What is professional attire today? A conjoint analysis of personal presentation attributes

Personal presentation attributes have long been understood to affect perceptions of competence and capabilities. To that end, this study investigates seven attributes associated with favorable interview presentation, including overall physical attractiveness, neatness and grooming, clothing color, conservative versus trendy attire, professional versus casual attire, and body modification (including tattoos and piercings). Participants (n = 108), including students, faculty, and hospitality industry professionals, sorted an orthogonal array of 16 full-color, laminated cards that contained photos so that respondents could see levels of clothing color, clothing conservativeness, and degree of professional attire. The remaining attributes and their corresponding levels were shown on respective analog indicators. The conjoint analysis results indicate that grooming and professional attire are the most important attributes in shaping favorable perceptions. Furthermore, faculty perceived conservative clothing to be better while students and industry professionals indicated that trendy clothing creates a more favorable presentation on the part of a job candidate.     

Married couples’ involvement with family vacations

Abstract

The involvement construct has received a great deal of attention in recent years. However, the majority of research on this topic has focused on the individual and has ignored spouses’ shared leisure involvement. In addition, little work has been done on involvement in the product‐class context of family vacations. This study examined the underlying dimensions of married couples’ involvement with family vacations and how these dimensions relate to selected personal variables. Factor analysis revealed two underlying dimensions. Stepwise multiple regression revealed that pleasure‐importance was positively related to gender role ideology and education and negatively related to presence of children in the home. A positive relation existed between the second dimension, sign value, and age. The study provides insight into both the nature of the involvement construct and how it might be used in future research.     

Voluntary association membership of outdoor recreationists: An exploratory study

Abstract

Research on the political activity of outdoor recreationists has focused primarily on their associational affiliations and concern for the environment. This article reviews literature on theories of collective behavior, recreation motivations, and environmental concern. The study considers outdoor recreation as a social movement and investigates relationships between incentives for voluntary membership in environmental and outdoor recreation associations, motivations for participation in outdoor recreation activities, and environmental concern. Members of associations were found to be significantly different than nonmembers on several variables including value for outdoor recreation, incentives for association membership, intellectual motivations for outdoor recreation, environmental concern, education level, and age. Results suggest that association efforts to obtain instrumental benefits, or public goods that accrue to all of society, are a primary incentive for outdoor recreationists to join voluntary associations. A common thread of intellectual pursuit distinguished members from nonmembers, suggesting that intellectual benefits may help define the relationship between outdoor recreation and associational affiliation behaviors.     

Statement of the Financial Economists Roundtable: Corporate Tax Reform

Corporate tax reform has been a controversial issue in the U.S. for several years, particularly as U.S. companies have accumulated cash in lower‐tax overseas subsidiaries, while some have used “inversions” to establish overseas corporate domiciles. Two features of U.S. corporate taxation stand out: 1. U.S. corporate income tax rates are the highest in the industrialized world. The federal rate is 35%; and, when combined with state taxes, it averages 39%, as compared to an OECD average of 24%. 2. U.S. corporations pay U.S. tax on their worldwide income, but can choose to avoid indefinitely corporate tax on foreign profits by not repatriating them. Neither feature is present in most other Western countries, where the norm is a “territorial” system that taxes companies only on their domestic profits. The Trump administration has proposed to cut U.S. corporate tax rates to 20%, thereby bringing them down to the OECD average, and to adopt a territorial tax regime like those found in most other Western nations. In this statement signed by 31 senior financial economists, the authors recommend cutting U.S. corporate tax rates, but retaining the current system of taxing the worldwide profits of U.S. companies (while giving them credit for taxes paid in overseas jurisdictions). Once U.S. rates drop to the international average, the economists point out, U.S. companies would have much less incentive under the worldwide system to use transfer pricing schemes to shift their profits to low‐tax jurisdictions than under the proposed territorial alternative. Indeed, under the current system, if the lower rates under consideration are enacted, the location of a company's business activity (including the firm's underlying intellectual property) would not affect its taxation. Along with lower corporate tax rates, the economists also recommend that Congress limit or remove the corporate option to defer the taxation of offshore profits and provide a schedule for repatriating off‐shore funds, using the inducement of the now lower rates as well as the possibility of a “tax holiday.”     

Modelling the volatility of commodities prices using a stochastic volatility model with random level shifts

We use the approach of Qu and Perron (Econom J 16(3):309–339, 2013) for the modeling and inference of volatility of a set of commodity prices in the presence of random level shifts of unknown timing, magnitude and frequency. Our approach contributes to the study of commodities in several aspects. First, we test for the presence of a genuine long-memory process in the volatility of commodities. Second, we determine that the random level shifts are certainly the main source of variation in the commodity price volatility. Finally, we estimate the volatility and its components as latent variables, thereby making it possible to evaluate their level of correlation with macroeconomic variables in small open economies such as Latin-American countries where the dependence on commodity price volatility is high. We use six commodity series: agriculture, livestock, gold, oil, industrial metals and a general commodity index. All series cover the period from January 1983 until December 2013 in daily frequency. The results show that although the occurrence of a level shift is rare, (about once every 1.5 or 1.8 years), this component clearly contributes most to the variation in the volatility. Furthermore, isolating the level shift component from the overall volatility indicates a strong relationship of this component with a set of business cycle indicators of several Latin American countries.     

Editorial

Editorial Introduction

Editorial     

AGAINST LEVIATHAN: A REVIEW OF CLASSICAL LIBERALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF NORMAN P. BARRY1

Classical Liberalism in the 21st Century is a collection of essays from colleagues and friends of the late Norman Barry, Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Buckingham. Most share Barry's Hayekian perspective. The essays cover themes such as: international competition in trade and between jurisdictions; the corporate social responsibility fad; secular economic errors; policies relating to alleged global warming; the state's impotence at removing externalities; the moral functions of competition; and, above all, Barry's rigour and eloquence in the economic and political case for freedom.