Initial public offer pricing,corporate governance and contextual relevance: Australian evidence

This study examines the relationship between initial public offer (IPO) corporate governance, IPO pricing and possible contextual relevance. A comprehensive inventory of IPO governance attributes is modelled. A positive association is reported between the inventory and IPO initial returns. This relationship is attenuated for IPOs where a diminished price relevance of governance structure is posited: smaller scale firms and/or those with alternative monitoring agents in place. Relevance appears modified and even supplanted by particular corporate priorities or the presence of other monitoring mechanisms. These contexts inform the motivation of key players regarding whether and how to act in response to the governance signal.     

Are Chinese nationals’ attitudes to wildlife tourist attractions different from those of other nationalities?

Many wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) have negative impacts on animal welfare and species conservation. In the absence of regulation, raising standards requires tourists to create market pressure by choosing to attend WTAs with benefits for wildlife. We surveyed respondents from five countries – China, Australia, Canada, UK, and USA – to quantify how attitudes to captive animals, and towards WTAs’ outputs and standards, may vary with nationality. Our aim was to provide a firm basis for behaviour change interventions to alter current patterns of tourist consumption of WTAs. All respondents agreed on the importance of conservation and animal welfare, but Chinese respondents were twice as likely to believe that WTAs would not be allowed to exist if they were bad for animals, and that WTAs’ promotional materials were reliable indicators of welfare and conservation standards. These findings indicate Chinese respondents had fundamentally similar attitudes to those from the other countries, but differed in how those attitudes were likely to be applied. Chinese tourists may experience more barriers to aligning their actions with their values with respect to WTAs. Removing these barriers may require information campaigns to highlight the lack of regulation, and the unreliability of some WTAs’ promotional materials and tourists’ reviews.     

Honesty, Individualism, and Pragmatic Business Ethics: Implications for Corporate Hierarchy

The boundaries of honesty are the focal point of this exploration of the individualistic origins of modernist ethics and the consequent need for a more pragmatic approach to business ethics. The tendency of modernist ethics to see honesty as an individual responsibility is described as a contextually naive approach, one that fails to account for the interactive effects between individual choices and corporate norms. By reviewing the empirical accounts of managerial struggles with ethical dilemmas, the article arrives at the contextual preconditions for encouraging the development of reflective moral agents in modern corporations.     

Income and Price Elasticities of Demand in South Africa: An Application of the Linear Expenditure System

This paper investigates the expenditure patterns of South African households using detailed cross‐sectional expenditure and price data that varies across region and time. Linear expenditure system parameter estimates are used to calculate income and price elasticities for a number of product categories at different points of the income distribution. We find substantial variation in the price and income elasticities of demand for items across the income distribution, with the bottom quartile being extremely sensitive to increases in the price of food and clothing items, and the top quartile being as sensitive as households in developed countries.     

THE PHILLIPS CURVE IN A MATCHING MODEL

Following ideas in Hume, monetary shocks are embedded in the Lagos‐Wright model in a new way: There are only nominal shocks accomplished by individual transfers that are sufficiently noisy so that realizations of those transfers do not permit the agents to deduce much about the aggregate realization. Assuming that the distribution of aggregate shocks is almost degenerate, aggregate output increases with the growth rate of the stock of money—our definition of the Phillips curve. This almost degeneracy assumption is far from being necessary; under some mild conditions, the Phillips curve result holds for a large class of distributions.     

Environmental factors of food literacy in Australian high schools: views of home economics teachers

This study set out to examine environmental factors impacting on the food literacy of adolescents. It utilized data from a nation‐wide survey of home economics teachers regarding their experience of food literacy education in Australian high schools. Content analysis and the ANGELO framework were applied to analyse free‐text comments from 78 of the respondents that were collected as part of a more extensive data set. The analysis of environmental factors revealed three enablers and ten barriers that could influence food literacy education delivered by high schools in Australia. High schools are well positioned to improve adolescents’ food literacy through a comprehensive, hands‐on approach in home economics. However, many environmental barriers were reported that could influence food literacy education in Australian high schools such as: lack of teaching materials and facilities, and human resources; the perceived inadequacy of the Australian school curriculum; non‐supportive school canteens; and negative role modelling. This study points to the need to eliminate or reduce these environmental barriers impacting on the capacity for effective food literacy education in high schools to help adolescents increase their food literacy and thereby support them in making informed food choices.     

The restructuring of the institutional real estate portfolio in the UK

Real estate investment portfolios of financial institutions have seen dramatic changes over the last three decades or more. Historically such property investment decisions have been seen within a portfolio diversification paradigm that has sought to balance risk and return. This paper considers the role of the supply of assets in the determining and constraining the UK institutional portfolio. The supply of real estate assets not only expands during property booms but has also been transformed by a long term urban development cycle as cities adapt to cars and the ICT revolution that has brought new property forms. The research examines long term trends in investment change by disaggregating into ten property forms rather than the usual three land use sectors. It then assesses to what extent investment patterns can be explained in terms of portfolio theory, short term net returns of individual sectors or driven by the supply of real estate assets. It concludes that the supply of real assets is an overlooked explanation.     

Do SMEs in deprived areas find it harder to access finance? Evidence from the UK Small Business Survey

Encouraging enterprise in deprived places is an important objective of the UK government policy. Evidence on the perceptions of entrepreneurs suggests that access to finance may be harder for firms in deprived areas, who may have fewer contacts, less collateral or worse access to mainstream banks. Yet there is little empirical evidence on whether this is actually the case. This paper investigates whether firms in deprived areas are more likely to find it hard to access finance than other firms, using a sample of around 3500 UK small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that firms in deprived areas are more likely to perceive access to finance is a problem. However, controlling for SME characteristics, firm growth, credit scores and selection effects, we find no evidence that they actually do find it harder to obtain. The results suggest that geographical disparities in access to finance are unimportant for the average firm.     

Unethical use of wildlife in tourism: what's the problem,who is responsible,and what can be done?

Wildlife tourism is a huge global market, the revenue from which can promote local livelihoods and tourist education, enact conservation, and improve animal welfare. Such benefits arise if wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) prioritise ethical deliverables above financial profit, but recent work has shown that the majority of WTAs have substantial negative animal welfare and conservation impacts. In the absence of global regulatory authorities, tourist revenue has become the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes acceptable use of animals in WTAs. Tourists, however, are not adequate assessors of WTAs’ animal welfare and conservation impacts: they lack the specialist knowledge required and are subject to a number of psychological biases that obscure the ethical dimensions of decisions to attend particular WTAs. This inadequacy is evidenced, and compounded, by overwhelmingly positive reviews on TripAdvisor (the industry-leading review site), even for WTAs with objectively poor ethical standards. Our suggested solution is to empower tourists by presenting unequivocal assessments of WTAs' animal welfare and conservation impacts, hosted in the fora that tourists already use to make their travel decisions. We would thereby promote a subjective norm that tourists should consider and limit their individual negative impacts when choosing which WTAs to visit.     

Is Africa integrating? Evidence from product markets

This paper presents a price-based assessment of product market integration in Africa using disaggregated retail prices for 91 products and 12 African cities from 1991 to 2008. We find evidence of substantial deviations from the law of one price ? product price differences between the cities averaged 76% over the period – a result that is consistent with the presence of large barriers to trade in the continent. Mean price differences across cities fell by close to a quarter over the period, but the decline was concentrated in the early 1990s with little progress subsequently, despite the regional trade policies implemented by the countries. Gravity-style estimates reveal that reductions in external tariffs and global trends towards price convergence in the early 1990s are the key contributors to the trend in price integration amongst the African cities.