Time price differentials in the rent‐to‐own industry: implications for empowering vulnerable consumers

Rent‐to‐own enterprises represent a lucrative and rapidly growing industry. They are of particular concern to social service agencies, policy makers and consumers because they target a vulnerable, economically disadvantaged segment of the population. This article presents an investigation of a major player in the industry in one US state that fell under scrutiny by the courts because of a question of whether it is a retail enterprise covered by truth in lending legislation. Findings indicate that the average time price differentials charged by the largest retailer in this state exceed by more than three times the regulated 30% cap on interest rates. Rent‐to‐own is an example where regulation must be put into place so consumers can make more informed decisions. Such regulation, however, must be accompanied by financial literacy education that will further empower vulnerable consumers in the marketplace.     

Fundamental Rights and the European Regulation of iConsumer Contracts

This paper addresses the question of how fundamental rights affect European legislation and adjudication on contracts regarding digital information services (iConsumer contracts). Fundamental rights may be seen as representing political choices for the protection of certain values in society, but at the same time, they are enacted rules of the legal system, which may be invoked to enforce the protection of the interests they represent. It is submitted that because of this double-faced nature, they can bring to the fore policy issues in contract legislation and case law. Fundamental rights can thus play a role in evaluating the policy choices that are being made in the review of the acquis communautaire in the field of consumer law. For iConsumer contracts, that means that the rights of consumers, authors, and suppliers of copyright-protected content affect the choice of rule-solutions on the European legislative level. Furthermore, these rights have an impact on the case law of the European Court of Justice in the field of e-commerce. Fundamental rights help define the various rule-solutions the Court can choose from and thus demarcate the law-making capacity of the judiciary.

Towards a Handbook on European Contract Law and Beyond: The Commission’s 2004 Communication “European Contract Law and the Revision of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Acquis</Emphasis>: The Way Forward”

The European contract law project has crossed the threshold between an intellectual exercise and concrete policy. The 2004 Communication on the way forward describes the procedure to implement the policy suggested by the 2003 Action Plan, and so it would now be timely to give some thought to the likely impact of the Common Frame of Reference (CFR) on future Community law. It is submitted that the CFR is indispensable for the planned crafting of full harmonisation consumer contract law. This article therefore focuses on the possible uses of the CFR for consumer legislation and attempts to make the case for a recasting of Community law on consumer protection as a first priority in the implementation of the project. Based on policy papers and policy considerations, this article suggests making a test case of the travel and tourism sectors. It also reflects further on the potential virtues of an optional instrument for consumer legislation.     

Democracy and Economy: What Role for Stakeholders?

This article introduces a note of caution to the stakeholding debate. Current discussions on stakeholders neglect their diversity and confuse alternative modes of stakeholder protection at the enterprise level; namely: direct shareholding, voluntary protection by enterprises, statutory protection, by ad hoc legislation or by granting them a voice. Public policy considerations differ widely in each case. The author views the idea of a nationwide "stakeholder economy" as an unwarranted extension and a misnomer.     

Sexual-harassment liability in 1998—goods news or bad news for employers and employees?

In June 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court issued three separate rulings regarding workplace sexual harassment. In an apparent victory for employers, the court ruled in one case that a victim must actually suffer a tangible loss (i.e., a demotion or unwelcome transfer) to establish a case for quid pro quo harassment. The court affirmed, moreover, that employers can absolve themselves of liability in hostile-environment cases by establishing a meaningful and effective policy against sexual harassment. Absent a meaningful policy, however, employers will be liable for a hostile environment created by supervisors. Thus, in another case, the court found an employer liable for workplace harassment because the employer failed to disseminate its existing policy and to follow its terms. Finally, in a same-sex harassment case, the court rejected the notion that egregious sexual harassment is per se unlawful, leaving open the possibility that a harasser who treats men and women equally, no matter how badly, could be found not guilty of unlawful behavior. Still, the court made it clear that an employer's best defense against supervisors' sexual-harassment behavior is an effective prevention policy. Consequently, employers should draft a policy that (1) defines sexual harassment; (2) states the company prohibits such conduct; (3) provides a clear procedure for submitting claims, including the names of individuals involved in the resolution process; (4) states that those who complain or cooperate with an investigation will not be retaliated against; and (5) is disseminated to all new employees when they join the company, reissued to all employees each year, and posted in a conspicuous location in the workplace.     

Dependent self-employment as a way to evade employment protection legislation

This paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self-employment, while making transitions to independent self-employment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and self-employment in favour of the former. In conducting this analysis, discrete choice models are applied to data drawn from the European Community Household Panel from 1994 to 2001. To test the hypotheses, a tentative individual measure of the potential severance payment that a worker would receive in the case of dismissal is included as well as aggregated variables that try to capture differences in labour market institutions and macroeconomic conditions. Evidence for a positive impact of the strictness of employment protection legislation and the potential severance payment on transitions to dependent self-employment is found. The opposite effects, however, are detected for individuals becoming independent self-employed.     

