Rediscovering and Confronting Critical Ambiguities in the Determination of Causality

The demonstration of non-spuriousness is both critical in making causal statements and extremely difficult. Unfortunately this issue is often summarily dealt with in methodological treatments in which spuriousness is reduced to instances of common cause. It is argued here, among other things, that extraneous variables need not be prior to the independent nor necessarily causally related to either independent or dependent variable. This being so, spuriousness is a far more common theoretical problem than is often currently acknowledged, and we might do well today to listen again to the advice of an earlier generation of sociologists whose work on the topic deserves more careful attention than it appears to have received.     

TESTING FOR WEAK FORM EFFICIENCY IN NEW AGRICULTURAL FUTURES MARKETS: SOME UK EVIDENCE

This paper examines the hypothesis that new agricultural futures markets are weak form inefficient in their early stages of development and that they exhibit a process of adjustment towards efficiency over time. The concept of pricing efficiency in futures markets is outlined and the hypothesis is tested with respect to the UK soyabean meal, potato and pigmeat futures markets, using serial correlation, runs and spectral analysis. The results indicate that over the time period of the contract samples these markets exhibit some weak form inefficiency; however there is no clear evidence of an adjustment process.     

Advantages of automating vital signs measurement

A comparison of automated versus conventional vital signs measurement methods revealed that the automated method required significantly less time and was perceived by nursing staff to be easy to use, accurate, and superior to the conventional method.     

Variability is beneficial in marked stopping problems

We consider a large class of stopping problems and show that the optimal return increases with increases in the variability of one or more of the distributions from which observations are drawn. This class of stopping problems includes many of the common variants of the standard economic search problem as well as many other stopping problems. The key assumption is that the optimal return is convex in each observation.      

Participation and Property Rights

This paper puts forward an argument for stakeholder rights. It begins by exploring two major answers to the question, 'in whose interests should the commercial company function?'. One claims parity for other stakeholders alongside the shareholder on the basis of a theory of property rights, and another on a theory of citizenship. Each of these answers, it is argued, fail to convince. The way forward is to recast the initial question, not asking in whose interest the company should function, but which type of interest, potentially located in any sort of person, might the company serve. That interest is identified and distinguished from others that people affected by corporations might have. These distinctions then provide the basis for an argument in favour of enfranchising two sorts of individual: sovereign stakeholders, in charge of monitoring the formulation and revision of company objectives; and secondary stakeholders, who along with those in the first category monitor the means used to achieve those objectives. The paper concludes that these distinctions should lead us to reconsider other elements in the corporate governance debate, such as the nature of a director's fiduciary duty; and the difference between democracy in corporations and democracy in the wider society.