Integrated Reporting,Stakeholder Engagement,and Balanced Investing at American Electric Power

The policies and practices of American Electric Power (AEP) encompass a number of paradoxes in the domain of sustainability. AEP is a large electric power provider with a predominantly coal‐fired power generation portfolio, which puts the company squarely in the center of national debates about global climate change and national air quality. At the same time, AEP is also a leader on several social and environmental fronts: integrated reporting, stakeholder engagement, technology innovation, and policy solutions for climate change. In this article, the authors describe AEP's rationale for providing leadership in these areas and then explore how the company tries to balance stakeholder interests and financial, environmental, and social concerns in its capital investment decisions. Using these examples, the authors expand on and discuss the limitations of Michael Jensen's theory of “enlightened value maximization.”     

A case study of short-sale constraints and limits to arbitrage

This paper uses a unique data set of trades in a unique pair of securities that enables the precise identification of individual broker activity and the trade direction of that activity. We find direct evidence that the imposition (removal) of short-sale constraints limits (generates) trading activity consistent with brokers exploiting apparent mispricing.     

The Demand for Private Medical Insurance in the UK: A Cohort Analysis

This paper examines the determinants of the demand for private health insurance in the United Kingdom from 1978 to 1996 using a pseudo-cohort panel. The focus is on the impact of public and private sector quality, generational change, and past purchase on demand. The results indicate that there has been generational change in buying behaviour, that the number of senior doctors employed in the public sector impacts upon demand for the private alternative, and that there is limited impact of habit in purchase. Changes to the structure of labour contracts in the NHS may affect demand for the private alternative.     

Class Formation and Localism in an Emerging Bureaucracy: British Bank Workers, 1880–1960

This article uses a case study of the spatial and career mobility of bank workers from Lloyds, a leading British bank, to explore the relationship between class formation and spatial mobility. The article argues against the idea that the large‐scale concentration and bureaucratization of the British banking industry in the early years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a mobile middle‐class spiralist or cosmopolitan. We use archival data from Lloyds Bank to argue that the emergence of Lloyds as a large‐scale national bank involved a compromise with localized interests rather than a detachment of the bank from local concerns. We use data on the career histories of a representative sample of male bank employees to argue that spatial mobility was organized largely within regions and helped to consolidate the prospects of rural bank workers. We argue that London emerged as a distinctive ‘hub’ for banking careers, with significant amounts of movement to and from London from all regions. We therefore demonstrate how localized and rural cultures were sedimented within a large, national bureaucracy, and that a genuine ‘spiralist’ structure did not emerge. En s’appuyant sur une étude de cas relative à la mobilité géographique et professionnelle du personnel de la Lloyds, l’une des premières banques britanniques, cet article examine le lien entre la formation d’une classe et la mobilité spatiale. Il combat l’idée que la concentration et la bureaucratisation à grande échelle du secteur bancaire britannique au début du XXe siècle a fait na? tre une classe moyenne mobile en spirale ou cosmopolite. Les données d’archives de la Lloyds révèlent que son développement en tant que grande banque nationale s’est accompagné d’un compromis avec les intér? ts locaux plutôt que d’une indifférence à l’égard de ces préoccupations. Les informations sur les carrières d’un échantillon représentatif d’employés de banque masculins permettent d’établir que la mobilité géographique a été organisée largement au plan régional, contribuant à consolider les perspectives des employés en zone rurale. Londres est apparu comme un ‘pôle’ particulier dans les carrières bancaires, avec un nombre considérable de mutations vers et de la capitale à partir de toutes les régions. L’article montre ainsi comment des cultures locales et rurales se sont sédimentées au sein d’une importante bureaucratie nationale et qu’aucune structure ‘en spirale’ pure n’en est issue.     

How real people make long-term decisions: The case of retirement preparation

Large variations in retirement wealth are common, with some households accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars and others accumulating next to nothing. We examine to what extent formal planning or simple rules of thumb contribute to these differences in wealth accumulation. In particular, we investigate whether those who follow simple rules of thumb or those who come up with more complete plans accumulate more wealth than those who take an unsystematic approach. We test this empirically using a specifically designed survey about retirement preparation. We find that people who rely on a rule of thumb behave like literal planners. However, people without any systematic approach save substantially less. Our results, taken together with evidence from psychology, suggest that financial planning advice based on simple rules of thumb may be helpful for those who currently take no systematic approach.     

(When) Do hub airlines internalize their self-imposed congestion delays?

Specification tests using stochastic bottleneck models of airport congestion investigate whether dominant airlines internalize or ignore self-imposed delays at twenty-seven major US airports. Data on flight times determine the airport's landing and takeoff delays for every minute of operation during peak travel days. Dynamic congestion functions based on stochastic-queuing theory separately identify delays that aircraft experience directly, impose internally on their airline's other aircraft, or impose externally on other airlines. Specification tests largely reject internalization and fail to reject non-internalization by dominant airlines. Optimal pricing should value all time using non-dominant aircraft time values and treat all delays as external.     

Women's unemployment during transition Evidence from Czech and Slovak micro-data

We analyse women’s weekly probabilities of leaving unemployment in the Czech and Slovak Republics (CR and SR) in order to investigate three questions: 1) Why are unemployment rates much lower in the CR than the SR?; 2) Does the unemployment compensation scheme (UCS) substantially lengthen unemploy-mentspells?; and 3) Why are women’s unemployment rates higher than men’s? We find that differences in the behaviour of the individuals, employers and institutions in the SR and CR (as measured by differences in coefficients) play a larger role in determining the CR’s shorter female unemployment spells than do differences in measured demand and demographic variables. The UCS has only a moderate effect on duration and its impact is greater in the CR. The differences between men’s and women’s spells (in each republic) are explained more by differences in coefficients than by differences in observed characteristics. JEL classification: C41, H53, J23, J64, O15, P2.