Financial liberalization,private investment and portfolio choice: Financialization of real sectors in emerging markets

Using firm level panel data, we analyze the impacts of rates of return gap between financial and fixed investments under uncertainty on real investment performance in three emerging markets, Argentina, Mexico and Turkey. Employing a portfolio choice model to explain the low fixed investment rates in developing countries during the 1990s, we suggest that rather than investing in irreversible long-term fixed investments, firms may choose to invest in reversible short-term financial investments depending on respective rates of returns and the overall uncertainty in the economy. The empirical results show that increasing rates of return gap and uncertainty have an economically and statistically significant fixed investment reducing effect while the opposite is true with respect to financial investments.     

Consumer workers as immaterial labour in the converging media markets: three value‐creation practices

This paper takes a practice‐based approach to consumer studies and focuses on the strategic and productive roles that consumers play as immaterial labour or consumer workers in the converging media markets. Based on a case study of a print media organization and its customers, the aim is to discuss the collaborative practices through which value is created in the market. By means of a textual analysis of online and interview data, three value‐creation practices are abstracted and illustrated: constructing a sense of belonging and collective identity, mutual helping and peer support, and building pride and self‐respect. Overall, the paper suggests that in global media environments, consumer‐customers are playing increasingly significant strategic roles in the practices and processes through which value is co‐created in the market. It is therefore concluded that the idea of consumers, and media audiences in particular, as recipients of communication and targets of marketing activities needs to be problematized and the dynamic strategic roles that consumers currently play in the market need to be acknowledged and actively incorporated into the business praxis of media corporations.     

Voluntary Environmental Agreements: Taking Up Positions And Meeting Pressure

This paper portrays voluntary agreements as a Nash-bargaining game between the authorities and the polluting industry. Before bargaining starts, the authorities threaten to introduce emission licences if the negotiations come to nothing, while industry, by the use of lobbying campaigns, can make it politically costly to regulate by law. The most likely game of the ones considered is characterized by the authorities first announcing a level of licensing, whereupon industry will adjust its lobbying activity. This game results in a relatively defensive industry and authorities than other games under consideration.     

Restructuring the State-Owned Banking Sector: A Comparative Assessment of Approaches in Central Europe

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

CAPITALIZATION OF GOVERNMENT SUPPORT IN AGRICULTURAL LAND PRICES: WHAT DO WE KNOW?

Abstract.  The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of existing literature, both theoretically and empirically, on the extent to which agricultural subsidies do translate into higher land values and rents and finally benefit landowners instead of agricultural producers. Our review shows that agricultural support policy instruments contribute to increasing the rental price of farmland, and that the extent of this increase closely depends on the level of the supply price elasticity of farmland relative to those of other factors/inputs on the one hand, and on the range of the possibilities of factor/input substitution in agricultural production on the other hand. The empirical literature shows that land prices and rents have in general a significant positive and inelastic response to government support. Such inelastic response is thought to reflect the uncertain future of the farm programmes. And in general, studies have indicated that land prices are more responsive to government-based returns than to market-based returns.     

The Monday effect revisited: An alternative testing approach

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the Monday effect of stock returns. We propose an alternative, multiple hypothesis testing approach based on the closure test principle which controls the multiple type I error. We consider the US, the UK and the German stock markets and test Monday related pairwise comparisons of daily expected stock returns, while the probability of committing any type I error is always kept smaller than a prespecified level α, for each combination of true null hypotheses. Overall, the new testing approach supports previous findings of a Monday effect for the 1970s and 1980s, in particular for the US and Germany, while it suggests that the Monday effect has vanished in the 1990s and 2000s in all three markets. The comparison of the closure test procedure, the traditional multiple t-test and the Bonferroni test, a classical multiple test procedure, shows that traditional testing may result in spurious significance while the Bonferroni test may sometimes be too conservative.     

Shadow vs. market prices in explaining land allocation: Subsistence maize cultivation in rural Mexico

Prices may fail to explain farmers’ land allocation if the relevant decision prices are “shadow prices” that deviate from market prices. This may be the case for farmers who attach significant non-market values to their crops. I theoretically explain why land allocation may not respond to market signals even if transaction costs are not binding. I use nationally representative rural household data from Mexico to show that shadow prices better explain the land subsistence farmers allocate to traditional maize in this center of maize diversity. I discuss the importance of non-market values in understanding supply response and on-farm conservation of traditional crops.     

Normative Violence in Domestic Service: A Study of Exploitation,Status, and Grievability

Journal of Business Ethics - This paper contributes to business ethics by focusing on consumption that is characterized by normative violence. By drawing on the work of Judith Butler this study of...