people to live in society without infringing on each other’s rights."

"The most serious criticism of EMU is that by abandoning exchange rate adjustments it transfers to the labor market the task of adjusting for competitiveness and relative prices... losses in output and employment (and pressure on the European central bank to inflate) will predominate."

"The most likely scenario is that EMU (Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union) will occur but will neither end Europe’s currency troubles nor solve its prosperity problems."

"The model retains the uncomfortable property that any increase in demand for home output ... leads to nominal and real appreciation... The uncomfortable fact remains that even in this model there is a short-run tendency for an expenditure increase to induce an appreciation... Expansionary fiscal policy will lead to an initial depreciation of the nominal and real exchange rate if ... (it) is accommodated by an expansion in nominal money."

"Once Italy is in, with an appreciated currency, the country will soon be back on the ropes, just as in 1992, when the currency came under attack."

"The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought."

"The paper develops a simple macroeconomic framework for the study of exchange rate movements. The purpose is to develop a theory that is suggestive of the observed large fluctuations in exchange rates while at the same time establishing that such exchange rate movements are consistent with rational expectations formation. In developing a formal model we draw on the role of asset markets, capital mobility, and expectations that have been emphasized in recent literature."

"In figure 3 we show the money and domestic asset market equilibrium schedules for given stocks of each of the assets. Along MM the domestic money market is in equilibrium. Higher interest rates reduce money demand so that equilibrium requires a depreciation and thus a rise in the domestic currency value of foreign assets and - hence wealth. The exchange rate thus plays a balancing role by affecting the valuation of assets."

"On my first trip to Chile, I went to the ministry of finance to meet with the minister and the deputy minister, and behind the deputy's desk were two photos -- one of Chile's president and the other of Rudi."

"Monetary policy affects the ... of goods and assets and (iii) effects through changes in explicit or implicit real interest rates on aggregate demand."

"Italians dream that the ECB (European Central Bank) will make their life easier than the Bundesbank does now... The new central bank is certain to establish itself at the outset as a direct continuation of the German central bank."

"If there was ever a bad idea, EMU it is."

"Globalization has brought a new challenge to Europe: migration."

"The Passions and the Interests does not have the policy urgency that a contribution to public decisions may enjoy (as Hirschman's The Strategy of Economic Development eminently does), nor the compulsive immediacy that the exigencies of practical reason generate (as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty superbly portrayed). What then is so special about this book? […] The answer lies not only in the recognition that Hirschman makes us see the ideological foundations of capitalism in a fresh way, but also in the remarkable fact that this freshness is derived from ideas that are more than two-hundred-years old. The basic hypothesis— the articulation and development of which Hirschman investigates—makes the case for capitalism rest on the belief that "it would activate some benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones.""