Abstract This article tries to give out the possible practices for these MNCs¡¦ subsidiaries in Taiwan and the Government of Taiwan to prolong, sustain, and even transform their own capabilities and subsidiaries¡¦ status when facing the raising of emerging market of China. After rearranging lots of articles concerning MNCs, this article take the dyadic view (subsidiary ¡V subsidiary ) to discuss the relationship of the subsidiaries between the two sides. And, this article¡¦s dependent and independent variables are also come from two main research streams of the MNC (i.e. Bartlett and Ghoshal(1989) and Porter(1986)). Through out the two main research streams, this article can not only give practical suggestions for the subsidiaries in Taiwan and the government of Taiwan but also give some theoretical extensions and contributions. Besides, this article also ties to explore the possible types of regional resources allocations in Asia for these MNCs. The practical suggestions following the empirical results are as follows: 1.no matter what the roles of the subsidiaries in Taiwan will be, to maintain a acceptable performance result is important for not only sustain their own status but also contribute to receive new charters. 2. the subsidiaries in Taiwan need to foster their own specialized capabilities, promote internationalization mentality for these higher ranking executives, which can prolong their own advantages edge. 3. social interactions are as important as economic ones. Subsidiaries¡¦ executives need to focus on the cultivation of social capital. 4. good business environment help make integration of value activities, but not necessarily contribute to future status of the subsidiaries between the two sides. 5. government of Taiwan needs to build and maintain infrastructure for helping create subsidiaries¡¦ capabilities. This article also find out four main types of the resources allocations of the MNCs. 1.regional centric: featuring raw materials, manufacturing, product design, human resources being global scale, but finance and marketing being coordinated in southeast Asia region, sales and process design being coordinated in great China region. This type of strategy is similar to Bartlett and Ghoshal(1989)¡¦s international strategy. 2.tansnational centric: featuring product design and process design being coordinated in global scale, marketing and sales being coordinated in regional area. This type of strategy is similar to Bartlett and Ghoshal(1989)¡¦s transnational strategy. 3.global centric: featuring all the value activities are coordinated in global scale, let no one value activity is coordinated in Asia region. This type of strategy is similar to Bartlett and Ghoshal(1989)¡¦s global strategy. 4.regional centric: featuring product design and process design are coordinated in great China region, other value activities like manufacturing, finance management, accounting /law services being also coordinated in great China region. This type of strategy is similar to Bartlett and Ghoshal(1989)¡¦s multidomestic strategy. The meaning of these four types are as follows: 1.regionalized production is not antipode of globalization production. globalization means the linkage of different regional areas. Globalization and regionalization is the same coin of different sides. 2.responding to what Porter(1998) says, global competition is managing the integration of these interrelated and dispersed resources. 3. different types of value activities are dispersed in different regions. Firms need not to concentrate all the activities in one country or region but need tightly coordination. 4. compared to Malnight(2001), this article indicates four types of different strategies which represent different levels of coordination.

Current world economy is impacted by the new and the old economy systems primarily due to high-tech software and hardware products that are constantly emerging to the market place. It has brought many innovations and high efficiencies to people¡¦s daily lives, e.g., the food, clothing, housing and transportation, etc. The influence of this evolution is potentially enormous and such evolution inspires people¡¦s confidence in the current Electronic Age. By reviewing the world¡¦s current economy, it appears that winner¡¦s economy system must rely on both the new and the old economy industries positively. In other words, the new economy has to be established on the foundation of stable traditional industries, and the old economy system must be improved and advanced with the help of the new technology. The basic reason is that the necessities of people¡¦s life are mostly supplied by the traditional industries from the old economy. As an island nation under the trend of the world¡¦s economy, Taiwan¡¦s new and old economy systems are required to be balanced in such a way that mutually one benefits the other. Because of this concern, the new government proposed a ¡§Green Silicon-Island Economical Development Project¡¨, and aggressively launched a ¡§Boosting Traditional Industry Plan¡¨ as well. By cultivating the traditional industries, the new economic technology can prosper accordingly. At this opportunistic juncture, Company A formulated a 5-year business plan to venture into a traditional industry: manufacturing of friction materials. The goal is to raise 4 million USD for starting up a production facility to manufacture and market a wide range of friction materials, in an effort to respond to the Government¡¦s call of boosting traditional industries. The main focuses of the proposed business are to build a solid manufacturing foundation on Taiwan, to market the products to the entire world, and to thrive the business to excellence with technology-based operation and management. The variety of friction materials is overwhelming. In terms of material composition, friction materials can be classified into the following four types: semi-metallic, sintered metallic, paper-based, and carbon fiber-based materials. This proposal explores key issues that are essential to the success of the production of all four types of friction materials. These key issues include: industry infrastructure, market size analysis, marketing strategies, operation networking, risk analysis, and core technical strength. Based on the above analysis, a 5-year financial planning is presented. Detailed analysis for the financial objectives on financial feasibility, cash flow, break-even point, and investment interests are also included. ¡K¡K¡K¡K¡K

