Rethinking the global food crisis: The role of trade shocks

Although fundamental factors were clearly responsible for shifting the world to a higher food price equilibrium in the years leading up the 2008 food crisis, there is little doubt that when food prices peaked in June of 2008, they soared well above the new equilibrium price. Numerous arguments have been proposed to explain overshooting, including financial speculation, depreciation of the United States (US) dollar, low interest rates, and reductions in grain stocks. However, observations that international rice prices surged in response to export restrictions by India and Vietnam suggested that trade-related factors could be an important basis for overshooting, especially given the very tangible link between export volumes and export prices. In this paper, we revisit the trade story by closely examining monthly data from Thailand (the largest exporter of rice), and the United States (the largest exporter of wheat and maize and the third largest exporter of soybeans). In all cases except soybeans, we find that large surges in export volumes preceded the price surges. The presence of these large demand surges, together with back-of-the-envelope estimates of their price impacts, suggests that trade events played a much larger and more pervasive role than previously thought.     

Frontinus—A project manager from the Roman Empire era

We compare selected project management practices undertaken almost 2,000 years ago with current literature on best project management practice. We take a case study approach focusing on a person who could be seen to have taken a project manager, project sponsor, and champion role. We suggest that some project management approaches used in Roman times are routinely used today; however, changes in the culture and technology have transformed possibilities for project management techniques, and so changed approaches are inevitable. The paper provides useful insights about the nature of changes to project management practice that may be expected during this century.     

Group bargaining in supply chains

Review of Economic Design - We consider a vertical supply chain in which a monopoly retailer produces a good by assembling a number of essential components each of which is owned by a monopoly....     

Conceptions of property rights and norms

The social norm literature in law and economics fails to account for the differences between the two major conceptions of property rights. The differences between the two conceptions affect people’s utility function by affecting how increases in property rights are perceived. This paper discusses how the modern, in rem, conception evolved from an older, in personam, conception; it also discusses how economics has absorbed the modern, in rem, conception. The paper demonstrates that if people do not perceive the benefits of modern property rights, they will follow their social norms if the government or planner imposes modern property rights on them. In the end, this allows one to make a fuller discussion of why norms economize information. This discussion has various consequences ranging from developmental economics to financial market economics and cannot be ignored.

Studying influence and accounting use—Empirical evidence about individual managers and organizations with changes in Galician healthcare

Legislation outlined proposed changes in Galician Health Centres. This allowed us to set down the theory about personal and organizational Information–Influence Matrices and then Frameworks of Issues for the interactions between an individual Financial Manager and a Health Centre Co-ordinator, as well as the proposed organizational changes into a new system [Purdy DE, Gago S. Extending influence and accounting use: developing the frameworks to incorporate Galician legal matters about the proposed healthcare changes with managers and organizations for empirical study. Critical Perspectives on Accounting; in press].Evidence from a longitudinal study covering January 1997 and December 2001, indicated the suitability of these types of Matrices and Frameworks of Issues to analyse conversational data.Results agreed with anticipations at a personal level—wholly for a co-ordinator and partly for the Financial Manager. Differences between the findings and our anticipated Financial Manager's framework are straightforward and we have amended our Framework accordingly. The organization level has followed our anticipations though only 15% of Health Centres had continued with the new system, 85% remained working with the old system.Galician law contained aspirations for changing healthcare with autonomous Health Centres. Spanish health policies and budget laws have inhibited moves to change, as well as the actions of the professionals involved.     

The “value” effect and the market for Chinese stocks

A long literature in empirical finance has isolated both a “value” and a small-capitalization effect in asset pricing. This study confirms the existence of these “style” effects both in new types of equity indexes and in the stocks of Chinese companies traded in international markets. We then present a new nonparametric method of portfolio construction that enables investors to extract the predictive power of these style effects, without diluting their efficacy through an unintended weighting distribution that closely resembles capitalization weighting. We then develop a simple method to isolate periods where style tilts are likely to be particularly effective.     

Work incentives and other effects of the transition to social assistance in the transition economies: Evidence from Bulgaria

The compensation levels, duration structure and means-tested aspects of the income support system for the unemployed in Bulgaria are considered. The available evidence points to the emergence of long term unemployment as a major problem, to a system of social assistance (SA) which is not overly generous and to growing poverty. Nevertheless, econometric analysis using micro data indicates that disincentives for job search exist for SA recipients. In the context of an acute fiscal crisis, systemic efficiency might be improved by restricting access to some benefits, by some changes in scaling, in moves towards targeted contributions and in improvements in administrative capacity.     

Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.     

You Support Diversity,But Are You Ethical? Examining the Interactive Effects of Diversity and Ethical Climate Perceptions on Turnover Intentions

Efforts to identify antecedents of employee turnover are likely to offer value to organizations through money saved on recruitment and new-hire training. The authors utilized the stakeholder perspective to corporate social responsibility to examine the effects of a perceived climate for ethics on the relationship between diversity climate and voluntary turnover intentions. Specifically, they examined how ethics climate (employees’ perceptions that their organization values and enforces ethically correct behavior) affected the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Results indicated that ethics climate moderated the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Turnover intentions were lowest among workers perceiving both a pro-diversity and highly ethical climate. These results reinforce the need to communicate both diversity values and ethical standards to employees.