ON MEASURING POVERTY

This paper investigates the properties of various measures of poverty and of the "difficulty of alleviation of poverty". It is found that the ranking properties of both kinds of indices can be quite counter-intuitive and that they could be misleading if used for policy evaluation. An alternative index is proposed; it is compared to the other indices and seems to fare rather well. To illustrate, a special reference is made to S. Anand's recent article on poverty in Malaysia.     

Effects of Securities Transaction Taxes on Depth and Bid-Ask Spread

This note investigates the effects of introducing a transaction tax on depth and bid-ask spread using a static model where a competitive market maker faces informed and liquidity traders. When the degree of information asymmetry is low, an increase in the transaction tax can result into a smaller rise in the selling price and the depth may even increase in some cases. When information asymmetry is high, the dealer could increase the selling price more than the tax and sometimes lowers the depth. This can result in a market shutdown if the liquidity trader is driven out of the market. We thank Vincent Reinhart and Walter Fisher for helpful discussions. Special thanks are also due to an anonymous referee and the editor C.D. Aliprantis for insightful comments and suggestions which have helped us to improve the paper substantially. The usual disclaimer applies.     

The long-term volume of East Europe's foreign trade: An estimate

The transformation process of East European (EE) countries led to the disappearance of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the former Soviet-bloc economic integration scheme, as well as to other changes in the foreign trade sector of those economies. This study seeks to identify the potential long run modifications in the volume of trade of EE countries by using a well-established model employed in the foreign trade literature, the gravity equation. Quantitative results suggest that in the next decades trade between East and West European countries could double from its present level.     

On the Kim and Roush Voting Procedure

We study in this paper some features of a new voting rule recently proposed by K.H. Kim and F.W. Roush. The (conjectural) optimality of this voting rule with respect to statistical manipulability by coalitions is discussed under two alternative probabilistic assumptions, namely the impartial culture condition (IC) and the impartial anonymous culture condition (IAC). We also analyze the ability of Kim and Roush procedure to fulfil the Condorcet conditions. Some representations of its Condorcet efficiency in three-alternative elections are obtained.     

Pricing Organic Nitrogen Under The Weak Disposability Assumption: An Application to the French Pig Sector

The nonparametric approach Data Envelopment Analysis is used in order to measure individual technical inefficiency. Different models are evaluated using a 1991 FADN data set of French pig farms. Organic nitrogen is considered as a byproduct of animal breeding. Used as plant nutrient, organic manure becomes an input in crop production which is pollutant when excessive amounts enter surface and groundwater. In the latter case, the usual hypothesis of strong disposability of organic nitrogen is refuted because the elimination of pollution is costly. In this paper, we introduce a hypothesis of weak disposability of organic nitrogen and compare the technical efficiency measures obtained with and without this assumption. Then, using the duality between the restricted cost function and the input-output distance function and following Färe and Primont (1995), we derive a shadow price of organic nitrogen which can be compared to the unit cost of different existing manure treatments.     

Through New Eyes: Artificial Intelligence,Technological Unemployment,and Transhumanism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Journal of Business Ethics - Klara and the Sun, the latest novel by Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, forces one to reckon with one's own anxieties about the future of emerging technologies...     

Changing the rules again: Short selling in connection with public equity offers

We study the impact of two recent regulations that impose restrictions on short selling. First, since October 2007 any investor that short sells a firm’s stock is prohibited from purchasing shares in the firm’s seasoned equity offering (SEO) if the short occurred in the five days prior to the offering (pursuant to an amendment to Rule 105). Previously Rule 105 only disallowed investors from covering a pre-issue short sale with shares purchased in the offering. We hypothesize that the amended rule has the unintended consequence of greater discounting for overnight offers, which are not announced in advance, because the rule excludes some potential buyers and thereby forces underwriters to set lower offer prices to fully distribute the offer. The evidence supports this hypothesis. Second, we examine the impact of the SEC’s 2008 Emergency Order that greatly curtails naked short selling on all stocks under its jurisdiction. We find that the Emergency Order is associated with large increases in discounting for offers announced in advance, suggesting that the removal of naked short sellers is associated with reduced pre-SEO pricing efficiency. Taken together, the results imply that recent restrictions on short selling have significant unintended effects on the capital raising process.     

Changing tourism patterns,capital accumulation,and urban water consumption in Mallorca,Spain: a sustainability fix?

This paper presents interdisciplinary research based on in-depth, comparative analysis of water consumption and land use patterns over a range of urban-tourist forms in Mallorca. The changing tourism patterns towards residential and quality tourism are studied, on the basis that capital investment for capital accumulation and increasing gains are its main drivers. Social awareness about overcrowding and resource limitations has moved the regulatory planning framework toward allowing further urban sprawl, based on the alibi of quality tourism. The rhetoric of this framework represents a first sustainability fix, a fix that hides the higher water demand and climate change issues. The socio-metabolic dimension of this process is analyzed in relation to how it has resulted in an uneven socio-spatial urban landscape of water consumption. This urban-tourist landscape is vulnerable to changes in climate, because it is sustained by an excessive use of water. Water supply is a serious constraint which has been resolved through its commodification and supply privatization, which are considered as a second sustainability fix. This tourism development process worsens rather than solves the metabolic rift, resulting in the second contradiction of capital accumulation between the imperative of continual growth and finite natural resources.