Urban Warfare Ecology: A Study of Water Supply in Basrah

This article assesses the impact of armed conflict on the drinking water service of Basrah from 1978 to 2013 through an ‘urban warfare ecology’ lens in order to draw out the implications for relief programming and relevance to urban studies. It interprets an extensive range of unpublished literature through a frame that incorporates the accumulation of direct and indirect impacts upon the hardware, consumables and people upon which urban services rely. The analysis attributes a step‐wise decline in service quality to the lack of water treatment chemicals, lack of spare parts, and, primarily, an extended ‘brain‐drain’ of qualified water service staff. The service is found to have been vulnerable to dependence upon foreign parts and people, ‘vicious cycles’ of impact, and the politics of aid and of reconstruction. It follows that practitioners and donors eschew ideas of relief–rehabilitation–development (RRD) for an appreciation of the needs particular to complex urban warfare biospheres, where armed conflict and sanctions permeate all aspects of service provision through altered biological and social processes. The urban warfare ecology lens is found to be a useful complement to ‘infrastructural warfare’ research, suggesting the study of protracted armed conflict upon all aspects of urban life be both deepened technically and broadened to other cases.     

The uncertainty challenge of contingent collaboration

Contingent knowledge workers will play an increasingly important role in organisational success as workers transition in and out of project‐based innovation teams with more frequency. Our research finds that collaborators in the contingent, high‐skill workforce face uncertainty challenges to their work that are unique from the independent, contingent professionals more often studied. The article proposes a theoretical framework of uncertainty to guide us in understanding collaborative contingent knowledge workers’ work experience. Interviews with postdoctoral researchers reveal four findings about the influence of these highly uncertain work environments on collaborative contingent knowledge workers – collaboration isolation, frustrated independence, performance anxiety and internalised blame. Perhaps most concerning is that the workers internalise the negative impacts as personal failings instead of recognising them as consequences of a poorly designed work environment. This study argues for the need to manage and mitigate different sources of uncertainty to avoid creating an unnecessary burden on contingent knowledge workers, and to enable a sustainable, contingent knowledge workforce.     

Dissecting Exchange Rates and Fundamentals in the Modern Floating Era: The Role of Permanent and Transitory Shocks

In this paper, we apply a permanent–transitory decomposition method to analyze the link between nominal exchange rates and fundamentals in the modern floating era. The results suggest that transitory shocks dominate nominal exchange rate fluctuations, while permanent shocks dominate the variations in fundamentals. Therefore, the findings suggest that the nominal exchange rate should not be approximated by a pure random walk. Moreover, we find that unobserved fundamentals in the Taylor rule model can explain the transitory components in exchange rates.     

CONVERTIBLE BOND PRICING MODELS

Convertible bonds are an important segment of the corporate bond market, with worldwide outstandings approaching US$235 billion. Simple pricing models value a convertible bond as being equivalent to a straight bond with an embedded option that enables the bond holder to convert to a specific amount of common stock. The straight bond is subject to both interest rate and credit risk, whereas the option to convert is dependent on the underlying stock price, which exposes the convertible bond holder to equity risk. The complexity of these features means that convertible bonds tend to be treated casually in major derivatives and corporate finance textbooks. This paper presents a survey of the theoretical and empirical aspects of convertible bond pricing. The limitations of these studies are highlighted to identify those areas of research that may improve the valuation process and facilitate the application of these securities for corporate financing.     

