Domesticating Gambling: Gender,Caring and the UK National Lottery

Abstract

The issue of gambling as a form of leisure practice has, to date, received very little attention from sociologists. This is despite the enormous range of consideration recently invested in gambling by policy makers, politicians, journalists, psychologists and economists. In particular, the role that gambling plays as an important part of women’s leisure patterns has been virtually ignored. In this paper, the impact of UK National Lottery play on women’s everyday leisure experiences is examined. A questionnaire was administered to a diverse group of 150 women, and 15 women from this sample volunteered to take part in in‐depth interviews. The questionnaires sought to produce a database of the frequency of lottery play, the types of games played and the amounts of money gambled. The interviews focused on individual experiences, meanings and perceptions of lottery play as a form of leisure. The quantitative and qualitative findings of the research are discussed in terms of the material and ideological constraints shaping women’s everyday experiences of leisure, and also in terms of the ways in which gender and ‘caring’ are reproduced through women’s National Lottery play. It examines the ways in which the lottery addresses a lack of time and space for women’s pursuit of leisure.     

Investor sentiment and risk appetite of real estate security market

This article proposes a new model to measure the risk appetite in absence of option prices. Without options transaction, traditional measurements cannot be made. This article establishes a Risk Appetite (RA) indicator by way of change measure and simulation, with two density functions, i.e. risk-neutral density and historical density. The RA indicators use the data from the Property Composite Index (PCI) and the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index (SSECI). The empirical result shows that investors involved in the real estate security market have lower RA compared to those in the general security market. Particularly, RA indicators for both indices started to fall markedly in early 2008 and even more so after September 2008. The changes in RA suggest that the overall investors’ attitudes nowadays towards China's stock market are never as pessimistic as before.     

Modelling agricultural land use allocation in regional Australia

An analysis of the drivers of agricultural land use is important for policy makers as the issues of climate change and food security become increasingly prominent in the political landscape. This paper analyses the role of prices, total land holdings and climate on land use in Australia. The analysis relates to a unique comprehensive coverage of commodity types at a regional level. An explicit treatment of missing data and the novel use of cluster analysis is employed within a partial adjustment framework for modelling land allocation. The majority of commodity types across regions exhibit significant degrees of slow partial adjustment for land allocation, the frequency of slow adjustment is greatest with crops and livestock and weakest for vegetables. In general, relative own and cross prices, total land holdings and rainfall only have a minor impact on short‐term land allocations, however numerous individual commodity/regional combinations have identified significant short‐run impacts.     

Learning to play Bayesian games

This paper discusses the implications of learning theory for the analysis of games with a move by Nature. One goal is to illuminate the issues that arise when modeling situations where players are learning about the distribution of Nature's move as well as learning about the opponents' strategies. A second goal is to argue that quite restrictive assumptions are necessary to justify the concept of Nash equilibrium without a common prior as a steady state of a learning process.     

Telecommunications and economic development in Singapore

The existing research of aggregate statistical analysis on the relationship between telecommunications and economic development is largely organized around the hypothesis that telephone growth fosters economic development. Although considerable evidence supports that hypothesis, there is also a growing realization that the growth of telecommunications, in turn, requires a sound economy. The existing research, however, ignores the reciprocal relationship between these two variables. Employing Singapore data, this article formulates a simultaneous equation model to assess the reciprocal relationship between telecommunications and economic development. These data support the reciprocal relationship hypothesis. Policy implications of the findings are also discussed.     

Financial reporting in hyperinflationary economies and the value relevance of accounting amounts: hard evidence from Zimbabwe

We examine the value relevance of inflation-adjusted (IA) and historical cost (HC) amounts in a hyperinflationary economy. Using a unique dataset drawn from annual reports of firms listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange from 2000 to 2005, we find that both sets of amounts are value relevant but HC amounts are superior to IA amounts. We also show that inflation gains and losses provide incremental information content beyond that provided by the HC amounts and that the power of this incremental content model is equivalent to that of the HC model but superior to that of the IA model. Further analyses indicate that, in periods of relatively low inflation, HC amounts are more value relevant, while in periods of relatively high inflation, the two sets of amounts are equally value relevant. Finally, we show that HC amounts have a greater ability to predict future cash flows than IA amounts, which suggests that the superiority of their value relevance stems from this.     

The Drivers of Climate Change Innovations: Evidence from the Australian Wine Industry

This study examined the drivers of climate change innovations and the effects of these innovations on firm outcomes in a sample of 203 firms in the South Australian wine cluster. The results of structural equation modeling analysis suggest that absorptive capacity has a direct effect on climate change innovations, and stimulates knowledge exchanges (KEs) between firms in the cluster. KEs between firms in the cluster in turn directly affect the climate change innovations. The findings suggest a perhaps counterintuitive interrelationship between firm- and cluster-level impacts, in which KEs between firms in the cluster play a partial mediating role in the innovation process. The study further finds that climate change innovations are related to firm performance (FP) and reductions in greenhouse gases (GHGs): mitigative innovations lead to greater GHG reductions while adaptive innovations impact on FP. Contributions of the findings are discussed, as are future research directions.