Working conditions and factory survival: Evidence from better factories Cambodia

A large and growing literature has identified several conditions, including exporting, that contribute to plant survival. A prevailing sentiment suggests that anti‐sweatshop activity against plants in developing countries adds to the risk of closure, making survival more difficult by imposing external constraints that may interfere with optimizing behavior. Using a relatively new plant‐level panel data set from Cambodia, this paper applies survival analysis to estimate the relationship between changes in working conditions and plant closure. The results find little, if any, evidence that improving working conditions increases the probability of closure. In fact, some evidence suggests that improvements in standards relating to compensation are positively correlated with the probability of plant survival.     

REASSESSING THE IMPACT OF BARRIERS TO CAPITAL ACCUMULATION ON INTERNATIONAL INCOME DIFFERENCES*

Can barriers to capital accumulation account for large differences in GDP per capita? We reconsider the claim that these barriers have an amplified effect on income levels in a model where both modern and traditional sector technologies are active. We show that this claim is not correct. We do find, however, that the removal of barriers to capital accumulation can cause large changes in the employment shares of labor. Thus the model can account for an important stylized fact of the development process, with labor moving from the traditional to the modern sector as income levels rise.     

STATIC FUND SEPARATION OF LONG‐TERM INVESTMENTS

This paper proves a class of static fund separation theorems, valid for investors with a long horizon and constant relative risk aversion, and with stochastic investment opportunities. An optimal portfolio decomposes as a constant mix of a few preference‐free funds, which are common to all investors. The weight in each fund is a constant that may depend on an investor's risk aversion, but not on the state variable, which changes over time. Vice versa, the composition of each fund may depend on the state, but not on the risk aversion, since a fund appears in the portfolios of different investors. We prove these results for two classes of models with a single state variable, and several assets with constant correlations with the state. In the linear class, the state is an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process, risk premia are affine in the state, while volatilities and the interest rate are constant. In the square root class, the state follows a square root diffusion, expected returns and the interest rate are affine in the state, while volatilities are linear in the square root of the state.     

Campus,City, Networks and Nation: Student‐Migrant Activism as Socio‐spatial Experience in Melbourne,Australia

‘Education–migration nexus’ policies in Australia between 1998 and 2010 linked international education with different forms of temporary and permanent migration. This resulted in a blurring of boundaries around student, worker, consumer, migrant and ethnic identities. While the exploitation, marginalization and vulnerability of international students in Australia has gained a great deal of media and scholarly attention, less consideration has been given to the varied forms of subsequent protest undertaken by student migrants in Australian cities. This article analyses three case studies of protests involving student migrants in Melbourne: a protest against unfair assessment; a fight for a campus prayer room; and labour protests within the retail service and taxi industries. It draws on theoretical work on new social movements and social transformation in urban spaces to find ways to conceptualize this activism in relation to the scales of campus, city and nation. In doing so, it argues primarily that these sites of protest are socio‐spatial experiences that encompass shifting and socially produced spatial scales, as well as complex networks of association across different communities, which in turn reflect different student‐migrant identities.     

Optimal investment,derivative demand,and arbitrage under price impact

This paper studies the optimal investment problem with random endowment in an inventory‐based price impact model with competitive market makers. Our goal is to analyze how price impact affects optimal policies, as well as both pricing rules and demand schedules for contingent claims. For exponential market makers preferences, we establish two effects due to price impact: constrained trading and nonlinear hedging costs. To the former, wealth processes in the impact model are identified with those in a model without impact, but with constrained trading, where the (random) constraint set is generically neither closed nor convex. Regarding hedging, nonlinear hedging costs motivate the study of arbitrage free prices for the claim. We provide three such notions, which coincide in the frictionless case, but which dramatically differ in the presence of price impact. Additionally, we show arbitrage opportunities, should they arise from claim prices, can be exploited only for limited position sizes, and may be ignored if outweighed by hedging considerations. We also show that arbitrage‐inducing prices may arise endogenously in equilibrium, and that equilibrium positions are inversely proportional to the market makers' representative risk aversion. Therefore, large positions endogenously arise in the limit of either market maker risk neutrality, or a large number of market makers.     

Valuing and value in diversity: the policy‐implementation gap in an IT firm

The focus of UK‐based research on diversity theory and diversity managers has led to a relative dearth of studies focusing on the critical issue of line managers' agency in policy implementation. This article provides a context‐sensitive organisational case study of the policy‐implementation gap in the UK base of one multinational IT company. The article explores male and female managers' perspectives on valuing diversity at a level of general abstraction, and the extent to which they see value in diversity for the effectiveness of their project teams. In the context of a White, male‐dominated industry, the case study shows how the gap is sustained rather than bridged despite the implementation of numerous diversity initiatives.     

Does Globalisation Affect Crime? Theory and Evidence

Globalisation sceptics argue that trade liberalisation has high social costs, including an increase in expropriative behaviour such as civil conflict, coercion of labour and crime. We show that a theoretical relationship between trade and expropriation exists, but the sign differs for developed and developing economies. We verify this empirically using data on crime rates. Specifically, we find that trade liberalisation, as measured by both higher openness and lower import duty rates, tends to increase burglaries and theft in very labour‐abundant countries. For other countries, however, we find that trade liberalisation has either a small negative effect on crime or no effect, depending on the country's capital abundance.