Marshall's Parable of the Meteoric Stones:

A bstract Marshall defended the classical concepts of land, labor and capital, even though many of his neoclassical contemporaries rejected these old distinctions and explained all factor incomes with a unified and general theory In his parable of the meteoric stones. Marshall illustrated the principles that separately determine rent, quasi-rent and interest , but he reconciled the old and the new by making special assumptions, which he did not fully explain His theory of rent requires the supply of land to be perfectly inelastic, and his doctrine of quasi-rent implies that markets are imperfectly competitive     

Institutional Antecedents of the Corporate Social Responsibility Narrative in the Developing World Context: Implications for Sustainable Development

Efforts to understand the background to perceptions and manifestation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the developing world need to focus on establishing their link with the challenges of socio‐economic governance and societal expectations and cultural traditions. This signifies a departure from a western centric understanding of CSR but also an over‐focus on CSR as philanthropy. This study considers the Malawian tourism industry and finds that its colonial legacy, post‐colonialism development thinking and the national education system explain the prevalence of a ‘CSR as philanthropy’ agenda. When these factors interact with challenges of socio‐economic governance and societal expectations, however, the universality thesis that has often been associated with the theory and implementation CSR can be challenged. These findings therefore suggest a shift from the western centric CSR thinking to a CSR perspective that is strongly grounded in local values and norms and which meets the expectations of the global society. This indicates a way forward if CSR is to be adequately institutionalized in the developing world. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The impact of HRM practices on service quality,customer satisfaction and performance in the Indian hotel industry

This article reviews findings from a first survey of employers' views on collective bargaining reform that now forms the centrepiece of post-apartheid South Africa's experiment with 'democratic corporatism'. Using factor analysis, three constructs have been identified that inform employer attitudes to a revised system of sectoral bargaining: 'autonomous capacity'; 'conditional association'; 'external threat'. Despite the potential for anomie, these factors appear significant in the way they consistently explain an employer's orientation towards associational membership and, by proxy, sectoral bargaining. Moreover, at least two-thirds of responding firms identified strongly with each of the three factors but, typically, firms with weak capacity and in need of collective protection from the other actors are most likely to associate. Regression analysis further reveals company well-being, foreign ownership and union presence to have a significant impact on these three factors to varying degrees. Equally, two of the factors (autonomous capacity and external threat) impact significantly on an employer's tolerance of free-riding in others and on the temptation to do so for oneself. Overall, for this sample of firms, employer bodies are to be viewed more as 'political devices' than as 'economic agents' in the immediate aftermath of political liberation. In this sense, they are different from their European counter-parts. However, there is an increasing likelihood of this changing as the flexibility agenda looms ever larger in employers' minds and as issues of 'political insecurity' correspondingly fade.     

TAXATION OF ECONOMIC RENTS

Economic rents have long been identified as an efficient tax base. In addition, the recent literature documents that rent income is highly concentrated and that rents are quickly increasing. Rent taxation thus seems attractive for reasons of both efficiency and equity. Nevertheless, rent taxation remains a marginal topic in research and policy making. In a systematic review of the neoclassical literature on different rent types, we find that some types of rents reflect inefficiencies and should thus be minimized, while others reward investments and should be supported in line with social welfare. What remains for taxation are land rents, one of the few true scarcity rents. Land rents have significant potential to improve the efficiency of the tax system. We then begin to develop a comprehensive theory of land rent taxation by identifying relevant efficiency and equity effects. The interaction of many of these effects remains unexplored, which might explain policymakers' hesitation in using land taxes to date.     

Forecasting temperature to price CME temperature derivatives

This paper seeks to forecast temperatures in US cities in order to price temperature derivatives on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The CME defines the average daily temperature underlying its contracts as the average of the maximum and minimum daily temperatures, yet all published work on temperature forecasting for pricing purposes has ignored this peculiar definition of the average and sought to model the average temperature directly. This paper is the first to look at the average temperature forecasting problem as an analysis of extreme values. The theory of extreme values guides model selection for temperature maxima and minima, and a forecast distribution for the CME’s daily average temperature is found through convolution. While univariate time series AR-GARCH and regression models generally yield superior point forecasts of temperatures, our extreme-value-based model consistently outperforms these models in density forecasting, the most important risk management tool.     

论城市土地储备的理论基础

我国城市土地储备制度仍处于起步与探索阶段,存在的突出问题是实践大大超前于理论研究.文章对与城市土地储备有关的地租理论、土地供求理论、区位理论、资源配置与市场失灵理论、政府管理理论、制度变迁与创新理论等进行了论述,指出了各个理论对我国城市土地储备的具体指导意义.     

