A real options model to assess the role of flexibility in forestry and agroforestry adoption and disadoption in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley

Efforts to restore the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley's forests have not achieved desired levels of ecosystem services production. We examined how the variability of returns and the flexibility to change or postpone decisions (option value) affects the economic potential of forestry and agroforestry systems to keep private land in production while still providing ecosystem services. A real options analysis examined the impact of flexibility in decision making under agriculture, forestry, and agroforestry and demonstrated that adoption of forestry or agroforestry systems is less feasible than would be predicted by deterministic capital budgeting models.     

Can economic, land use and climatic stresses lead to famine, disease, warfare and death? Using Europe's calamitous 14th century as a parable for the modern age

Although many of today's ecological, climatic and socio-economic problems seem unprecedented, similar events have occurred in the past. As such, historic periods of climatic and economic volatility can be used as a way of developing frameworks for analyzing today's predicament. Western Europe's “middle ages” (circa 11-14th century) may be one such case. By the 12th century, medieval Europe had shifted from the subsistence agrarian economy that emerged following the collapse of the Roman Empire to one where spatially dispersed trade in agricultural commodities helped support a complex society that devoted considerable resources to cultural works. This shift was facilitated by new institutional arrangements centred on monastic orders that provided access to both new agricultural and food processing technologies as well as trade routes. These institutional arrangements contributed to population growth and land clearing. All of these factors increased the wealth of society but also concentrated this wealth in a small number of communities that were dependent on an ever-increasing and exploited hinterland for resources. Ultimately, this created a tightly coupled continent-wide subsistence system that was vulnerable to the weather, economic and disease shocks of the 14th century when Europe's population declined by perhaps 50%. In exploring this history, the goal of this paper is to draw on a diverse theoretical body of literature (that includes resiliency theory, landscape ecology, political science and ecological economics) to develop a series of hypotheses about how large-scale complex civilizations can become vulnerable to climate change.     

Examining alternative futures: Theoretical considerations

In consequence of world population growth, technological dependence and natural resource depletion, mankind, especially in the developed world, which operates with a free-trade tradition, faces unprecedented challenges to civilised survival. Following the Harrison Brown precedent in assessing the dynamics of social systems' responses to survival pressures, the authors have selected themes of theoretical social science and juxtaposed them for insights into the nature of and paths to our collective future, here characterised in three alternative scenarios.     

Strategic human capital management in the context of cross‐industry and within‐industry mobility frictions

Research Summary: We develop and test a theory examining how frictions that restrict mobility across industries and frictions constraining mobility within an industry can co‐occur to effectively isolate individual human capital, ultimately changing the firm's make‐versus‐buy decision for human capital. Empirically, we demonstrate that when cross‐industry frictions in the form of limited skill transferability and within‐industry frictions in the form of noncompete enforceability are both present, employees exhibit longer tenures, firms hire workers with less initial experience, firms change the amount and nature of training provided, and wages marginally increase. These findings suggest that sufficiently strong and complementary mobility frictions shift the emphasis of firms’ human capital management practices toward internal development of human capital relative to acquisition on the external market. Managerial Summary : In the face of frictions to employee mobility both within and across industries, which we capture empirically using measures of noncompete enforceability and limited skill transferability across industries, firms tend to hire less experienced workers, such workers exhibit longer tenures, and firms invest more in their training, particularly in the development of new skills. Our findings imply that for firms operating under such complementary frictions, better hiring and internal development capabilities are particularly important for performance, while those firms without such capabilities may benefit from considering ways to circumvent the mobility frictions, including moving out of the focal state or lobbying for different noncompete laws.     

Interest rates and the recent weakness in M2: An extension to the P model of inflation

A model of changes in the deflator for nondurables and services consumption expenditures is estimated simultaneously with the error-correction model of M2 growth described in Koenig (1996). The inflation forecasts generated by the joint model have marginal predictive power for changes in the GDP deflator and exhibit none of the systematic bias which has plagued the original formulation in recent years. Output-market slack is of little use in predicting changes in the consumption deflator, but there is evidence of a speed effect.     

企业价值:动荡环境中的重心?(中)

我们的目的是在变化的环境中,推动行业战略管理理论中“企业价值”的应用研究。借助五个不同行业中具有典型意义的企业,通过考察企业价值对消费者、顾客和客户的不同作用,从四个重要维度量化并分析了市场对企业公开声明的战略的观点,并且说明了在产业效应中考虑到动荡因素的可能性。结论是:特定行业在顾客对不同类型的动荡的感知面前是非常脆弱的,在很多大型企业中也是如此。笔者认为,相对于渐进变化环境中的企业价值,在激进、动荡市场环境或间断均衡中的企业价值更为明显,与顾客和客户的关系也更为紧密。