Spirituality,Fan Culture,and the Music of Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons

This article presents findings from a qualitative study with passionate fans of the rock and roll band, Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons. The study looked at how fan involvement in the music scene enhanced quality of life through the ability to access a personal sense of spirituality. While the majority of participants (87%) had been raised in religious households, most of those (93%) had intentionally abandoned religious affiliation only to come to embrace a language of spirituality and religion to describe their attraction to the music. This study fills a gap by exploring how aspects of spiritual language and sensations can be embraced in a secular context after departure from a formal religious upbringing.     

Managerial Ownership and Financial Analysts’ Information Environment

Despite the importance of sell‐side financial analysts as information intermediaries in the capital market, little is known about how managerial equity ownership is associated with their information environment. Using Barron, Kim, Lim and Stevens’ (1998) framework for measuring the precision of financial analysts’ information, we observe that managerial ownership is positively associated with the precision of financial analysts’ public (common) and private (idiosyncratic) information, largely consistent with the alignment view of managerial equity ownership. These results are robust to controlling for various economic and statistical factors that might affect the inference.     

The economic geography of race in the New World: Brazil, 1500–2000†

Race is a fundamental aspect of historical inequality and institutions, yet it is at times overlooked within the literature on comparative development in the Americas. This article investigates the nature of staple production in Brazil and attendant changes in the racial composition of 20 modern states from its discovery by the Portuguese to the present. The Indigenous population was surpassed by that of African descent in the north‐east, south‐east, and north, respectively, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; not until decades after the abolition of slavery did people of European heritage come to constitute a majority. These transitions were guided by the relative productivity, natural increase, and price of Native and African slaves, contingent on the extent of natural resource wealth (mineral deposits or land suitable for growing cash crops) and supply of free labour. In those areas where slavery was most profitable, a 1 per cent increase in the relative cost of Native labour raised the proportion of people of African ancestry by up to 2 per cent, depending on the measures of slave prices and racial classifications considered. This relationship is robust to changes in output prices or the populace of European descent, and alternative scenarios of aboriginal population decline.     

APPLYING MONTE CARLO SIMULATION AND RISK ANALYSIS TO THE FACILITY LOCATION PROBLEM

Facility location problems have become a more strategic decision than just finding the lowest cost space to house a company's product. When choosing the placement of a distribution center, a company must weigh the new freight costs and the cost of a new or leased structure against its necessary service levels, as well as several other factors. Companies can also save on logistics costs in choosing the correct location by incorporating the inherent risk and variability that are involved in a facility location decision. However, in reality, most companies do not analytically consider risk and variability in choosing a location. This article presents a methodology to help determine candidate locations and then conduct a financial risk analysis to determine the ideal location of a new facility.     

Changes in subjective risks of hurricanes as time passes: analysis of a sample of Katrina evacuees

Using a quasi‐field experiment, we report on subjects' perceptions of the risks of hurricanes. All experimental subjects were displaced by either Hurricane Katrina or Rita, in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas, except for a small control group consisting of people who live in central Texas. We examine their perceptions of risks just after the hurricanes occurred, and over one year later to evaluate the change in subjective risk perceptions over time. A latent risk model is estimated in which subjective probabilities of hurricane strike risk are represented as a function of respondents' demographic characteristics and experiences following the storms.     

Analyzing the Welfare Impacts of Full‐line Forcing Contracts

Theoretical investigations have examined both anti‐competitive and efficiency‐inducing rationales for vertical bundling, making empirical evidence important to understanding its welfare implications. We use an extensive dataset on full‐line forcing contracts between movie distributors and video retailers to empirically measure the impact of vertical bundling on welfare. We identify and measure three primary effects of full‐line forcing contracts: market coverage, leverage and efficiency. We find that bundling increases market coverage and efficiency, but has little impact on one distributor's gaining leverage over another. As a result, we estimate that full‐line forcing contracts increased consumer and producer surplus in this application.     

Breaking the “Bamboo Curtain” and the “Glass Ceiling”: The Experience of Women Entrepreneurs in High-Tech Industries in an Emerging Market

Despite the role women play in job creation, economic growth and society revitalization, especially in economies undergoing fundamental transformations, issues emerging from women in entrepreneurship have not received adequate attention in academic research. As a result, our understanding of women entrepreneurship in emerging markets as well as in nontraditional industries is even more limited. In this study, I attempt to partially fill the gap by comparing entrepreneurial orientations and venture performance between men and women entrepreneurs in electronics industry in Chinese transition economy. I offer insights gained from statistical analyses based on a survey as well as case study. Results reveal that while women are influenced by the same factors that affect decision making among men and exhibit some similarities, they differ from men in their willingness to take more risks and make bolder moves in pursuit of greater returns and future competitive advantage. In addition, women entrepreneurs outperform their male counterparts. I compare these findings with existing literature and offer suggestions for future research. Justin Tan is Professor and the Newmont Chair in Business Strategy in the Schulich School of Business at York University in Canada. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in China. His research has been appeared in academic journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, among others. He serves as editor, associate editor, guest editor, and reviewer for most leading management journals. His research has been supported by Ford Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, among others.     

Affirmative action programs and business ownership among minorities and women

Affirmative action programs are commonly used as a means to level the playing field for minority- and women-owned firms in public procurement markets, and therefore may be a positive factor in business entry and survival. To the extent that affirmative action programs also apply to traditional labor markets, however, they may alter the opportunity cost of starting a business. We utilize the elimination of affirmative action in California and Washington States through voter initiatives to identify the effect of affirmative action on minority and female self-employment rates. In our base specifications, we find evidence of modest increases in self-employment among minorities and women in both California and Washington after elimination of affirmative action, consistent with the hypothesis that the opportunity cost of starting a business fell due to restricting opportunities in the traditional labor markets. The sign of the estimated effect, however, is not uniformly positive when considering specific race/gender groups, and the statistical significance of the main results is somewhat sensitive to the choice of control states.     

应对大宗商品危机

近期大宗商品价格出现了三十年未见的大幅波动，并还将持续一段时间。 消费品公司必须了解行业的这一“大循环”、其如何影响业务以及它们如何应对风险管理和成本控制的双重挑战。     

Managing Risk in a Transitional Environment: An Exploratory Study of Control and Incentive Mechanisms of Venture Capital Firms in China

In this study, we examine the control and incentive mechanisms of domestic and foreign venture capital (VC) firms in China. Primary findings show that most VC firms use staged capital infusion, value reassessment based on subsequent performance, and other tools reflecting the flexible and dynamic characters of the investment systems and rarely replace management team. On the other hand, domestic VC firms are less active in monitoring, less likely to retain veto rights, and less likely to introduce stock options into target firms and for all employees. They are also less motivated to provide value-added services than their foreign counterparts. Instead, they concentrate their monitoring and participation on the financial aspects of the invested ventures. We discuss these findings and suggest directions for future research.