Social bricolage in the aftermath of war

ABSTRACT

While social bricolage has emerged as a key theoretical frame for understanding how social entrepreneurs mobilize and deploy resources to create social value under situations of resource scarcity, there is scant knowledge about social bricolage in post-conflict settings characterised by extreme resource paucity and adversity. Drawing on field research in post-conflict northern Uganda, we show how groups of disenfranchised young people use social bricolage to create social change in a volatile situation marked by extreme resource deprivation and a plethora of challenges arising in the aftermath of war. Based on empirical data, we outline three key practices of social bricolage employed to cope with resource scarcity, extended crisis and volatility. First, we unravel the practice of securing resources and creating social value by mobilizing peers. Second, we show how pluriactivity is used to stretch and make the most of scarce resources in a shifting environment. Third, we illuminate the practice of rekindling pre-war cultural resources to reunite fragmented communities. By illuminating these practices and showing how the context of the post-conflict developing country setting influences the dynamics of ‘making do with resources at hand’, we seek to extend social bricolage theory.     

THE PARADOX OF SLOW-GROWTH HIGH-INCOME REGIONS

We attempt to provide an economic theory and the empirical evidence to explain why slow-growth regions, like Quebec in Canada, enjoy as high living standards as rapidly growing regions. In the long term quantities not prices adjust (except for the price of land, a resource in fixed supply). Despite variations in regional growth rates, real per capita income adjusted for housing costs converge in all regions. The analysis offers important insights into regional development and has far-reaching implications for federalism.     

The causes and consequences of land use regulation: Evidence from Greater Boston

Over the past 30 years, eastern Massachusetts has seen a remarkable combination of rising home prices and declining supply of new homes, which doesn't appear to reflect any lack of land. In this paper, we examine the increasing number of land-use regulations in Greater Boston. These regulations vary widely over space, and are hard to predict with any variables other than historical density levels. Minimum lot size and other land use controls are associated with reductions in new construction activity. These regulations are associated with higher prices when we do not control for contemporary density and demographics, but not when we add these contemporaneous controls. These results are compatible with economic theory, which predicts that production restraints on a good won't increase the price of that good relative to sufficiently close substitutes. Current density levels appear to be too low to maximize local land values.     

Enclosing the Commons in Honduras

We are witnessing in the 21^st century a dramatic new wave of enclosures of common resources and traditional or indigenous landholdings, as small agrarian producers across the global South are losing their land to large corporations and landowners, especially in the agribusiness and extractive industries. In the context of competing theories about land grabbing and the global commons, this article will offer a detailed empirical account of the strategies by which capital has seized land from smallholders and communities in Honduras, with emphasis on the wide variety of tactics that are used to both grab the land itself and also to maintain an aura of legality around a process that often includes at least the threat of violence.     

城市用地对经济增长贡献的分析

随着经济的高速发展,城市用地扩张在城市经济中所起的作用越来越明显。目前城市建设用地的投放被称为"地根",和货币金融政策"银根"并驾其驱作为宏观调控的两大主要手段。中央政府和地方政府由于存在着利益分配的问题,因而掌握土地实权的地方行政将土地投放作为发展经济的重要驱动。但是土地投入对经济的贡献到底有多大,应该用什么样政策来管理土地投入使用,通过利用改进后的索洛模型来分析,得出的统计结果和模型假设相矛盾。出现这种不合的原因归结为两点,一是中国统计数据质量不高,二是模型适用经济体大小范围。但是能从统计结果大致看出三种要素在经济增长中地位的高低,资本最为重要,其次为劳动力,最后是土地投入。土地投入的作用很小。只要土地投入达到必需量后,土地的进一步投入带来的经济增长很小。最后,进一步提出相关的政策建议,中国应该走"聪明增长"的道路,而不是盲目地扩大城市用地范围。     

Revealed Preference and Location Choice

The assumption that population and structural densities are defined over parcels of land with zero area is problematic when interpreting the standard residential land use model as approximating a large finite economy. This paper extends revealed preference theory to depict a spatial economy with land parcels of finite area. The model generalizes the standard utility function approach, allowing for many consumer types with different tastes and incomes and labor-leisure choice, to show that the most important predictions of the standard theory hold in the general finite framework studied here.     

A game theoretic approach to optimize multi-stakeholder utilities for land acquisition negotiations with informality

To combat the critical stresses of rising urbanization, the government acquires land from private owners using the power of eminent domain. This land assembly causes negative externalities such as increasing social tension and injustice that may impose a long-term threat to stability and sustainable development. Therefore, there is a need to make the land acquisition process more transparent and just. Considering the unique Indian context where informality has a strong presence, we propose an approach based on game theory that models the bargain through a three-stage Nash equilibrium game. Four agents – the government, the private developer, the landowner, and the free rider – are considered. We provide conditional solutions for the generalizable Case and proceed to model different stakeholder behavior patterns through two utility functional forms – linear and exponential. In the linear case, we find that the free rider obtains half of the revenue of the project, whereas the landowner gains between one-fourth and one-half of the revenue. Thus, we highlight the undeniably crucial role free riders play in land acquisition negotiations. However, closed form solutions cannot be obtained for the exponential form, due to which we use simulations to demonstrate a solution procedure. We conclude by stating that the proposed model can be useful in formulating future land policies in a sustainable and inclusive manner, with optimal utility derivations for all concerned stakeholders. Our model can also be extended to other spatial contexts where informality features heavily in the land market, especially in the Global South.     