Modeling heterogeneous effective advertising stock using single-source data

This paper presents a nonlinear modeling of market response between advertising stock and direct utility with heterogeneous parameters using single-source data. We examine advertising threshold effects and measure the effective advertising stock at the individual consumer level. Two kinds of information, i.e., TV advertising exposure data and consumer’s purchase history data, are combined for the modeling. The former is used for constructing advertising stock over calendar time via heterogeneous carryover parameters and the latter is applied to the choice model. The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is applied to estimate these heterogeneous parameters. Compared to other possible nonlinear specifications, it is shown that the proposed threshold utility function model with discontinuity at the threshold performs better than other smooth market response models. The empirical results support the existence of an advertising threshold and suggest the pulsing or “on/off” policy for our datasets. In terms of the effective reach, implying the reach after suspending the ad exposure to investigate how it is damping out for a possible “on/off” advertising policy, the optimal “off” interval was measured to be quite short to support a high-frequency pulsing policy, because the carryover parameter as well as the difference of ad stock and threshold are not large enough for our datasets.      

Trade and competition policies in an increasingly integrated world economy

The traditional boundaries between trade policy and competition policy are becoming fuzzier and less valid because firms increasingly compete at the same time in many different markets and in different ways. The following article examines a number of policy areas in which trade policy has significant effects on competition, and competition policy has significant effects on trade. It concludes that new ways of multilateral cooperation are necessary if trade and competition policies are to complement rather than contradict each other. This article was written while the author was a senior lecturer at the European Institute of Public Administration, Maastricht, the Netherlands. He is now Minister Plenipotentiary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nicosia, Cyprus. The article is a revised draft of a paper that was presented at a seminar organised by the OECD on 6 July 1993. The author is grateful to participants of the seminar for their comments and suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are the responsibility of the author and should not be attributed to any institution.     

Policies for the prevention of cigarette consumption: the case of Spain

This paper describes the causes that generate the relatively high – among comparable OECD countries – prevalence of tobacco consumption in Spain. It evaluates the current policy interventions geared towards reducing incidence and prevalence. It argues that, despite a recent major breakthrough in legislation on advertising and consumption in public places, one of the major shortcomings of current policies is the lack of an effective fiscal policy. This lack of effectiveness is explained by some idiosyncrasies of the Spanish cigarette market that call for specific measures.     

虚假业绩美化手段比较研究

通过对现金流操控与盈余管理、会计策选择以及财务舞弊的概念比较,发现会计政策选择和盈余管理行是公司在法律法规允许范围内选择能够有利于美化当期业绩的会计方法;会计舞弊是在惩罚成本小于获得收益时,公司萌生舞弊之念,提供虚假信息蒙蔽误导投资者;现金流操控行为既有在法律法规允许范围内的调整手段,又有违法的虚造手法,花样和手段之多令投资者难辨真假,危害更大。     

Entrepreneurial failure and discrimination: lessons for small service firms

This paper draws lessons from a case decided by the USA Supreme Court, wherein the firm failure was perceived by the minority entrepreneur as an outcome of racial discrimination. Implications of this case are significant because the failure rate of minority-owned US businesses has been consistently higher than the average failure rate of US business. We argue that the impact of discrimination by a customer is greater for small service firms. Through the Domino's Pizza case, we assert that issues relating to equal employment, inter-company contracting and choice of business organisation must be managed by the owner of a service firm.     

The effect of prospective payment under DRGs on the market value of hospitals

This article investigates the effect of a change in Medicare payment regulations on for-profit hospital market values. A theoretical argument on the effects of this regulatory event is presented in which hospital managers are concerned about firm wealth but also value prestige, provider perceptions of quality, and perhaps other prerequisites. In this case, DRGs will induce hospitals to seek higher wealth because they increase the opportunity cost of nonpecuniary benefits. The issue is pursued empirically by estimating the market response to DRG legislation using seemingly unrelated regressions.     

Europe — A pioneer in greenhouse gas emissions trading

The decision on the EU directive for emissions trading in June 2003 makes Europe a pioneer in the large-scale application of market instruments to climate policy. This development would have been unthinkable five years ago. The negotiations provide a textbook example of public choice theory in practice. We describe the crucial points of the recent and upcoming legislation process at the levels of the EU and the Member States, the latter with a focus on Germany. The timetable for the enforcement of the emissions trading directive at the national level seems very tight—especially when considering the likely manoeuvres by several stakeholder groups.     

The food superstore revolution: changing times,changing research agendas in the UK

This article considers the changing scope of research into UK food superstores over some three decades. Rather than catalogue changing market shares by format, we seek instead to show how such change links to national policy agendas. Academic research has evolved to address the growing complexities of the social, technological, economic and political impacts of the superstore format. We exemplify this by tracing the progression of retail change in Portsmouth, Hampshire, over 30 years. We discover that academic research can conflict with the preconceptions of some public policy makers. The position is exacerbated by a progressive decline in public information – and a commensurate rise in factual data held by commercial data companies – that leaves policy makers with a choice of which data to believe. This problem casts a shadow over the objectivity of macro-policy as currently formulated. Concerns currently arise because the UK Competition Commission (2006–2009 but ongoing) starts each inquiry afresh with a search for recent data. Furthermore, it has recently called for changes to retail planning – the very arena in which UK superstore research commenced.     

