Korea's Growth Performance: Past and Future

South Korea is arguably the premier development success story of the last half century. Rapid growth coincided with extensive state interventions in the economy, and considerable controversy exists as to how much this performance should be credited to the country's state‐led development strategy and to what extent the lessons from that experience might be portable or applied elsewhere. The salience of this issue has grown as South Korea has become a more important provider of development assistance and advice. Now the country faces challenges in maintaining its superior economic performance, notably interrelated problems revolving around the country's demographics, long‐term fiscal position, and lagging productivity in the services sector domestically, and a taxing environment externally. Finally, the country confronts scenarios involving potential instability, collapse, and/or absorption of its neighbor, North Korea.     

Implicit pricing across residential rental submarkets

This paper examines implicit price differences of rental housing characteristics across various property types to measure whether determinants of rents are valued in the aggregate or separately. The results show that hedonic price functions are not identical across property types, which suggests that ordinary least squares is not the appropriate estimation technique when modeling the implicit prices for an aggregate rental market. Generalized least squares estimation of a random coefficient model removes the restriction of fixed parameters imposed by OLS and allows estimation of implicit prices for rental markets containing multiple property types.     

The Effects of Charm Listing Prices on House Transaction Prices

As is the case for many different goods and services, it is common practice in many real estate markets for sellers to offer properties for sale at listing prices just below some round number price ( e.g. , $99,900 instead of $100,000). The academic marketing literature refers to this practice as "charm" pricing and suggests that this strategy is an attempt by sellers to take advantage of buyers' cognitive processes in which charm prices affect buyers' perceptions about the seller or the item being offered for sale. Although numerous papers in the housing economics literature have addressed the impact of the magnitude of listing price on observed house transaction prices, no prior published study has considered the impact of the design of listing prices in housing markets. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the effects of charm pricing on house transaction prices using sample data. The results provide some evidence that houses listed at certain charm prices sell for significantly greater transaction prices than those listed at round number prices.     

Nonlinear supporting prices : The superadditive case

Assumptions on allocations and preferences sufficient to allow superadditive price support are considered for an exchange economy with a finite number of traders when the commodity space is an ordered topological vector space. The main requirements are a uniformmonotonicity assumption on preferences and that no permutation of the allocation among agents yields a Pareto improvement. No convexity assumption on preferences is used, the positive orthant need not have interior, while the proof is constructive. Applications to finite and infinite dimensional commodity spaces are discussed.     

Focus group discourses in a mined landscape

Focus group research is rarely used for examining environmental discourses other than when conflict arises. This study looks at local citizen perceptions in relation to mined (or ‘cutaway’) industrial peatland landscapes in Ireland, and seeks to shine a light on the opinions of potential actors, and the degree of willingness to participate in after-use strategies, through focus group sessions. Data are analysed using two mechanisms—content and discourse analysis. It is shown that there is a high degree of reflective perceptions on issues of quality of life and the environment with a low level of concern about further use of peatlands as places of employment—a shift from a productive, utilitarian perception to a post-productive, non-utilitarian perception. It is also shown that, when presented with a scenario that sees cutaway peatlands being used for amenity and biodiversity, there are no negative issues and some degree of enthusiasm. This paper will conclude with remarks on focus group methodologies.     

Strategic revenue recognition to achieve earnings benchmarks

I examine whether managers use discretion in revenue recognition to avoid three earnings benchmarks. I find that managers use discretion in both accrued revenue (i.e., accounts receivable) and deferred revenue (i.e., advances from customers) to avoid negative earnings surprises, but find little evidence that discretion is used to avoid losses or earnings decreases. For a common sample of firms with both deferred revenue and accounts receivable, I find evidence that managers do not prefer to exercise discretion in either account. However, further tests show that managers preferred to use discretion in deferred revenue before the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 went into effect, consistent with them choosing to manage an account with the lowest real costs to the firm (i.e., future cash consequences). My results suggest that the revenue recognition joint project undertaken by the FASB and IASB to reduce managerial estimation in revenue recognition may have the unintended consequence of leading to greater real costs imposed on shareholders as firms are likely to use even greater discretion in accounts receivable.     

From database to face-to-face —wateraid's donor development programme

This paper was first presented at the Henry Stewart Conference, ‘Relationship marketing for charities: Latest thinking and best practice’, on 23rd February, 1996. The paper describes the implementation of the Donor Development Programme at WaterAid and the lessons learned during this process. The analogy of a courtship is used for the development of the relationship between the supporter and the charity.     

Consumer Valuation of Food Quality and Food Safety Attributes in Vietnam

Food systems in developing countries are currently undergoing a profound transformation toward high-value products. Appropriate policies are needed to guide this transformation, presupposing good understanding of consumer preferences. We analyze consumers' valuation of different vegetable attributes in metropolitan areas of Vietnam, using contingent valuation techniques and a mediation framework for two specific examples. Consumers are willing to pay an average price premium of 60% for Chinese mustard that is free of chemical residues and of 19% for different convenience attributes of potatoes. Income levels and media have positive impacts on the willingness to pay, partly mediated through consumer perceptions.     

非接触智能卡安全分析

智能卡安全控制器经常遭受大量的黑客攻击.最近,攻击方法的巨大改进,宣布了以前许多设计声称其产品非常安全的说法的终结.对于原本设计具有很长设计寿命的用于护照之类的高安全性芯片来说,现在也不得不采取最新的反制措施来应对,而需要接受最广泛的各种测试.