Transition = Improved Revenue Performance Plus Elektrificatsiya? A Look at Irkutsk Region During the Early Transition Era

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

The influence of residential segregation and its correlates on ethnic enterprise in urban areas

I develop and estimate a model of potential to enter self-employment based on individual and community-level factors. Of particular interest was the influence of racial residential segregation processes, and segregation's tendency to concentrate persons with similar demographic profiles in geographic space. It has been argued that segregation processes can also concentrate poverty and its associated social dislocations. An analysis of a database of 8917 households in four U.S. metropolitan areas revealed that two residential segregation processes (clustering and interaction) limit and enhance potential entry into self-employment for blacks, and provides a partial explanation for the longstanding gaps in white and black self-employment rates.     

Mobile people, mobile capital and tax neutrality: Sustaining a market for Offshore Finance Centres

This paper examines the self-reported effects on business performance, sustainability and confidence following international initiatives to regulate Offshore Finance Centres (OFCs). Since the late 1990s small countries and territories have been encouraged and pressured by multilateral organisations and supranational institutions to exchange information on civil and criminal tax matters. Interview based research in Australia, Andorra, Guernsey, Samoa and Singapore has been carried out to determine how OFC clients have reacted to these initiatives along with their impacts on the offshore sector, including local economies and societies. This paper shows that these international programs have caused contraction and reorganisation in leading OFCs. However, their diverse clientele and access to established markets for global financial services continues to make them attractive locales for fund management, trusts, captive insurance and private banking. The effects on OFCs located in smaller, developing countries have been much more severe, with reports that these jurisdictions are facing major problems sustaining a share of the worldwide market for financial services and products. This suggests that because of the uneven consequences of international efforts to regulate offshore finance in selected jurisdictions, these initiatives may actually increase tax competition rather than reduce it, at least in the short term. For multilateral policies to be effective, it may well be necessary for wealthy and poor nations, including OFCs (which include some of the world's poorest and wealthiest jurisdictions) to determine if tax competition contributes to or ameliorates the inconsistencies and contradictions of globalisation and the uneven development that it produces on a worldwide scale.     

Work-Family Conflict: A Virtue Ethics Analysis

Work-family conflict has been examined quite often in human resources management and industrial/organizational psychology literature. Numerous statistics show that the magnitude of this employment issue will continue to grow. As employees attempt to balance work demands and family responsibilities, organizations will have to decide to what extent they will go to minimize this conflict. Research has identified numerous negative consequences of work-family stressors for organizations, for employees and for employees' families. There are however many options to reduce this strain, each with advantages and disadvantages. An ethical analysis, from a virtue ethics perspective, is applied to this timely issue to present an alternative view in addressing this critical business decision. In addition, a strong connection between the virtue ethics analysis and a well-known management theory is given to provide a foundation for managerial implications for resolving work-family conflict.     

An Analysis of Contrarian Investment Strategies in the UK

The performance of contrarian, or value strategies – those that invest in stocks that have low market value relative to a measure of their fundamentals – continues to attract attention from researchers and practitioners alike. While there is much extant evidence on the profitability of value strategies, however, most of this evidence pertains to the US. In this paper, we provide a detailed characterisation of value strategies using data on UK stocks for the period 1975 to 1998. We first undertake simple one-way and two-way classifications of stocks in which value is defined using both past performance and expected future performance. Using sales growth as a proxy for past performance and book-to-market, earnings yield and cash flow yield as measures of expected future performance, we find that that stocks that have both poor past performance and low expected future performance have significantly higher returns than those that have either good past performance or good expected future performance. Allowing for size effects in returns reduces the value premium but it nevertheless remains significant. We go on to explore whether the profitability of value strategies in the UK can be explained using the three factor model of Fama and French (1996). Broadly consistent with the results for the US, we find that using the one-way classification the excess returns to almost all value strategies can be explained by their loading on the market, book-to-market and size factors. However, in contrast with the US, using the two-way classification there are excess returns to value strategies based on book-to-market and sales growth, even after controlling for their loading on the market, book-to-market and size factors.     

Travellers under fire: Tourists in the Tibetan uprising

Following the demonstrations in Lhasa in the fall of 1987, tourists who witnessed the events became the principal source of information to journalists denied access to Tibet and gathered material on arrests, torture, and imprisonment for human-rights organizations. A loosely knit network that arose in the first few days following the demonstrations continued to function for more than 2 years, recruiting new volunteers to take the place of those who left. Using material collected as a participant-observer among individual travelers in Tibet during 1987 and 1988, the article examines the growth of this network in terms of the response of different travel cultures to political unrest.     

Marketing and the law

Marketing decisions are particularly vulnerable to legal rulings made in both the courts and the legislatures. The effective management of those legal implications challenges the modern marketing professional. Grasping marketing’s overall legal environment, including its governing case law, regulatory statutes and future trends, is essential. This review will provide analysis of recent court cases and legislation with particular emphasis on creatively assisting the marketer’s management of the legal factor.