Challenges for land system science

While considerable progress has been made in understanding land use change, land system science continues to face a number of grand challenges. This paper discusses these challenges with a focus on empirical land system studies, land system modelling and the analysis of future visions of land system change. Contemporary landscapes are contingent outcomes of past and present patterns, processes and decisions. Thus, empirical analysis of past and present land-use change has an important role in providing insights into the socio-economic and ecological processes that shape land use transitions. This is especially important with respect to gradual versus rapid land system dynamics and in understanding changes in land use intensity. Combining the strengths of empirical analysis with multi-scale modelling will lead to new insights into the processes driving land system change. New modelling methods that combine complex systems thinking at a local level with macro-level economic analysis of the land system would reconcile the multi-scale dynamics currently encapsulated in bottom-up and top-down modelling approaches. Developments in land use futures analysis could focus on integrating explorative scenarios that reflect possible outcomes with normative visions that identify desired outcomes. Such an approach would benefit from the broad and in-depth involvement of stakeholders in order to link scientific findings to political and societal decision-making culminating in a set of key choices and consequences. Land system models have an important role in supporting future land use policy, but model outputs require scientific interpretation rather than being presented as predictions. The future of land system science is strongly dependent on the research community's capacity to bring together the elements of research discussed in the paper, via empirical data collection and analysis of observed processes, computer simulation across scale levels and futures analysis of alternative, normative visions through stakeholder engagement.     

Location Decisions of Domestic and Foreign-Affiliated Financial Advisors: Australian Evidence

We examine two views of the location choice of newly qualified personal financial advisors that recommend fund managers to retail investors. In one, sources of investment pools are the determinants of the location choice of financial advisors (the ‘source of funds’ hypothesis). In the other, investment advisors learn from and mimic the location of competing industries (the ‘knowledge spill-over’ hypothesis). We also investigate whether ownership structures, such as institutional and foreign affiliation, affect the location choices of advisors. Overall, advisor location is determined by considerations for the profitability of an area as a source of both investment funds and potential information spillovers from competitors. Institutional affiliation may result in differences in the set of relevant location choice factors, but does not detract from our main findings.     

The impact of microcredit on self‐employment profits in Vietnam

This study examines the impact of microcredit on household self‐employment profits in Vietnam. For two indicators of credit participation – a dichotomous participation dummy and the accumulated amount of microcredit received per household – the analysis reveals a positive effect on household profits. The analysis also reveals that an instrumental variable method within a fixed‐effects framework can control for the possible endogeneity of credit and thereby identify the true effect of credit.     

“我们正在寻找中国进口商”

亚洲是我国开展对外经贸合作最主要的对象之一，特别是东盟一巾吲自由贸易区2010年1月1日全面启动以来，中国与亚洲国家经贸合作正变得更广泛而深入。近日，本刊记者集中采访了新加坡、马尔代夫和马来阳砸驻华大使，请他们介绍中国企业在这些国家的发展机会。     

Enhancing mental models,analogical transfer,and performance in strategic decision making

Recent research suggests that managers often make strategic decisions in novel situations by utilizing past experiences to reason by analogy. However, there is substantial evidence that decision makers often fail to identify and apply knowledge about one situation to a similarly structured situation. Two experimental studies investigated the mechanisms impacting knowledge transfer from one managerial situation (the source) to an analogous situation. The results show that exposure to variation in the source situation improves transfer performance. Variation decreases performance in the short term but improves learning and increases analogical transfer. Higher performance on and systematic search of the source situation also increase transfer performance. These results yield important implications for enhancing analogical transfer in strategic decision making and for future research on reasoning by analogy. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

UK Analysts' Earnings Forecasts

This paper reports the results of an empirical study of UK analysts' earnings forecasts for 126 firms for the years 1980 and 1981. Six hypotheses regarding the accuracy of these forecasts are tested, with results which both confirm and conflict with prior UK findings. In addition, evidence is found of a greater than generally attributed sensitivity of test results to the measure of accuracy used.     

The nonlinear time series properties of unemployment rates: some further evidence

The time series properties of unemployment rates for Germany, Japan, the UK and the US are re-examined. Evidence of nonlinear structure in the residuals of the most parsimonious linear ARMA models is reported for all countries except Japan. Modelling this nonlinearity using SETAR models suggests strong asymmetry in unemployment dynamics and the presence of a possible limit cycle for the UK. However, residual diagnostics for these models indicate remaining structure. Alternative TAR models conditioned on past growth rates of industrial production yield substantial reductions in residual variance over both linear and SETAR counterparts, iid residuals in all cases other than the US, and threshold values at or very near zero, clearly identifying the asymmetric behaviour of unemployment during expansionary and contractionary phases of the business cycle.