New Life for the Octopus: How Voting Rules Sustain the Power of California's Big Landowners

The concentrated ownership of farmland has influenced rural life in the state of California for more than a century. Reformers have introduced measures to counteract that concentration, such as acreage limits on farms receiving water from federally funded projects. Large landowners have fought back with policies that have protected their ability to amass and maintain their empires. In the first part of this article, Mason Gaffney presents this historical background in broad outlines. In the second part, Merrill Goodall explains an important policy that preserves the power of entrenched interests: water districts that are governed by a board elected by a voting system that allots one vote to each dollar of land value. In these districts, a tiny handful of landowners is able to control a public agency without opposition and without the need to persuade other voters.     

Selection of Causes According to Socio-Demographic Status in South Africa

Cause related marketing links charities to the sales of products, brands, or services. The charity is mentioned in promotional campaigns and a percentage donated to the cause according to unit sales or turnover. This article aims to establish which charities are more popular with South African consumers, and whether different socio-demographic groups (age, gender, income, and education) prefer to support different causes. A quantitative study was conducted in South Africa using a structured questionnaire administered via interviews at shopping malls. Different groups were found to prefer to support considerably different causes and these causes were identified.     

Internet pharmaceutical sales: attributes, concerns, and future forecast

Internet pharmaceutical sales continue to skyrocket as healthcare providers and consumers are increasingly relying on the efficiencies and convenience that is available via such transactions. Managed care companies, increasing demands to reduce healthcare inefficiencies while maximizing the quality of patient care is a significant contributing factor to the expanding utilization and success of online pharmaceutical sales. However, with the expansion of Internet pharmaceutical sales, healthcare providers, pharmacy benefit management and insurance companies, and consumers realize new opportunities and risks. This paper will review the attributes and concerns associated with online pharmaceutical sales, discussing current and pending legislation intended to more effectively manage these parameters.     

Which skills contribute most to absorptive capacity,innovation and productivity performance? Evidence from the US and Western Europe

ABSTRACT

Skills are widely recognised as central to absorptive capacity, that is, firms’ ability to identify and make effective use of knowledge, ideas and technologies that are generated elsewhere. But identification of the specific levels of education and skills that contribute most to the development of absorptive capacity is often hampered by the use of skill measures as proxies for absorptive capacity itself. Drawing on a cross-country industry-level dataset, we retain separate measures of key components of absorptive capacity, namely, skills, R&D investments and openness to foreign trade and investment. We then estimate a system of structural equations in order to evaluate the extent to which different levels of skill contribute to innovative output (measured by growth in patenting) and subsequently to growth in productivity. We find important roles for both high-level skills and upper intermediate (technician-level) skills in converting the knowledge sourcing opportunities provided by openness into innovative output. In final stages of production (making use of innovative output), productivity growth in countries near to the technological frontier is enhanced not just by high-level and upper intermediate skills but also by the skills of the workforce as a whole.     

Twitter investor sentiment and corporate earnings announcements

We examine the impact of firm-specific investor sentiment (FSIS) on stock returns for negative and positive earnings surprises. Using a measure constructed from firm-specific tweets, we find that FSIS has a greater impact on stock returns for negative relative to positive earnings surprises. We further show that the impact of FSIS is greater for firms whose valuation is uncertain and difficult to arbitrage. Moreover, we provide evidence of return reversals over post-announcement periods. Our results highlight the importance of FSIS around earnings announcements.     

Cost–raising Strategies in a Symmetric, Dynamic Duopoly

This paper provides a characterization of the set of dynamic models in which symmetric duopolists have incentives to raise a common cost. The advantage of the dynamic analysis over existing static models is that it extends the conditions (restrictive in static models) under which symmetric cost raising is profitable. The model is illustrated by standard examples from industrial organization: quantity and price adjustment, and learning–by–doing.