New MII Circular on Telecom and Internet Firms

On July 13, 2006, the Min istry of Information Indus try of the People＇s Repub lic of China （＂MII＂） issued a new notice concerning foreign-invested telecom and internet companies in China. MII＇s ＂Notice on Strengthening Regulation of Foreign Investment in and Operations of Value-Added Telecom Services＂ （the ＂MII Circular＂）, further clarifies the existing regulatory framework governing foreign investment in internet and other value-added telecommunications （＂ VATS ＂） businesses in China.     

Cointegration and causality in the Asian and emerging foreign exchange markets: Evidence from the 1990s financial crises

This article examines the cointegration level, changes in the existence and directions of causality of the foreign exchange (FX) rates in the Asian and emerging markets during the 1990s financial crises. Engle and Granger's simple bivariate and Johansen's multivariate cointegrations are applied to the FX rates for the 1994 Mexican, 1997 Asian, 1998 Russian, and 1999 Brazilian crises. In addition, the article conducts the Granger causality test and impulse response analysis to examine the causality pattern in all the FX rates. The analysis shows most of the pre-Mexican causality disappears and significant numbers of new causality emerge in the 1994 Mexican crisis while the 1997 Asian crisis generates significant spillover effects into the later part of the 1998 Russian and 1999 Brazilian crises.     

R. J. Chambers on Securities and Obscurities: Making a Case for the Reform of the Law of Company Accounts in the 1970s

This study examines the contribution of Raymond J. Chambers to the British inflation accounting debate in the early‐to‐mid 1970s, from the perspective of the reception of his book, Securities and Obscurities: A Case for Reform of the Law of Company Accounts, published in 1973. To structure the empirical narrative, drawing on previously unpublished documents from the R. J. Chambers Archives, we employ Czarniawska and Joerges’ ( 1996 ) notion of the ‘travel of ideas’, and Mumford’s ( 1979 ) observation of the existence of ‘inflation accounting debate cycles’. The result is a narrative that traces the environmental and material circumstances that led to Chambers’ book having a lesser impact on the British inflation debate than one would expect based on the international exposure of his ideas, his influence at the time, and the empirical rigour of his proposal. The purpose of this exercise is to assess how contextual factors, such as the choice of publisher, use of promotional material, and distribution methods, can be as (or more) important than the substance of the proposed ideas, arguments, and solutions.     

Bank CEO materialism: Risk controls,culture and tail risk

We investigate how the prevalence of materialistic bank CEOs has evolved over time, and how risk management policies, non-CEO executives’ behavior and tail risk vary with CEO materialism. We document that the proportion of banks run by materialistic CEOs increased significantly from 1994 to 2004, that the strength of risk management functions is significantly lower for banks with materialistic CEOs, and that non-CEO executives in banks with materialistic CEOs insider trade more aggressively around government intervention during the financial crisis. Finally, we find that banks with materialistic CEOs have significantly more downside tail risk relative to banks with non-materialistic CEOs.     

Owning and testing smoke alarms: findings from a qualitative study

Reducing injury and death in house fires is an important public health intervention activity with the presence of an operating smoke alarm widely considered an important way of reducing harm from fire. Yet despite a number of initiatives and fire-safety campaigns, a number of households at greater risk of domestic fire fail to have a functioning alarm. This paper provides empirical insight into everyday experiences of owning, maintaining and testing smoke alarms among a purposive sample of individuals identified as being less likely to own a functioning smoke alarm. Analysis from focus group data identifies a number of reasons why individuals may not own or test an alarm, and provides new insight into how fire risk is understood in the context of a range of competing, and potentially more prominent, individual and household risks. We suggest that while initiatives that aim to reduce fire injury and death should be continued, their success, and indeed future research on fire risk, should pay attention to the mundane and everyday contexts within which individuals currently rarely reflect on their risk of experiencing a domestic fire.     

Rookes v. Barnard and the trade union question in British politics

In the 1950s, given the scope of the Trade Disputes Act 1906 that had granted immunity against specific torts (civil wrongs) to organisers of industrial action, the courts had little role in industrial relations. Hence, the importance of the House of Lords decision in 1964 that, in threatening to strike to secure Douglas Rookes's removal from the Heathrow design office of the British Overseas Aircraft Corporation after his resignation from the union, Alfred Barnard and others had used unlawful means because a threat to break a contract of employment came within the tort of intimidation that was unprotected by the Trade Disputes Act's statutory immunities, and thus, they were liable to pay damages to Rookes. The legal arguments deployed are analysed within growing unease in the Conservative Party and among employers at the emergence of workplace union organisation and national strikes. Despite being partially neutralised by the Trade Disputes Act 1965, Rookes was a harbinger of a new judicial activism that outflanked trade unions' tort immunities by creating novel common law liabilities. This in turn laid the political basis for subsequent Conservative legislation to restrict and regulate trade unions and industrial action, a project that is ongoing.     

Sample attrition in the RLMS, 2001–10

The data of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) – Higher School of Economics represents one of the few nationally representative sources of household and individual data for Russia. These data have been collected since 1992 and in recent years, thanks to more secure financial and logistical support, have become a resource increasingly drawn upon by scholars and students for national and cross-national studies. In this paper, we examine the extent of non-random attrition in the RLMS and discuss the circumstances under which this might give rise to biases in econometric analysis. We illustrate this with an example drawn from the health sphere.     

Up in smoke: demarketing and consumer smoking cessation

The concept of demarketing refers to the use of marketing techniques to reduce or eliminate demand for a product or service. A review of the demarketing literature relating to health and specifically antismoking initiatives indicated that, while research on this topic exists, much of it is not grounded in an acceptable attitudinal or behavioural theory. After determining the importance placed by a sample of 18–24‐year olds on nine demarketing initiatives, two dimensions were identified that best explained this construct. Items within these dimensions were summed and averaged to form single variables, which were then used to form the attitudinal component of the Model of Goal Directed Behaviour. The findings showed that two of these variables – one that captured product packaging aspects and another that consisted of place and price items – significantly influenced the desire to quit and indirectly influenced the intention to quit. Anticipated positive emotions, frequency of quitting attempts and perceived control over quitting also positively influenced the desire and/or intention to quit. The article concludes with a discussion that interprets these findings from a theoretical and practical perspective and suggests directions for future research.     

The Discriminating Beta: Prices and Capacity with Correlated Demands

Uniform customer‐class pricing can do much of the work of congestion‐based or time‐of‐day pricing in communication or wireless networks. A monopolist exploits differences in the stochastic characteristics of demands. If demands are correlated and the firm faces a capacity constraint, then it can set prices to reduce the variability of aggregate demand, thereby reducing the probability of excess demand and the associated service quality deterioration. Demands that covary negatively with aggregate demand are valuable to the firm in much the same way that securities that covary negatively with the market are valuable in a stock portfolio. Customer classes that exhibit low covariance with aggregate demand realize lower optimal prices. Optimal capacity is also affected by these covariances. As long as demands are not perfectly positively correlated, expected costs of joint production are less than expected costs of serving demands separately.