TURNING FARMERS INTO FORESTERS VIA MARKET LIBERALISATION

Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and public concern over the environment have brought woodland into the public eye as an environment-friendly alternative land use in British agriculture. Survey evidence indicates that whilst it is the inadequacy of the returns from woodland that acts as the principal deterrent to planting, there are also a number of other factors that discourage woodland adoption. Of these, the perceived lack of flexibility that is associated with woodland figures highly. In part, loss of flexibility occurs due to the strength of controls such as felling licences and Tree Preservation Orders that restrict the conversion of woodland back to agricultural land. This paper develops a simple comparative static model of the way in which such restrictions impact on the allocation and price of woodland vis-à-vis agricultural land. Where felling controls are in operation they may reduce as well as preserve the area of woodland, and retard the efficacy of financial incentives. In this light, policymakers may do well to abolish felling restrictions on new woodland (possibly in conjunction with enhanced woodland incentives generally) if expansion of the wooded area is an explicit objective of future agricultural policy.     

Japan's Pre-Perry Preparation for Economic Growth

Of all the nations that inhabit the three largest parts of the globe, the Japanese deserve to rank the first, and to be compared with the Europeans—C. P. T hukberg [ Travels , 1796, vol. Ill, p. vi.     

ECONOMIC THEORY AND SHEEP-CATTLE COMBINATIONS*

This paper deals with the problem of determining the optimum combination of sheep and beef cattle on grazing properties. A major difficulty is that iso-cost functions (production possibility curves) for sheep and cattle are unstable and difficult to estimate because of sheep-cattle-pasture interaction. After discussion of theoretical difficulties consideration is given to practical approaches, based on the iso-cost function concept, which might provide graziers with useful guide-lines. Evidence is presented which suggests that the substitution rate between sheep and cattle with respect to pasture is not constant, and probably varies with stocking rate.     

Options with Constant Underlying Elasticity in Strikes

Closed-form solutions are derived and interpreted for European options, with stochastic strike prices, that maintain constant elasticity of the strike with respect to the price of the underlying asset. We refer to such options as CUES. CUES preserve the relative shares of exercise price risk for both the buyer and writer of the option, regardless of whether the price of the underlying asset moves up or down. The relevance of the CUES concept is established through applications in two distinct fields. First, it is established that CUES-like options are embedded in private equity investments. This concept is then used in a novel application to determine the equity share of a private company corresponding to a given level of investment. Secondly, the advantages that CUES would provide over traditional executive stock option grants are considered and it is shown that CUES can provide enhanced incentive-alignment without increasing options expense to the company. JEL Classification: G130     

Did Office Market Size Matter in the 1980s? A Time-Series Cross-Sectional Analysis of Metropolitan Area Office Markets

Recent contributions to the literature have resulted in a standard modelling of office markets. The models provide considerable insight into the working of office markets. • Nonetheless, a major difficulty is the use of data for a single city or aggregate data for the U.S. The latter implicitly assumes that model structure is invariant across cities. In this article we test for structural differences in office markets by size class. Rental data from REIS Reports for twenty-one metropolitan areas for the time period 1981 to 1990 are used to model office market behavior. Results suggest market outcomes vary by city size, larger markets are better modelled using standard procedures, and Manhattan behaves quite differently from the other markets.     

Measuring the sustainability of a community safety promotion network: working from the inside out

Mackay Whitsunday Safe Communities (MWSC) was developed using a capacity building model that consciously attempted to design sustainability into the network. Our aim was to quantify the flow of resources used by MWSC to implement and sustain its injury control activities. Resource exchange among network members was quantified and analysed using social network analysis. In 2004, MWSC accessed an estimated 6.5 full-time staff equivalents and $0.9 million. However, these resources were largely accessed externally. The linking relationships that connected MWSC to its external support network, more than half of which were maintained by six broker network facilitators, were the critical social asset used to access resources and sustain network productivity. The sustainability of this network and arguably similar safety promotion networks is vulnerable to the changing priorities of external sponsoring agents and highly dependent on its leaders who facilitated access to the resources it required to remain productive.     

Management,Organizational Justice and Emotional Exhaustion among Chinese Migrant Workers: Evidence from two Manufacturing Firms

This article explores how Human Resource (HR) policies and practices influence employee perceptions of organizational justice, which in turn impacts employee emotions and feelings of emotional exhaustion. Using structural equation modelling and based on employee survey data drawn from two manufacturing organizations, we find that a strong HR system — perceived by workers as distinctive, attractive and consistently implemented — fosters perceptions of distributive, procedural and interactive justice. However, only distributive injustice leads to negative emotions and emotional exhaustion. This is explained by reference to the cultural and institutional context (China), status (migrant) and type of workers (semi‐skilled, manual) included in the study. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications that arise from these findings.