US cities in transformation : Urban policy in an advanced economy

This article reports on the main findings of the work of the US National Research Council Committee on National Urban Policy. The committee concluded that the most important single force affecting the future of US cities was the structural transformation of the international and national economies. A new urban system is emerging in the USA, fuelled importantly by the growth of service and knowledge-based industries. Future urban policy in the USA should be incremental in nature-the efficacy of policies and institutional reforms will have to be judged in light of how well they address the impact of economic and market forces on urban areas.     

Wither Qualitative/Quantitative?: Grounds for Methodological Convergence

The qualitative quantitative issue has been given attention in sociological scholarship for decades. Upon theoretical examination of the basis of separations, the commonly used criteria of subjectivity versus objectivity, systematization, quantification and generalization, do not separate. This suggests that the impetus for the qualitative/quantitative issue is more political than intellectual owing to several factors in the practice of sociology: diverse intellectual heritages, the domination of quantitative sociologists in teaching methods and writing methods text books, the proliferation of computer technology in the past 20 years, and separation of theory and method. Advancing sociological methods means transcending the quantitative/qualitative issue and moving on to consider issues like science, validity, causality and multiverse.     

Measuring the sustainability of a community safety promotion network: working from the inside out

Mackay Whitsunday Safe Communities (MWSC) was developed using a capacity building model that consciously attempted to design sustainability into the network. Our aim was to quantify the flow of resources used by MWSC to implement and sustain its injury control activities. Resource exchange among network members was quantified and analysed using social network analysis. In 2004, MWSC accessed an estimated 6.5 full-time staff equivalents and $0.9 million. However, these resources were largely accessed externally. The linking relationships that connected MWSC to its external support network, more than half of which were maintained by six broker network facilitators, were the critical social asset used to access resources and sustain network productivity. The sustainability of this network and arguably similar safety promotion networks is vulnerable to the changing priorities of external sponsoring agents and highly dependent on its leaders who facilitated access to the resources it required to remain productive.     

Are Investors the Bad Guys? Tenure and Neighborhood Stability in Chelsea,Massachusetts

In this article, we examine the role of investors and occupant‐owners in an urban context during the recent housing crisis. We focus on Chelsea, Massachusetts, because it is a dense city, dominated by multifamily housing structures with high rates of foreclosure for which we have particularly good data. We distinguish between occupant‐owners and investors using local data, and we find that many investors are misclassified as occupant‐owners in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Then, employing a competing risks framework to study ownerships during the period 1998 through mid‐2010, we find that local investors, who tend to invest more in relation to purchase prices and sell more quickly, experienced approximately 1.8 times the mortgage foreclosure risk of occupant‐owners, conditional on financing. Nonlocal investors have no statistically significant difference in foreclosure risk from occupant‐owners. Nonetheless, those owners with subprime purchase mortgages (most of whom are occupant‐owners) faced the highest foreclosure risk when house prices fell.     

Do not swipe the small stuff: A randomized evaluation of rules of thumb-based financial education

We perform the first rigorous test of a rules of thumb-based approach to financial education on consumer behavior and outcomes. We test two rules of thumb that are targeted at reducing credit card revolving and deliver them in a randomized fashion via e-mail, online banner, and physical mailer. Using monthly administrative data and pre and postintervention credit data on almost 14,000 consumers, we find that the “Do not swipe the small stuff” rule of thumb reduces participants' targeted credit card balance by an average of 2% at a cost of around $0.50 per person. The “Credit keeps charging” rule shows a decline as well but the impact is not significant.     

Travelling neo-tribes: conceptualising recreational vehicle users

Neo-tribes have been defined as including people from different walks of life who come together in fluid groupings, bound by common interests, similar lifestyles, rituals and language. This concept is popular in sociological literature, but has rarely been applied to travellers or tourism literature. This study sought to understand whether neo-tribalism could add insights into our existing knowledge of recreational vehicle (RV) users in Canada. Using a grounded theory approach including focus groups and in-depth interviews, the research found RV users exhibit neo-tribal characteristics which can be characterised as symbolic and behavioural. The behavioural aspects of this neo-tribe are evident in campsites, where rituals such as happy hours exist. Symbolic aspects included fluidity of membership and commitment to the RVing lifestyle. The findings suggest that the neo-tribal concept is a highly useful tool for understanding the motivations, behaviour and needs of travellers and adds new insights into our understanding of the RVing experience.     

Uncertainty and the Governance of Street Vending: A Critical Comparison Across the North/South Divide

Through a critical comparison of the spatial management of street vending in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay and New York City, USA, we show how uncertainty enables the management of vending and urban space. By uncertainty, we mean a condition characterized by legal complexity and negotiable enforcement of laws and regulations. Putting New York and Ciudad del Este in dialogue, we demonstrate that these negotiated legalities are not limited to Southern urbanisms, nor are they remnants of unmodern social forms. We find similarities in how vendors experience and negotiate uncertainty, even as divergent mechanisms link uncertainty and inequality. By claiming streets as sites of work, vendors challenge dominant notions of global urbanism which conceive of sidewalks as sites of circulation, rather than livelihood. Especially in Ciudad del Este, vendors know the biases of law, and ground their claims to livelihood in ethics rather than legal compliance. Yet vendors’ claims can also reinscribe hierarchical relationships with frontline enforcers and reinforce exclusionary notions of rights based in productive citizenship. Understanding how uncertainty works as a logic of governing helps expose these unavoidable tensions and therefore to imagine and construct pathways toward more just urban economies.     

Tender Offers and Free Cash Flow: An Empirical Analysis

High free cash flow firms are characterized by a mismatch between growth opportunities and resources. High free cash flow target firms receive higher-than-average abnormal returns. Target returns are lower when the bidder is a high free cash flow firm. During the 1970s, results suggested that cash-flow-rich bidding firms pursued low-benefit takeovers. During the 1980s, high free cash flow firms became the targets of tender offers. Results are consistent with the notion that reducing agency problems in target firms generates benefits and that bidding firms with large free cash flow undertake low-benefit acquisitions.     

Global business in the Middle East

W. Abdallah. 2001. Managing Multinationals in the Middle East: Accounting and Tax Issues. Westport, CT: Quorum Press. 279 pages. ISBN 1‐56720‐267‐5. M. Kavoossi. 2001. The Globalization of Business in the Middle East: Opportunities and Constraints. Westport, CT: Quorum Press. 161 pages. ISBN 1‐56720‐203‐9.