Measuring the costs of height restrictions with a general equilibrium model

This paper investigates the costs of residential height restrictions, using a numerically solvable general equilibrium model which is based on residential location theory and which has several novel features. The time and money costs of travel are treated separately, households demand recreational land as well as structure and, most importantly, actual construction cost data are used in an activity analysis formulation of the supply side of the housing market. There are two major conclusions. First, households' demand for recreational land is significant; ignoring it results in simulated cities considerably smaller and denser than is observed. Secondly, residential height restrictions merit serious consideration since their costs appear to be quite modest.     

Systemic risk and bank business models

In this paper, we decompose banks' systemic risk into two dimensions: the risk of a bank (“bank tail risk”) and the link of the bank to the system in financial distress (“systemic linkage”). Based on extreme value theory, we estimate a systemic risk measure that can be decomposed into two subcomponents reflecting these dimensions. Empirically, we assess the relationships of bank business models to the two dimensions of systemic risk. The observed differences in these relationships partly explain why micro‐ and macroprudential perspectives sometimes have different implications for banking regulation.     

The current non-status of general equilibrium theory

This paper argues that the abandonment of general equilibrium theory by microeconomists was a mistake. It provides counter arguments to two of the reasons for that abandonment—lack of both generality and consistency with methodological individualism in uniqueness and stability analysis of equilibria—and urges microeconomists to refocus some of their attention on it.     

Extreme Value Theory and Statistics of Univariate Extremes: A Review

Statistical issues arising in modelling univariate extremes of a random sample have been successfully used in the most diverse fields, such as biometrics, finance, insurance and risk theory. Statistics of univariate extremes (SUE), the subject to be dealt with in this review paper, has recently faced a huge development, partially because rare events can have catastrophic consequences for human activities, through their impact on the natural and constructed environments. In the last decades, there has been a shift from the area of parametric SUE, based on probabilistic asymptotic results in extreme value theory, towards semi‐parametric approaches. After a brief reference to Gumbel's block methodology and more recent improvements in the parametric framework, we present an overview of the developments on the estimation of parameters of extreme events and on the testing of extreme value conditions under a semi‐parametric framework. We further discuss a few challenging topics in the area of SUE. © 2014 The Authors. International Statistical Review © 2014 International Statistical Institute     

A simple urban growth model with durable housing

In the last decade the static theory of residential urban location and land use has been extensively developed. The theory has generated many useful insights, but because it ignores growth and the durability of housing and urban infrastructure there are many urban phenomena it cannot explain. In this paper a simple urban growth model with durable housing, in which all builders have perfect foresight, is presented. The discussion focuses on the qualitative differences between the economics of this model, the static class of models, and a class of dynamic models in which myopic expectations are assumed.     

Employee involvement,the quality of training and the learning environment: an individual level analysis

Theories such as human capital theory, the metaphors of learning and the high involvement work paradigm all suggest that the quality of training and learning varies along a number of axes. This article shows how these theoretical insights have been translated into questions used in a UK survey of 6829 employees carried out in 2006. We find that the qualities of both the training experience and on-the-job learning are strongly associated with the extent and nature of employee involvement. This suggests that employee involvement is likely to play an important role in the process of upskilling the workforce, which has been accorded a central role in the economic strategies of many nation states as well as supra-national organizations such as the European Union.     

PLANNING AND GOVERNANCE IN A POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT: A Historical Institutionalist Approach to Land Use Planning in Morocco

This study is concerned with the way colonial land use planning practices have persisted within local institutional structures in the former French colony of Morocco. We use a historical institutionalist approach to reevaluate Morocco's land use planning history and identify key feedback mechanisms that support the continuity of colonial practices within the Moroccan planning institutional structure. We used institutional mappings to identify key actors involved in planning and examined the formal power relations between them. Interviews were used to discuss the effect of informal interactions on the development of land use plans. We argue that aspects of French colonial planning that persisted within the Moroccan local institutional structure have created constraints for Moroccan land use planning. We focus in particular on how a centralist formalization of planning institutions has hampered the effectiveness of decentralization reforms and explain how institutional patterns deriving from the French paternalist approach to colonial rule have persisted in the form of a duality in modern planning structures. Finally, we argue that this path dependence has been strengthened by the creation of the derogation system as a potential way out for actors who are most capable of inducing change.