Land change in the Brazilian Savanna (Cerrado), 1986–2002: Comparative analysis and implications for land-use policy

The Brazilian Cerrado, a biodiverse savanna ecoregion covering 1.8 million km² south and east of the Amazon rainforest, is in rapid decline because of the expansion of modern agriculture. Previous studies of Cerrado land-use and land-cover (LULC) change imply spatial homogeneity, report widely varying rates of land conversion, use ambiguous LULC categories, and generally do not attempt to validate results. This study addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing moderate-resolution, multi-spectral satellite remote sensing data from 1986 to 2002 in two regions with identical underlying drivers. Unsupervised classification by the ISODATA algorithm indicates that Cerrado was converted to agro-pastoral land covers in 31% (3646 km²) of the study region in western Bahia and 24% (3011 km²) of the eastern Mato Grosso study region, while nearly 40% (4688 km² and 5217 km², respectively) of each study region remained unchanged. Although aggregate land change is similar, large and contiguous fragments persist in western Bahia, while smaller fragments remain in eastern Mato Grosso. These findings are considered in the current context of Cerrado land-use policy, which is dominated by the conservation set-aside and command-control policy models. The spatial characteristics of Cerrado remnants create considerable obstacles to implement the models; an alternative approach, informed by countryside biogeography, may encourage collaboration between state officials and farmer-landowners toward conservation land-use policies.     

Block trades in options markets

Block trading, which was sparse before the reduction of the minimum permissible block size threshold in October 2012, currently accounts for about 30% of the trading volume in WTI crude oil options. Block orders share similar characteristics to those routed at the pit, but they have lower information content and face higher execution costs, due to high search costs. However, our results show that such block orders would have been costlier to execute at the pit, which suggests that some pit order flow may have migrated to the upstairs market, contributing to the eventual demise of energy options pits.     

Coupon characteristics and redemption intentions: A segment-level analysis

The authors investigate how different segments of consumers react to different coupon characteristics, such as face value and method of distribution. They utilize a latent segmentation approach to identify the underlying segments. The empirical analysis suggests that different segments of consumers place varying emphasis with regard to economic benefits, psychic benefits, effort costs, and substitution costs. A further examination of the derived segments with respect to consumer correlates such as psychological, attitudinal, behavioral, and demographic characteristics reveals that coupon-related consumer characteristics, rather than demographics, exhibit significant and meaningful differences across these segments. Implications of the segment-level analysis for evaluating coupon drops and managing promotional expenditures are also discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Task assignments and incentives: generalists versus specialists

I develop an agency model of job assignments where jobs differ based on the breadth of tasks. A tradeoff between task complementarities and relative abilities of workers results in those with balanced skills being assigned to multitask jobs. The same tradeoff between complementarities and relative abilities also influences incentives to sort privately informed workers to jobs. I then draw on a variety of sources (survey data, case studies, and anecdotal evidence) to suggest that relative abilities and multitasking play an important role in managerial assignments of nonacademic research scientists.     

Supply chain immune system: concept,framework, and applications

Behind every product and service is a supply chain. These supply chains are extremely complex and vulnerable to multifarious risks that threaten their performance and stability, ranging from simple machine or truck breakdowns to catastrophic natural disasters. This paper presents a novel framework for supply chain risk management based on the analogy of the biological immune system, which has multiple layers of increasing sophistication to neutralise a variety of risks. The various layers include: physical barriers, innate response, and adaptive response. The working of the framework is explained with an illustrative semiconductor supply chain. Applications of this framework include short-term disruption response and long-term immunisation, providing planner and manager level insights respectively.     

Ensuring Daughter Survival in Tamil Nadu,India

The South Indian state of Tamil Nadu is a relatively recent addition to the list of Indian states to experience the phenomenon of “missing girls”. Nonetheless, the government and non-governmental organizations in the state have been active for some time in collecting data to track gender differences in survival and in introducing interventions to prevent daughter elimination. Against this background, this article has two aims. First, it provides a temporal and spatial analysis of patterns of daughter deficits in Tamil Nadu over the period 1996–2003. Second, it undertakes an examination of the modus operandi, underlying assumptions, strengths and weaknesses of various interventions and assesses their effect on daughter elimination.     

The relationship between the frequency of news release and the information asymmetry: The role of uninformed trading

This paper shows that the degree of information asymmetry is lower for firms with more frequent news releases. The relation holds for various measures of information asymmetry such as the probability of information-based trading (PIN), permanent price impact, and adverse selection component of bid-ask spread, even after adjusting for endogeneity between news release and information asymmetry. By decomposing the PIN into intensities of uninformed and informed trades, similarly to Brown and Hillegeist (2007), we find that intensity of uninformed trading increases much more than that of informed trading for firms with more frequent news releases. As a result, information asymmetry, as is measured by PIN, decreases for such firms due to the large increase in the intensity of uninformed trading. Our findings highlight not only the importance of news releases in leveling the playing field of investors but also the role of uninformed investors in reducing trading cost due to information asymmetry.