Clocking the Progress in Time Use Research

Book reviewed in this article:
Joachim Merz and Manfred Ehling (eds.), Time Use –Research, Data and Policy     

Growing market concentration and changes in consumer welfare: The case of the U.S. commercial airline market

Initial assessments of the economic deregulation of the U.S. airline industry indicated that most consumers gained from the increased competition in the airline market. More recent studies have reached less favorable conclusions. In this study, changes in passenger welfare are determined for 19 U.S. destination cities for the years 1979, 1983, and 1987 on the basis of Hicks' equivalent variation measure, using a counterfactual research design. Particular attention is given to variations in consumer welfare gains/losses depending on (a) the proportion of the change in air fares attributed to deregulation, and (b) the destination airport's classification. The estimates suggest that travelers to large, long-standing hub cities were generally insulated from any large post-1979 welfare changes. Travelers to new hubs experienced substantial welfare declines between 1979 and 1987 — although their post-1983 welfare changes were uniformly positive. Travel to nonhub airports showed the greatest variance, with both the relatively largest welfare gains and the relatively largest losses.     

Ethical selving in cultural contexts: fairtrade consumption as an everyday ethical practice in the UK and Germany

Fairtrade consumers, by enacting their political and moral concerns through consumer choice, are at the same time constructing themselves as ethical selves. I will argue that they can only do so by drawing on cultural contexts. While fairtrade is instituted in supranational organizations and acts on a global level, there are still differences on a national level. On the basis of an Anglo‐German study, this paper seeks to map out the cultural contextualization of fairtrade consumption on both a supranational and a national level. The paper identifies the framing role of global consumer culture and an implicit ethics of equitability inscribed in capitalist practices of exchange and specifies how these play out differently in Germany and the UK. In both cases, there are strong references to sovereign consumer choice, and expectations of equitability in commodity exchange have been found. But while, in the British case, there is more emphasis on individual choice and taste, German fairtrade consumers seem to follow more what they perceive as an authoritative discourse. And, while British respondents envisaged the relation to be achieved with producers along the lines of a business relationship, German respondents conceptualized it more as a paternalistic employment relation between fairtrade organizations and producers. Differences will be explained in terms of distinctive consumer cultures, national moral economies and colonialist histories. I will argue that the two national settings not only offer different opportunities and challenges in terms of market success but also pose distinct ethical questions for fairtrade marketers.     

Does the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission make a difference? An assessment of its first decade

In 1972 the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) was given the mandate of protecting the U.S. public against unreasonable risks of injury associated with consumer products. Pooled cross-sectional time-series data from 1961 to 1982 on states' accidental home death rates are used to examine how effective the CPSC has been. This evaluation controls for several relevant historical forces (besides the CPSC) which may have contributed to fluctuations in the accidental home death rate. The results indicate that after controlling for those exogenous factors for which there are data, the CPSC reduced accidental home deaths by an estimated 17,941 over its first ten years of operation.     

Financial advisor titles: Informational complexity and the role of regulatory simplification

Today's complex financial markets require high levels of financial literacy that most consumers do not possess. Consumers may choose to mitigate their information disadvantage by hiring a financial professional. In searching for such a professional, however, consumers will find a multitude of financial advising titles that may or may not signal competence, education, and professionalism. Various regulatory bodies, and piecemeal regulation over the past 80 years, have resulted in an incoherent code of law. Two narrow protections for senior citizens specifically address financial credentials, however. These model regulations were drafted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) and the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) in 2008. This commentary explores why some states have adopted these regulations while others have not and notes the need for research to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of such regulations.     

Genetic Testing and the Demand for Cancer Insurance

There has been an expansion of the availability of disease-specific insurance policies in the United States over the past decade. At the same time, recently developed medical tests are providing consumers with new information regarding their risk of contracting particularly serious diseases. This exploratory study makes use of data from two groups of women to examine the demand for one type of disease-specific policy, cancer insurance. Members of the first group have been tested for a BRCA1 gene mutation that is associated with an 88% risk of contracting breast and/or ovarian cancer by age 70. The other group consists of women from the general population who have not been tested for any BRCA1 gene mutation.The study results indicate that women who have been tested for the BRCA1 gene mutation are more likely than untested respondents to have purchased cancer insurance and to have recently thought about purchasing cancer insurance. The results also indicate that older women and women who have modest household incomes are more likely to have purchased cancer insurance. Women who have minor children, who are more highly educated, who have no health insurance, who have had cancer, or who report that they are in poor health are more likely to have recently contemplated purchasing cancer insurance. Our discussion of the findings highlights several issues that merit further consideration on the part of consumer policy makers working in the area of insurance regulation.