Employee Profit-Sharing: Weitzmania and Wild-Goose hases

Professor Martin Weitzman's proposals for sharing profit among company employees are being adopted uncritically by the Government and advisers to other Parties, Dr Charles Hanson, of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, casts a sceptical eye over these and similar proposals.     

Global Best Practice or Regulating Fiction? Street Vending,Zero Tolerance and Conflicts Over Public Space in New York, 1980–2000

In global urban studies, different cities often serve as stand‐ins for various policy approaches. New York is closely associated with zero tolerance/quality of life policing—specifically the ways this crime‐fighting technique was used to manage and regulate public space in support of broader urban redevelopment goals. Whether celebrated or criticized, the image of New York as a city that was successful in ‘cleaning up’ public space has been exported across the globe, and has been invoked by a number of cities as they embark on their own projects to clear street vendors and other unwanted actors from public space. This article will challenge this established narrative through an examination of struggles over street vending and public space in New York during the 1980s and 1990s. It will show how the revanchist project of public space management was challenged and ultimately limited by vendors using discourses of free market populism and entrepreneurship. It demonstrates the ways in which the image of New York as a city of settled and well‐regulated public space does not tell the complete story, and how New York, like many other ordinary cities across the globe, is a city of contested spaces and uncertain regulatory effectiveness.     

Strategic management and fundraising: A planning model for resource development in the nonprofit organisation

Many nonprofits can benefit greatly from integrating their strategic, marketing and fundraising planning into an environmentally comprehensive process. Even during this critical period for them, many nonprofits typically have failed to implement this type of integrated planning because their corporate culture often nurtures: an inner process focus, leadership pathologies, professional balkanisation, reluctance to accept advancement as a global organisational activity, an unwillingness to accept the realities of a moving market and a lack of political will to undertake social advocacy on behalf of their clients. In order to succeed in the future, nonprofit organisations will need to approach strategic planning through an interdisciplinary methodology that will be shaped by multiple market audits focusing on: mission and institutional capabilities, image and competitive analysis, philanthropic feasibility and flexible integration of revenue/resource development. Nonprofits that adopt this interdisciplinary process will be rewarded by enhanced fundraising returns, once re-founded on a culture that has remained mission-relevant while becoming market-driven. The nonprofit that bases its planning on more effective use of intelligence gathering and flexible focusing of its human and financial capital will be more capable of acting upon a fluid environment and realising the institution's optimal future.     

The role of attribution theory in control systems

In this paper we develop a revised model of the management control process in light of attribution theory. Attribution theory describes how people seek and use information to structure and to control their social environment. We examine how and why people cognitively interact with feedback information contained in performance reports in making expectancy and variance investigation decisions. We also discuss conflicts that a superior and a subordinate may have due to different attributions used to explain behavior.     

Futurists and state energy policy: The Wisconsin story

This analysis of the development of state energy policy focuses on the role of futurists and of alternative energy futures, from the experience of Wisconsin during the 1970s as viewed by participants in that development. First considered in the early 1970s, the concept of state energy policy has rapidly gained acceptance and become an important component of overall state policy. Methodological improvements and diversity and the involvement of growing numbers of people, groups, and agencies have been essential to shaping and improving the policy development process. A major success of Wisconsin's energy policy has been avoiding the construction of excess generating capacity by public utilities. A notable failure was not planning for revenue shortfalls with declining use of gasoline, despite early studies projecting the decline. Problem areas for improving the practice of energy policy analysis include the lack of creativity and imagination, the dissemination and embedding of results, and the analyst's need, in specifying problems and objectives, to work from the standpoint of policy makers.     

Europe and the world

Michelle Egan. 2001. Constructing a European Market. Standards, Regulation and Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 362 pages; ISBN 0‐9‐24405‐7. Brigid Gavin. 2001. The European Union and Globalization; Towards Global Democratic Governance. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 242 pages; ISBN 1‐84064‐005‐7. Patrick A. Messerlin. 2001. Measuring the Costs of Protection in Europe: European Commercial Policies in the 2000s. Washington: Institute for International Economics. 370 pages; ISBN 0‐88132‐273‐3.     

Varying monetary policy regimes: A vector autoregressive investigation

Recently, two stylized facts about the behavior of the U.S. economy have emerged: first, macroeconomic aggregates appear to be less volatile post-1984 than in the preceding 2 decades; second, monetary policy appears more responsive to inflationary pressures – and thereby more “stabilizing” – during the Volcker/Greenspan chairmanships relative to earlier regimes. Does a causal relationship exist between these two observations? In particular, has “better” policy by the Federal Reserve Board contributed significantly to the lessened volatility of the U.S. economy? This paper uses a structural vector autoregressive (VAR) specification to address these questions, examining the advantages and limitations of such an approach. In contrast with much of the existing research on these topics, I find that most of the quantitatively significant changes in volatility are attributed to breaks in the non-policy portion of the structural VAR, and not to the identified policy equation.     

A bias in the volatility smile

We show that even if options traded with Black–Scholes–Merton pricing under a known and constant volatility, meaning essentially in perfect markets, one would still obtain smiles, skews, and smirks. We detect this problem by pricing options with a known volatility and reverse engineering to back into the implied volatility from the model price that was derived from the assumed volatility. The returned volatilities follow distinctive patterns resulting from algorithmic choices of the user and the quotation unit of the option. In particular, the common practice of penny pricing on option exchanges results in a significant loss of accuracy in implied volatility. For the most common scenarios faced in practice, the problem primarily exists in short-term options, but it manifests for virtually all cases of moneyness of at least 10 % and often 5 %. While it is theoretically possible to almost eliminate the problem, practical limitations in trading prevent any realistic chance of avoiding this error. It is even more difficult to identify and control the problem when smiles also arise from market imperfections, as is widely accepted. We empirically estimate a very conservative lower bound of the effect at about 16 % of the observed smile for 30-day options. Thus, we document a previously unknown phenomenon that a portion of the volatility smile is not of an economic nature. We provide some best-practice recommendations, including the explicit specification of the algorithmic choices and a warning against using off-the-shelf routines.     

‘We're still the same people’: developing a mass media campaign to raise awareness and challenge the stigma of dementia

• A popular awareness‐ and fund‐raising vehicle for charities and non‐profit organisations is the annual ‘Day’ or ‘Week’ campaign. Such campaigns can be challenging because they often involve multiple, potentially competing objectives, not least the requirement to balance the needs of the general public with the those who already have, or are caring for someone with, a particular condition. This paper reports on formative research conducted in Scotland to inform the development of an awareness‐raising campaign on the issue of dementia, which had two key aims: to raise awareness of the condition among the general public, and to reduce the stigma associated with it. Social marketing consumer research was conducted with three key groups—the general public, carers and people with dementia‐to explore their beliefs and perceptions about dementia and their information needs. The research highlights the importance of providing realistic and credible images of people with dementia to the general public and the importance of avoiding instilling fear of the condition. Guidance for future awareness‐raising activity in this area is provided.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.