The economic costs to fisheries because of marine sand mining in Ongjin Korea: Concepts, methods, and illustrative results

We illustrate a methodology for estimating the damages to commercial fisheries from entrainment and from temporary loss of seafloor habitat productivity because of marine sand mining. A Beverton-Holt, year-class model is used to estimate illustrative short-term, long-term, and indirect (food web) effects from the inception of mining through the time to recovery of the injured resource stocks. A Base Case analysis evaluates hypothetical mining for a 4 km² mining site with biological recovery of the mined area beginning seven months after mining ceases and the bottom excavation fills in. Sensitivity analyses also are used to illustrate damages for alternative recovery paths and for 20 hypothetical mining sites for one year of mining and for recurring mining for 5 and for 10 years. Important qualifications and directions for further research are outlined.     

The Effect of Cultural Distance on International Marketing Strategy: A Comparison of Cultural Distance and Managerial Perception Measures

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to examine whether service convenience increases customer satisfaction that fosters customer loyalty in Indian commercial banks. A cross-sectional study of 352 retail banking customers through questionnaires was conducted. The population of the study is retail urban customers of banks in Rajasthan. Responses are analyzed using structural equation modeling. Dimensions of service convenience are decision convenience, access convenience, transaction convenience, benefit convenience, and postbenefit convenience. Decision convenience was found to influence customer satisfaction more than the other dimensions of service convenience. Customer satisfaction furthers customer loyalty. The article emphasizes the significance of SERVCON on customer satisfaction for the Indian banking sector. The direct impact of SERVCON on customer loyalty is also studied.     

Urban Land Development and its Prices: The Effects of Conversion Costs with Redevelopment

This paper analyzes urban land development when landowners anticipate a future large-scale redevelopment by a third party developer. Landowners' initial development activities can deter such redevelopment because they impose two conversion costs on the redeveloper: demolition costs and landowners' reservation prices. These costs are eventually borne by the landowners when the developers' market is competitive. For the landowners' initial development activities, we analyze both the efficient solution and the noncooperative solution under the Nash equilibrium. In both cases, the possibility of redevelopment results in a lower level of initial development due to the conversion costs, but increases land prices. However, the magnitude of their effects is smaller in the Nash solution due to an externality. The presence of such an externality provides a rationale for zoning and urban planning.     

The productivity effects of the liberalization of Japanese telecommunication policy

In the early 1980s, the Japanese government decided to pursue policies of liberalization that opened Japan's telecommunication market to competition and moved toward the privatization of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the dominant domestic telecommunication service provider. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of liberalization on the productive performance of NTT. To assess the productive consequences of liberalization, we first provide basic productivity measures for NTT. The Total Factor Productivity (TFP) measures are then decomposed to separate out the effects of liberalization from other factors such as scale, technology, and capacity utilization. The TFP decomposition is based on the parameter estimates of a dynamic cost model.During the 1958–87 period, NTT's TFP level increased at an average annual rate of 3.4%. However, TFP improved at a significantly faster rate following the decision to adopt policies of liberalization. The NTT's average annual TFP growth rate was 5.12% for the 1982–87 period as compared to a 0.26% per year growth rate for the previous five year (1977–82) period. The decomposition of TFP growth appears to indicate that liberalization was a major source of productivity improvement for NTT.     

Optimal reinsurance and portfolio selection: Comparison between partial and complete information models

We consider partial and complete information models to investigate how partial information has a unique quality over complete information for insurers. We find that optimal reinsurance and investment strategies for the partially informed insurer depend on prior beliefs, whereas those for the completely informed insurer do not. In addition, information quality can affect insurer behaviour, mainly through the relative difference between risk-adjusted market premium and risk-adjusted insurance premium projected on the financial markets. Numerical results indicate that partial information increases the conservativeness of insurer strategies.