Productivity and international competitiveness of agriculture in the European Union and the United States

This study looks at international competitiveness of agriculture in the European Union and the United States. The most intuitive concept is that of price competitiveness. We calculate relative prices for 11 member states of the European Union and the United States for the period 1973–2002. We assume that markets are perfectly competitive and in long‐run equilibrium, so that the observed price always equals average total cost, as measured by the cost dual to the production function. This assumption is used in our calculation of relative competitiveness and productivity gaps between the European Union and the United States and in our decomposition of relative price movements between changes in relative input prices and changes in relative productivity levels.     

Testing the CAPM revisited

This paper re-examines the tests of the Sharpe–Lintner Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). The null that the CAPM intercepts are zero is tested for ten size-based stock portfolios and for twenty five book-to-market sorted portfolios using five-year, ten-year and longer sub-periods during 1965–2004. The paper shows that the evidence for rejecting the CAPM on statistical grounds is weaker than the consensus view suggests, and highlights the pitfalls of testing multiple hypotheses with the conventional heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation robust (HAR) test with asymptotic P-values. The conventional test rejects the null for almost all sub-periods, which is consistent with the evidence in the literature. By contrast, the null is not rejected for most of the sub-periods by the new HAR tests developed by Kiefer et al. (2000), Kiefer and Vogelsang (2005), and Sun et al. (2008).     

The State of Public Sector Unionism: Challenges and Opportunities

The face of unionism in the United States is becoming increasingly public sector. On the surface, public sector unionism appears as a bright spot for labor. A more careful examination of the data, however, reveals that such unionism is at a standstill. Absolute growth has been insufficient to offset losses in private industry, and it is largely tied to increases in public employment. Public employee unions face numerous serious challenges, and questions have been raised in the federal service about the very legitimacy of union representation. Future scenarios suggest that public sector unionism as a whole will likely remain in a more or less stagnant position.     

Applying the Randomized Response Technique in Business Ethics Research: The Misuse of Information Systems Resources in the Workplace

Mitigating response distortion in answers to sensitive questions is an important issue for business ethics researchers. Sensitive questions may be asked in surveys related to business ethics, and respondents may intend to avoid exposing sensitive aspects of their character by answering such questions dishonestly, resulting in response distortion. Previous studies have provided evidence that a surveying procedure called the randomized response technique (RRT) is useful for mitigating such distortion. However, previous studies have mainly applied the RRT to individual dichotomous questions (e.g., yes/no questions) in face-to-face survey settings. In this study, we focus on behavioral research examining the relationships between latent variables, which are unobserved variables measured by multiple items on Likert or bipolar scales. To demonstrate how the RRT can be applied to obtain valid answers from respondents answering a self-administered online questionnaire with Likert and bipolar scales, we build a behavioral model to study the effect of punishment severity on employees’ attitudes toward misuse of information systems resources in the workplace, which in turn influence misuse behavior. The survey findings meet our expectations. The respondents are generally more willing to disclose sensitive data about their attitudes and actual behavior related to misuse when the RRT is implemented. The RRT’s implications for causal modeling and the advantages and challenges of its use in online environments are also discussed.     

Critical Political Economy and Material Transformation

The starting point for this paper is that critical political economy needs to take up the challenge that originates in Marx's seminal contributions of conceptualising the economy as both processes of value creation and processes of material transformations. This is because, inter alia, the successful production of commodities requires knowledge of their constituent materials and their potential transformations and the ways in which these can be managed through the production process to allow the creation of surplus value and profits. Using the steel and automobile industries as an example, I show how a wide range of materials can be produced with a variety of desirable properties through careful control of the production process. Sophisticated management of the production process depends upon the knowledge of the properties of the materials and of the ways in which these can be combined and transformed to give types of steels with particular desired combination of properties. Capitalist interests have increasingly shaped the processes of R&D through which knowledge about the materials, their properties and their transformations has been developed and deployed to produce profits via producing steel and – inter alia – automobiles.     

Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery: Re‐enactment Event Tourism as Authentic Heritage Travel

Abstract

Heritage tourism has evolved to include study of sub‐segments who travel to attend and participate in historical event re‐enactments. In the US, the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific coast and back again is being commemorated from its point of departure to its end. This paper is an exploratory study of a sample of re‐enactment tourists who attended three of the Lewis and Clark events. The role that re‐enactment tourism plays in heritage tourism is examined and preliminary findings on perceptions of nostalgia and authenticity of the re‐enactment products and events are presented. Preliminary managerial benefits and suggestions for host communities are provided.     

Central city crime and suburban economic growth

This paper explores the relationship between inner-city crime patterns and suburban income growth, analysing data on 318 US counties for selected metropolitan statistical areas of 32 states within the United States from 1982 to 1997. The findings suggest that violent crime does seem to have a negative impact on close-in suburbs, with a less negative impact farther away from the central city (becoming positive at some point). While results are not as robust as we had hoped they are consistent with flight to further-out suburbs rather than migration to different metropolitan areas in response to urban crime.     

Institutionalism and Econometrics: Toward a Meaningful Synthesis

For the last twenty years, the world economy has evolved at a great speed. Every good, capital asset, and knowledge is mobile and induces more competition. Innovation in commodities is a complex process that requires more cooperation. To innovate in the knowledge economy, firms nowadays must establish “win-win situations” for individuals in creating networks. These networks are useful for firms in order to come up with innovative strategies. The building of networks enables the interactions between agents, the environment, and institutions. The interdependence of agents and institutions is not new to evolutionary theory (Commons 1931 Commons, John R. “Institutional Economics.” American Economic Review 21, 4 (1931): 648–657. [Google Scholar]; Veblen 1898 Veblen, Thorstein. “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Sciences?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 12, 2 (1898): 373–397.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). However, I argue that institutions must be more flexible than ever before in order to help agents adapt to the modern knowledge economy. On the basis of the role of meso-networks, I propose new long-run specialization and short-run competitiveness that will promote greater efficiency and equality around the world in relation to firms and countries exporting industrial goods into world markets. Within the innovative networks, I analyze the role of two different actors: (i) the “economic leader” who has a long-run strategy and (ii) the “go-between leader” who knows how to diffuse “useful information” to actors to help them innovate in new products, services, or processes.     

J. S. Mill on Wages and Women: A Feminist Critique

"J. S. Mill on Wages and Women" questions the common belief that Mill, despite his feminism, never suggested an end to the sexual division of labor because of his devotion to the concept of efficiency and other tenets of classical economics. A review of Mill's analysis of a competitive labor market indicates that he believed it to be fully consistent with women's equality in the workforce. In fact, in his works on women, it becomes clear that Mill was concerned that the logical extension of classical economic principles might lead to the commodification of domestic duties, including child rearing, a notion he evidently feared. Therefore, it was Mill's fear of, rather than dedication to, extreme allegiance to efficiency and unimpeded capitalism that limited his feminism.