The aim of this thesis is to test whether incorporating principles of responsible investment will have an impact on financial performance when investing in emerging markets. A developed market is included to bring up potential structural differences between emerging and developed markets. Principles of responsible investment suggested by the UN concerns environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. The financial performance of highly rated ESG portfolios was evaluated by using the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the Fama French 3-factor model. Alpha has been used as the performance measurement. Results reveal that incorporating principles of responsible investment by using a best-in-class approach generates statistically significant and positive alphas in emerging markets, while the developed market of the U.S generates an insignificant alpha.

This dissertation consists of three economic experiments that investigate behavioral differences in decision making process under risk (uncertainty with known probabilities) and under ambiguity (uncertainty with unknown probabilities). The first and the second chapters present two experiments with subjects choosing between lotteries involving risky and ambiguous urns. Decisions are made in conjunction with a sequence of random draws with replacement, allowing us to track the beliefs of the agents at different moments in time. In the first chapter, we develop and estimate a model of subjective belief updating allowing for base rate fallacy. We find that when updating under ambiguity subjects significantly underweight the new signal, while when updating under compound risk subjects are essentially Bayesian. In the second chapter, we estimate a popular multiple priors model for decision making under ambiguity in dynamic environments. Our estimates suggest a difference in the confidence with which subjects discard the unlikely priors depending on whether an ambiguous urn was presented first or second. Specifically, when an ambiguous urn is presented first, subjects consider more priors during the learning process as compared to when a compound urn is presented first. We also find significant evidence against the hypothesis that human subjects consider only Dirac priors. In the third chapter, we examine the behavior of security dealers in an environment where the level of asymmetric information is viewed as either risk, compound risk, or ambiguity. Using two measures of market liquidity, resiliency and price, we find that duopoly dealer markets are both more resilient to uncertainty about asymmetric information as well as having higher dealer bids compared with monopoly dealer markets for all three uncertainty scenarios. Additionally, we find differences in dealer bidding behavior in duopoly setting depending on whether the uncertainty about informed trading is presented as risk, compound risk, or ambiguity. / text

The United States is in the midst of a rather severe housing crisis. Home prices have declined and foreclosures have increased in cities all over the country. The crisis began in 2007 and has continued into the fourth quarter of 2008. Some cities have been severely affected by the housing crisis while others have been able to maintain relatively healthy housing markets. This paper demonstrates the local nature of housing markets and the factors which shape them. Analyses of the local housing markets of Austin, TX, Atlanta, GA and Miami, FL comprise the bulk of this paper and demonstrate the broad spectrum of housing market conditions that exist today. The lessons learned from the three case studies finally lead to some recommendations for local planners which could prove effective for creating and maintaining healthy local housing markets. / text

