Casual Employment in Australia: A Further Analysis

Casual employment is steadily increasing its share of total employment in Australia. This paper analyses some of the factors that have led to this situation by extending the work of Simpson, Dawkins and Madden (1997). The results, while confirming some of their research and clarifying the role of union membership in limiting the spread of casual employment, also show that the determinants of casual employment in Australia are sensitive to the period of estimation and the form of model used.     

Agricultural planning,pricing policy and co-operatives in Vietnam

In the competition between national government and local co-operatives, a central contradiction in socialist rural development, the price system, market control and terms of trade are crucially related to the relative power and capacity of the central government to control ratios of accumulation and consumption. In Vietnam there is a dynamic interaction between government and agricultural producers over pricing policy and paradoxically, it is the co-operative, primarily viewed by the state as a means of providing cheap food, which has strengthened the collective bargaining position of agricultural producers. The government has had to introduce material incentives to expand agricultural production beyond subsistence levels and bow to pressure to alter the previous accumulation/consumption ratios in favour of consumption.     

A Closer Look at Barrier Exchange Options

A barrier exchange option is an exchange option that is knocked out the first time the prices of two underlying assets become equal. Lindset, S., & Persson, S.‐A. (2006) present a simple dynamic replication argument to show that, in the absence of arbitrage, the current value of the barrier exchange option is equal to the difference in the current prices of the underlying assets and that this pricing formula applies irrespective of whether the option is European or American. In this study, we take a closer look at barrier exchange options and show, despite the simplicity of the pricing formula presented by Lindset, S., & Persson, S.‐A. (2006), that the barrier exchange option in fact involves a surprising array of key concepts associated with the pricing of derivative securities including: put–call parity, barrier in–out parity, static vs. dynamic replication, martingale pricing, continuous vs. discontinuous price processes, and numeraires. We provide valuable intuition behind the pricing formula which explains its apparent simplicity. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 33:29–43, 2013     

The Demand for Food Products: An Analysis of Interpurchase Times and Purchased Quantities

In this paper we study household purchase behaviour of storable food products. An inventory model is developed in which the household chooses an optimal stock level of the product. Storage of the product is costly, there is a fixed cost per purchase occasion, and the market price is sometimes discounted because of price promotions. We show that the optimal purchase policy is an s , S policy. The model is used to derive predictions on the correlations between interpurchase times and purchased quantities on the one hand, and prices on the other. These predictions are empirically verified using consumer panel data.     

Liquidity-Based Competition for Order Flow

We present a microstructure model of competition for order flowbetween exchanges based on liquidity provision. We find thatneither a pure limit order market (PLM) nor a hybrid specialist/limitorder market (HM) structure is competition-proof. A PLM canalways be supported in equilibrium as the dominant market (i.e.,where the hybrid limit book is empty), but an HM can also besupported, for some market parameterizations, as the dominantmarket. We also show the possible coexistence of competing markets.Order preferencing—that is, decisions about where ordersare routed when investors are indifferent—is a key determinantof market viability. Welfare comparisons show that competitionbetween exchanges can increase as well as reduce the cost ofliquidity.     

The potential of internet technologies: insights from the public sector

The objective of this paper is to examine the implications of the internet for public sector organisations. Although there are considerable barriers to the full implementation of internet technologies, the findings illustrate that the internet presents public sector organisations with the potential to enhance the ways in which they fulfil the needs of users of their products and services.     

Further Evidence on the Capital Structure of REITs

This study examines the determinants of real estate investment trust (REIT) capital structure decisions from 1990 to 2008. Using a broad sample of 2,409 firm‐year observations, we find that asset tangibility is positively related to leverage, whereas profitability and market‐to‐book ratios are negatively related. Additional evidence suggests that firm debt capacity varies systematically with the unique operating and financing mechanisms employed by REITs. These results are robust across both aggregate firm debt levels and marginal security issuance decisions. Finally, our results provide further insight into competing capital structure theories, generally supporting empirical predictions derived from the market timing and trade‐off theories, although failing to support pecking order theory predictions.