Complexities of Consumption: The Case of Childcare

Mothers face many challenges in choosing a caregiver for a child when it is time to return to work. In North America, this choice is often made in a context of limited supply with several significant factors constraining choice. Indeed, many mothers have very little effective choice at all. Using in‐depth interviews with mothers who have recently chosen childcare services, we explore the choice of childcare and the post‐choice stage of ongoing childcare consumption, and we account for our informants' reframing of choice outcomes that are often not reflective of preference. Building on prior research on choice and post‐choice outcomes, we reveal the inherent complexities in mothers' ongoing use of childcare, and we offer policy recommendations based on our deep understanding of this intensely personal consumption context.     

Argentina's Currency Board Collapse: Weak Policy or Bad Luck?

Two basic views can be discerned in post‐mortems of Argentina's currency board: (1) that weak fiscal policy was fundamentally to blame, and (2) that the peso had become too severely overvalued for the peg to survive. This paper evaluates the evidence for these rival interpretations. The real effective exchange rate index did not indicate massive overvaluation, but this index does not capture the effects on the equilibrium rate of the ‘sudden stop’ in capital flows to emerging markets after 1998. It also understates the amount of adjustment required for Argentina to reach the equilibrium rate, because neighbour countries’ dollar exchange rates were held up by Argentina's overvaluation, as is indicated by their depreciation in 2002. Argentina was particularly vulnerable to the sudden stop because of the extreme volatility of its portfolio inflows. Fiscal policy simulations suggest that, even with a substantially improved primary balance from 1994 onwards, loss of investor confidence would still have triggered unsustainable debt dynamics once the recession began to bite after 1998. The stagnation of output and prices in Argentina created a yawning gap between the interest rate on debt and the rate of growth of nominal GDP. Had the currency been floated in, say, 1995, the real devaluation of the peso would still have pushed up the debt/GDP ratio, but higher output would have left greater scope for addressing this by running a sizeable primary surplus. Moreover, the more gradual depreciation under floating might have allowed the economy to adjust to higher debt service payments without resort to default. The IMF has criticised itself for not pressing for tighter fiscal policy in the 1990s. A more fundamental criticism would be that it was seduced by the bipolar model into complacency about adjustment to real shocks and forgetting the teachings of optimum currency area theory.     

The Global Corporation: Sharing the Regulatory Responsibility

This article, based on the first of the 1999 Stockton Lectures, argues that the effective management of the global economy cannot be left to government: that international corporations have a crucial role too. Corporations that play this role can shape and be ahead of the public policy curve and thereby often gain competitive advantage. The public policy game between governments and international business can be co-operative and a positive sum game. If it is not, both sides will be weakened. Success is likely to elude companies adopting strategies that run against the grain of public policy. marketplace, and that it is to society's benefit that they should so do.     

Training European trade unionists

This article analyses the findings from a pilot research project looking at the pattern of trade union education provision in Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. In each country the trade union movements are adapting their training systems to meet new challenges in often hostile economic and political climates. In spite of common problems there remain significant national differences in trade union education deriving from divergent traditions which we explore through a systems model which ocuses on the key issues of national legislation, funding, training provision and accreditation. We conclude by suggesting the need for new research and policy agendas.     

Time to Do the Job Properly—The Case for a New Approach to EU Consumer Legislation

Following 25 years of legislative activity in the field of consumer law, the EU has proposed major reforms to the consumer law acquis. Existing legislation is largely based on directives harmonizing aspects of national consumer laws. This paper argues that a more appropriate approach for EU consumer law would be legislation in the form of a regulation which is applicable to cross-border transactions only. This argument will consider the constitutional constraints of the EU Treaties, before examining the case for a cross-border-only measure. It will be argued that the cross-border approach is preferable, because it would provide clearer benefits for consumers seeking to buy goods/services across borders, while not upsetting domestic law unnecessarily, in particular in the context of e-commerce.     

零利率下限约束、宏观经济波动与混合型货币政策框架

宏观经济持续低迷引发学界关于货币政策有效性的广泛讨论。本文构建包含名义利率零下限约束的混合型货币政策框架,据以系统比较存在和不存在零利率下限约束两种情形下宏观经济波动异质性以及货币政策有效性的差异。研究发现,总需求下降时零利率下限约束情形下产出下降和通缩程度更为严重;总供给下降不会引致名义利率触及零利率下限以致宏观经济波动演变无明显差异;零利率下限约束情形下央行数量型调控的有效性显著降低,价格型调控则完全失效。本文认为考虑零利率下限约束的建模更宜刻画现实经济周期和宏观调控效力,忽视零利率下限约束会对宏观经济预判和政策调控有效性的认识产生偏误;需求低迷环境下“数量型调控为主、价格型调控为辅”的政策组合仍为央行合意的货币调控范式,央行须更加关注降低实际资金利率;政府应注重宏观政策协调配合,实施更加积极的财政政策以与货币政策发挥有效政策合力,促使实体经济趋稳高质发展以摆脱利率下限约束困境。