Barriers to entry and competitive strategies

The relationships between the difficulty of entry and competitive strategies in five industries, chosen for their differing structural contexts, were tested. Statistical support was found for the value of pre-entry analysis of entry barriers and of firms' predicted responses to potential entry. In particular, the creation of idle productive capacity appears to be a potent deterrent to new entrants.     

Repeat‐Sales Indexes: Estimation without Assuming that Errors in Asset Returns Are Independently Distributed

This article proposes an alternative specification for the second stage of the Case‐Shiller repeat‐sales method. This specification is based on serial correlation in the deviations from the mean one‐period returns on the underlying individual assets, whereas the original Case‐Shiller method assumes that the deviations from mean returns by the underlying individual assets are i.i.d. The methodology proposed in this article is easy to implement and provides more accurate estimates of the standard errors of returns under serial correlation. The repeat‐sales methodology is generally used to construct an index of prices or returns for unique, infrequently traded assets such as houses, art and musical instruments, which are likely to be prone to exhibit serial correlation in returns. We demonstrate our methodology on a data set of art prices and on a data set of real estate prices from the city of Amsterdam.     

Food fraud: economic insights into the dark side of incentives

In this review, we contextualise the articles in this special issue, relating them to existing food fraud research, and identify food fraud research trends, challenges and priorities for the near term. We accomplish these aims through a comprehensive review of research by food scientists, economists, other social scientists, legal experts, government research groups and international trade organisations. Existing food fraud research is heavily weighted towards food science, packaging and labelling, and legal areas of knowledge discovery. Moving forward, research is needed pertaining to general economic welfare outcomes from food fraud incidences, economic incentives to deter frauds, economic spillovers from fraud incidences to other food products and markets (domestic and international) and further delineation of the effect of different types of food fraud on consumer and producer welfare. The articles in this special issue make significant contributions to understanding of the role of food fraud in consumer decisions, measuring consumer welfare losses from fraud, food fraud spillover effects to other markets and new frameworks for fraud analysis.     

Then and Now: Examining Older People's Engagement in Outdoor Recreation Across the Life Course

Outdoor recreation provides a range of health and wellbeing benefits and facilitates engagement with natural environments. We explore older people's participation in outdoor recreation throughout their lives to examine how past experiences shape engagement later in life. A qualitative life history approach, consisting of semi-structured interviews and a focus group in three place-specific (urban, rural, and small town coastal) case studies in Scotland, was adopted. Thematic analysis revealed ways in which childhood experiences shaped adult engagement and highlighted life course transitions where behaviour change was most pronounced. Place and gender were considered as factors which may affect responses. Participants identified the points of getting married, becoming a parent, children entering adolescence, retirement, the onset of disabilities or ill health, and the death of others as “moments of change” in the extent and/or form of their outdoor recreation. The findings highlight potential for targeted interventions to promote outdoor recreation throughout life.     

Higher Intensity,Higher Profit? Empirical Evidence from Dairy Farming in New Zealand

Over the last two decades there have been significant and well‐documented changes in the nature and structure of New Zealand dairy production. One particular feature has been a marked shift in the ‘input intensity’ of dairy farming systems through increased use of supplementary feed. These changes have generated debate about the impact of dairy farm intensity on the performance of farm businesses and the competitiveness of the New Zealand dairy sector. Using a novel econometric approach, we assess statistically the impact of three types of dairy farming systems on milk production and financial performance, using farm business data provided by DairyBase^®. Our empirical results show that higher input systems perform significantly better physically than lower input systems, but not financially. The disaggregated analysis suggests that the average treatment effects differ by region and performance quantiles.     

Mobile devices in the lecture hall: Into it,indifferent, or intrusion?

The authors explored undergraduate business students’ feelings and thoughts about themselves, other students, and their professors when mobile devices are used in the lecture hall for nonacademic purposes. Specifically, they investigated mobile device use during class time, and whether students support it, are indifferent toward it, or consider it to be an intrusion. Using the critical incident technique, the authors thematically categorized students’ thoughts and feelings regarding mobile device usage in the classroom for nonacademic purposes. The results uncovered unique perspectives presented by the students that carry implications for students, professors and administrators.     

‘Passionate and professional’: reconciling logics in public service accounting

In order to deliver public value, the UK government sought to build relationships and connect ‘the public’ with public servants (including back-office workers), but with what effect? Drawing on interviews with public service accountants, the authors found that how these accountants conceptualized ‘the public’—as society or people—shaped whether public value was considered as a monetary or moral concept. Accountants who regarded the public as people spoke of an improper level of involvement and struggled to maintain their professionalism.     

Men at work. Wages and industriousness in southern Sweden 1500–1850

ABSTRACT

In his classic works on the industrious revolution, Jan de Vries argues that demand for new consumer goods trigged eighteenth century Europeans to work more. This implies that industrious behaviour and new consumption patterns were two parallel and interdependent processes that preceded the industrial revolution. However, there is an alternative explanation for any increase in labour output on household level, namely that the labourers were forced to work more to meet ends. An indication of this could be that day labourers’ relative wages decreased over time. In this article, we investigate this by studying wages from annual and casual labour in southern Sweden and compare their levels with consumption baskets.     

Worlding Water Supply: Thinking Beyond the Network in Jakarta

This article draws on scholarship in Southern theory to ‘world’ the study of water’s urbanization. This means complicating scholarship by widening the focus beyond the application of Northern norms to engage with complex and diverse practices in Southern cities. For water’s urbanization, this means focusing on what water supply is for the majority: neither the centralized piped‐water network nor its absence, but the range of practices and technologies that unite people, nature and artefacts in a complex socio‐ecological politics of water. Drawing on scholarship from Southern urbanisms, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies, we illustrate how expanding water’s urbanization to include more than networked infrastructure in Jakarta draws attention to the importance of ecological connections between piped water, groundwater, wastewater and floodwater. Thinking beyond the network requires deeper engagement with the ecological connections between the diverse flows of water in and around urban environments. These produce distinct forms of fragmentation that are missed when analysis is limited to piped‐water supply. The emphasis on ecological connections between flows of water and power seeks to draw attention back to the importance of the uneven exposure to environmental hazards in cities in which neither water nor nature are wholly contained by infrastructure.     

Misleading Forecasts in Accounting Estimates: A Form of Ethical Blindness in Accounting Standards?

Drawing from research on strategic choice, this study investigates the relationship between market turbulence and firms’ sustainable behavior, in the context of sustainability-related institutional adversity. It argues that the relationship between market turbulence and sustainability is mediated by network embeddedness, and this mediating role in turn is moderated by a firm’s innovative orientation. Data collected from a sample of Ontario restaurants inform predictions about firms’ propensity to adopt local wines in their portfolios, despite the limited market and normative support that these wines receive compared with imported wines. The study shows that market turbulence enhances sustainable firm behavior, through the development of strong network relationships. Furthermore, the mediating effect of network embeddedness is particularly salient among firms that exhibit a stronger innovative orientation. These findings reveal how and when turbulent market conditions can contribute to a firm’s sustainable behaviors in the presence of limited institutional support for such behaviors.