Tourism in Scotland—under new management

Scotland's tourism product has its own national identity which is derived from the distinctive character of the country's climate, culture, tradition, and industrial and social history. In this report John Stuart, Director of External Relations at the Scottish Tourist Board, describes the new techniques that have been devised to manage the tourism industry in Scotland and promote its product in the UK and overseas.     

Smart Meter-Angebote: Eine empirische Untersuchung von Kundenpräferenzen

The implementation of smart meters in German households by 2032 is a major step in the transition towards an intelligent and connected energy system. Despite of federal legislation providing a structured plan for the nationwide smart meter rollout including basic product requirements, actors within the energy market have the opportunity to take an active part in shaping the market through appealing product offers and hence to create competitive advantage. This study identifies relevant features of smart meters from literature und business practice, and measures customer’s preferences for these features. Results indicate predominantly positive customer evaluations of smart meter features, amongst which the availability of consumption data, the installation price and rental charges as well as time variable tariffs contribute most to overall utility of smart meters. Finally, findings suggest targeting customers by defining strategies to address privacy concerns, to educate about saving potentials as well as to create differentiated pricing schemes.     

Unraveling the Genetic Component of Multifactorial Diseases: Dream or Reality

The etiology of many human diseases is complex and very likely involves a combination of genetic and environmental risk factors. A popular strategy to detect genetic risk factors is to perform a systematic screening of the genome searching for linkage. The power of such and approach depends very much on the unknown characteristics of the genetic factors and the main difficulty is to establish a good trade-off between false positives and false negatives. Besides, a precise localisation of the risk factor will generally not be obtained. The set up of a candidate gene stratery is necessary to go further in genetic factor identification. It is likely that for multicfactorioal diseases the only genetic risk factors that can be detected are those with fairly strong effect. Even in that case, it is important to design strategies which increase the power of detection and provide for a better evaluation of the associated risks.     

Competition for goods in buyer-seller networks

Abstract. This paper studies competition in a network and how a network structure determines agents' individual payoffs. It constructs a general model of competition that can serve as a reduced form for specific models. The paper shows how agents' outside options, and hence their shares of surplus, derive from “opportunity paths” connecting them to direct and indirect alternative exchanges. Analyzing these paths, results show how third parties' links affect different agents' bargaining power. Even distant links may have large effects on agents' earnings. These payoff results, and the identification of the paths themselves, should prove useful to further analysis of network structure.     

Rules,rogues, and risk assessors: Academic responses to Enron and other accounting scandals

Abstract

The recent accounting scandals in the USA and the resulting regulation of the US profession via the Sarbanes–Oxley Act have led to the resurrection of an old debate: principles vs. rules. We argue that such a debate is jejune and serves as little more than a diversion from discussing more substantive issues raised by events like Enron and Andersen. Accounting is not confronted by a choice of principles to the exclusion of rules or vice versa. Principles underlie any set of rules, and any implementation of principles will inevitably involve adopting some rules. We take issue with various analyses of the accounting scandals that rely too exclusively on the principles of neo-classical economics. We conclude by identifying four major obstacles impeding meaningful academic and educational treatment of the maladies of which Enron is merely a symptom.     

Working sick and out of sorts: a cross-cultural approach on presenteeism climate,organizational justice and work–family conflict*

Abstract

A climate of presenteeism has important effects on employee well-being and the organization itself. Our study, based on surveys of health sector employees in six different countries (Brazil, Ecuador, Lebanon, Portugal, Russia and Spain) examines whether organizational justice plays a mediating role in the relationship between a presenteeism climate in the organization and work–family conflict (WFC). Our results indicate that the perception of organizational justice and the presenteeism climate do influence WFC. Moreover, higher levels of WFC were found in non-Latin countries. This study contributes to the work attendance and life balance field by providing cross-cultural empirical evidence corroborating the effect of justice and presenteeism climate on the WFC.     

Orthogonalized factors and systematic risk decomposition

In the context of linear multi-factor models, this study proposes an egalitarian, optimal and unique procedure to find orthogonalized factors, which also facilitates the decomposition of the coefficient of determination. Importantly, the new risk factors may diverge significantly from the original ones. The decomposition of risk allows one to explicitly examine the impact of individual factors on the return variation of risky assets, which provides discriminative power for factor selection. The procedure is experimentally robust even for small samples. Empirically we find that even though, on average, approximately eighty (sixty-five) percent of style (industry) portfolios’ volatility is explained by the market and size factors, other factors such as value, momentum and contrarian still play an important role for certain portfolios. The components of systematic risk, while dynamic over time, generally exhibit negative correlation between market, on one side, and size, value, momentum and contrarian, on the other side.     

A sectoral analysis of the financial instability hypothesis

Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) is applied to various North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) industry groups, and it is found that some sectors develop much more closely in accordance with the FIH than others. Minsky categorized firms based on the relationship between cash flow and debt service requirements: hedge finance units, whose operating revenues are adequate to service current interest and principal on their debt; speculative finance units, which can meet interest payments but cannot pay down principal; and Ponzi finance units, which cannot meet current interest payments. The FIH is related to, as well as supportive of, Austrian Business Cycle (ABC) theory, because interest rates are negatively correlated with the proportion and market value of speculative firms in several sectors.