Marketing its Colonial Heritage: A New Lease of Life for Cape Coast,Ghana?

Most of the published works on place promotion and urban change have been undertaken within the western world. This essay goes beyond previous studies by examining the phenomenon within the African context. Specifically, it examines the utility of heritage tourism as an avenue for place promotion of Cape Coast, Ghana. The essay demonstrates how urban development in Ghana has become more centralized on towns such as Accra and Kumasi, so that once important towns like Cape Coast have lost their importance. The fact that such towns have attempted to improve their position via innovative urban development strategies, and the experience of Cape Coast, is a testimony of how heritage tourism is helping to fill this gap. However, there are significant structural constraints on the effective use of tourism in salvaging Cape Coast’s declining image, and these have to be addressed before too much faith is put in tourism as a tool for place promotion.     

Underreaction to Dividend Reductions and Omissions?

Using a sample of 2,337 cash dividend reduction or omission announcements over the 1927 to 1999 period, this study reports significant negative post‐announcement long‐term abnormal returns, which last 1 year only. However, this long‐term abnormal performance is driven by the post‐earnings‐announcement drift. After controlling for the earnings performance and the skewness of buy‐and‐hold abnormal returns, there is no compelling evidence of a post‐dividend‐reduction or post‐dividend‐omission price drift.     

Share Issuance and Factor Timing

We show that characteristics of stock issuers can be used to forecast important common factors in stocks' returns such as those associated with book‐to‐market, size, and industry. Specifically, we use differences between the attributes of stock issuers and repurchasers to forecast characteristic‐related factor returns. For example, we show that large firms underperform after years when issuing firms are large relative to repurchasing firms. While our strongest results are for portfolios based on book‐to‐market (i.e., HML), size (i.e., SMB), and industry, our approach is also useful for forecasting factor returns associated with distress, payout policy, and profitability.     

MAPs: Labor-Based Peer Assistance in the Workplace

An offshoot of management-based Employee Assistance Programs, Member Assistance Programs (MAPs) are peer-based programs designed to help union members suffering from substance abuse and other personal problems. Although a relatively recent phenomenon, MAPs are rooted in traditional union principles of voluntarism and mutual aid. This article examines the emergence and growing popularity of MAPs, differences in MAP structure and orientation across unions, and the potential significance of MAPs to unions and industrial relations.     

CRIMINAL PERCEPTIONS AND VIOLENT CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION

This paper explores the relationship between various measures of prior victimization and indicators of both the perceived victimization risk and fear of crime. Equations are specified and estimated both for the fear of crime/perception of risk and for prior victimization. Since prior victimizations are exogenous to the determination of the current assessment of risk or fear of crime, it is possible to isolate the independent effects of victimization and extraneous factors, like racial neighborhood composition, in a recursive model structure. The analysis also examines the contribution that individual victimization and extraneous factors make to the overall gap between average victimization rates and average indicators of fear.
Prior victimization explains some of the rather enormous perception of future victimization, but a sizable gap between perceived risk and actual risk remains. Much of that gap appears to be related to proximity to nonwhites, a possible proxy for racial prejudices and beliefs that nonwhite neighborhoods contribute to heightened crime.     

The Intra-Industry Transfer of Information Inferred from Announcements of Corporate Security Offerings

This study investigates the extent to which information inferred by investors from initial announcements of corporate security offerings affects share prices in the capital markets. The empirical tests measure the response in the common stock prices of both firms announcing a security offering and non-announcing firms operating in the same industry. Small but significantly negative abnormal returns are shown by industry shares upon initial announcements of common stock, convertible debt, and straight debt public offerings. Such an industry response indicates that share prices incorporate an inside assessment of factors relevant to the valuation of an industry subset of firms.     

BUSINESS CYCLES AND RACIAL DISPARITIES IN PUNISHMENT

Deeply rooted historical patterns allow us to make a correlation between imprisonment and unemployment and the marginalization of blacks. This paper examines the interrelationships among criminal activity, punishment, and cycles of the economic system based on the influence of political and economic forces on forming penal policies. The penal system is viewed as a device by which labor market fluctuations can be regulated. We examine differences between blacks and whites and between the North and the South to arrive at this paper's thesis: that race provides the link among economic cycles, employment, and crime.     

Financial Innovations,Money Demand,and the Welfare Cost of Inflation

In the 1990s, the empirical relationship between money demand and interest rates began to fall apart. We analyze to what extent financial innovations can explain this breakdown. For this purpose, we construct a microfounded monetary model with a money market that provides insurance against liquidity shocks by offering short‐term loans and by paying interest on money market deposits. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that the introduction of the sweep technology at the beginning of the 1990s, which improved access to money markets, can explain the behavior of money demand very well. Furthermore, by allowing a more efficient allocation of money, the welfare cost of inflation decreased substantially.     

Did FinTech Lenders Facilitate PPP Fraud?

In the $793 billion Paycheck Protection Program, we examine metrics related to potential misreporting including nonregistered businesses, multiple businesses at residential addresses, abnormally high implied compensation per employee, and large inconsistencies with jobs reported in another government program. These measures consistently concentrate in certain FinTech lenders and are cross-verified by seven additional measures. FinTech market share increased significantly over time, and suspicious lending by FinTechs in 2021 is four times the level at the start of the program. Suspicious loans are being overwhelmingly forgiven at rates similar to other loans.