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This dissertation consists of three essays on microeconomics. The first essay considers matching markets, markets where buyers and sellers and concerned about who they interact with. It proposes a model to analyze these markets akin to the standard supply and demand framework. The second essay considers mechanism design, the problem of designing rules to make collective decisions in the presence of private information. It proposes the concept of strategyproofness in the large, which is that an agent without too fine information has negligible gains from misreporting her type in a large market. It argues that, for all practical purposes, this concept correctly separates mechanisms where behavior akin to price-taking is observed, and those where participants rampantly manipulate their stated preferences. A Theorem is proven that gives a precise sense in which strategyproofness in the large is not a very restrictive property. The third essay considers the evolutionary origins of the endowment effect bias, where the willingness to pay for a good is smaller than the willingness to accept. It gives evidence that this bias is not present in a modern hunter-gatherer population, questioning standard evolutionary accounts. It shows that cultural shocks in a subpopulation did give rise to the bias. / Economics

Abstract: Black immigrants are a demographically and socially important group in the United States. Between 1960 and 2005 the foreign-born share of the entire black population increased twenty-two fold. Furthermore, this group also accounted for more than 20% of the growth in the black population in the 2000s. In spite of the rapid growth of the black immigrant population, few studies have evaluated their health and labor market outcomes. The existing literature on black immigrants demonstrates that this group has health outcomes that are substantially different from those of other immigrant populations. Research illustrates that most black immigrants arrive in the United States with better health than black Americans and maintain this health advantage after more than two decades in the United States. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced among African immigrants. Research in this area also demonstrates that certain subgroups of black immigrants, such as West Indians, have superior labor market outcomes compared to black Americans. Because of the phenotypic similarities between these two groups, these findings have led some scholars and policymakers to question the salience of discrimination and racism in determining the labor market outcomes of black Americans. This dissertation expands the literature on the health and labor market outcomes of black immigrants by evaluating the salience of the major sociological theories, including immigrant versus native culture, bias of whites toward black immigrants over black Americans, and selective migration in explaining differences in labor market outcomes between black immigrants and black Americans. In an effort to better understand the unique health patterns among black immigrants, this dissertation also advances and tests a conceptual model that evaluates whether social, economic, and health conditions within the sending countries of black immigrants explain variations in health and disability among these immigrants. This dissertation uses data on males from the 1980-2000 U.S. Censuses and the 2001-2007 American Community Survey to estimate wage, employment, and self-employment models to determine if black immigrants have outcomes that resemble those of native blacks (collectively) or native black internal migrants. The results suggest that migration selectivity is important in explaining wage and employment differences between black immigrants and black natives. However, migration selectivity plays a limited role in explaining self-employment differences between black immigrants and black natives. This general finding is produced when black immigrants are evaluated collectively and when they are separated by both region and country of birth. This result suggests that differences that exist between black immigrants and black natives are the result of selective migration rather than culture. This work is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of the importance of selective migration in explaining labor market differences between black Americans and black immigrants from all the major sending regions and countries of the world. This work also uses data on black immigrants from the 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 March Current Population Survey to evaluate the role that conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin play in explaining variation in health and disability among black immigrants in the United States. Estimates from reduced form health and disability models show that these outcomes are more favorable for immigrants who migrate from countries with high combined enrollment ratios, low income inequality, and high life expectancy. The results also demonstrate that country of origin conditions explain some portion of differences in health among immigrants. / text

In an attempt to engage the fundamental issues of design that are integral to our understanding of architecture and the built environment, this thesis investigates how spontaneous architecture can transcend political and social boundaries by acting as a catalyst in the urban environment. The act of catalyzing is exemplified in the informal sector through street markets and street vendors. And while the complexity of the current economic reality in the United States has resulted in a fragmented architectural typology, the dynamic articulation of marginalized vacant space in the urban core has become a strong player in a revival of localism. The underpinning goal of this thesis is to develop an understanding of the significance that these catalytic engines play in the reintegration of cities still fighting to overcome the spoils of modernity. Through a revival of localism and a re-appropriation of urban energies, markets exemplify the bottom-up approach of incremental urban design powered by formation of strong micro economies. Market case studies we visited in 6 cities in the United States: St. Louis, Missouri; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Detroit, Michigan; and New York, New York. The case studies were used as means of deriving at potential insights to the state of the American street market. An examination of prescription of catalytic opportunities – a dynamical system that has a sensitive dependence on the initial conditions of a place – presents a series of guiding principles for successful market design. / text

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