Does Size Matter? Evaluating Corporate Environmental Disclosure in the Australian Mining and Metal Industry: A Combined Approach of Quantity and Quality Measurement

There are an increasing number of companies in the mining and metals sector disclosing environmental sustainability information in their annual reports, sustainability reports and corporate internet web pages. However, there is ongoing debate about the relationship between the quantity and the quality of environmental disclosure. That is, does an increase in number equate to an increase in quality? This study investigates the relationship between the quantity and the quality of environmental disclosure reports. Using content analysis, we examine the environmental disclosure of 55 Australian mining and metal companies which are listed among the Australian Securities Exchange's (ASX) Top 100 mining and metal sector companies. We find that the size of firms influences both the quantity and the quality of corporate environmental disclosure. That is, we find that market capitalization is positively and significantly correlated to the quantity (number of words) and the quality of disclosure. We also confirm that there is a very highly significant, positive correlation between quantity (number of words) and quality of environmental disclosure. In order to investigate any differences between the top performing group and the bottom performing group in terms of environmental disclosure quality, further analysis also confirms that there is a positive relationship between the quantity and the quality of environmental disclosure. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The Big Family: Informal Financing of Small‐ and Medium‐Sized Businesses by Guanxi

Guanxi facilitates interaction between companies and people in Confucian societies. Does this type of social construct still play the key role, when the entrepreneurs live in Western societies? The objective of this article is to verify the impact of Guanxi on the capacity of small and medium‐sized businesses accessing financial resources informally. To this end, data collected from small Chinese entrepreneurs active in the principal business center of Brazil were used. From nonparametric tests, the results suggest that: (1) different levels of Guanxi allow small and medium‐sized businesses to access informal financial resources; (2) different types of informal financing are mostly used, or judged to be more significant, depending on the level of Guanxi of the entrepreneur in terms of parental and nonfamily ties; and (3) unlike the Western literature on the financial cycles of start‐ups, this type of informal financing can extend beyond the initial stage of the business. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Free trade agreement and transport service trade

This study investigates the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on trade in transport services using OECD data from 2003 to 2006. Our analysis found that FTAs had a positive overall impact on transport services for multiple countries (i.e., 26 home and 56 partner countries). The resulting positive overall impact assures that, even with the challenges associated with different layers of services and the obstacles formed by generally low trade openness in the sector, the provisions in FTAs (e.g., national treatment and market access for goods and services) promote transport service trades. Our findings suggest that the provisions in FTAs encourage economic agents to increase engagement in transport services because of expanded openness of the physical movement of goods across international borders.     

Market Risk Disclosures and Investment Efficiency: International Evidence from the Gulf Cooperation Council Financial Firms

This study examines the association between market risk disclosures (MRDs) and the investment efficiency of financial firms from six emerging markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Based on a sample of 553 firm‐year observations over the 2007–2011 period, we find that MRDs are significantly and negatively associated with both under‐investment and over‐investment and that this association is more pronounced for larger firms. We also find that the association between MRDs and under‐investment is moderated during periods of economic distress such as the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and that the association between MRDs and over‐investment is magnified during periods of reduced financial distress. Our results are consistent with the idea that MRDs reduce information asymmetry, which ultimately improves investment efficiency. We contribute to the literature in an emerging market context by providing empirical evidence on the association between MRDs and investment efficiency across six emerging GCC capital markets. This study also fills a gap in the literature by providing evidence on the factors affecting the investment efficiency of financial firms.     

IMMIGRANT RELATIVE WAGES AT THE GREAT RECESSION: EVIDENCE WITH MATCHED EMPLOYER‐EMPLOYEE DATA FOR SPAIN

The article examines relative wages of immigrants in Spain, with a particular focus on the impact of the Great Recession. The empirical analysis is restricted to men and is based on matched employer‐employee microdata and the decomposition techniques of Juhn et al. (1991, 1993) and Fortin et al. (2011). Our results show that the significant native‐immigrant wage gap that exists both in terms of average wages and of differentials along the wage distribution is essentially explained by differences in the endowments of observed characteristics so that, in general, immigrants tend to receive a similar wage treatment than Spaniards with analogous observed attributes. On the other hand, the Great Recession has had a noticeable impact on the relative wages of immigrants, given that the significant increase of the native‐immigrant wage gap observed during the previous expansionary period was mitigated during the economic downturn due to composition effects arising from the severe employment destruction pattern.