Richard Perren. Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840

This is a very British book about the international meat industry.A volume in Ashgate's Modern Economic and Social History series,its principal contribution is charting the relationships betweencountries engaged in the meat business, especially the nationsin Latin America, plus Australia and New Zealand that exportedmost of their production to the United Kingdom. The author notes several times that Britain was "the largestmarket for internationally traded meat." His analysis throughmuch of the volume is     

Quasi-cournot behavior in a multimarket,multiplant setting

This paper introduces multimarket selling options, capacity constraints and quasi-Cournot conjectures into oligopolistic rivalry. It is shown that increased output responses between rivals that are producing below capacity will effect output reductions for all markets, but that increased output responses between rivals that are producing at capacity will effect an output increase in at least one market and might even result in a capacity extension and output increases in all markets.     

Costs of adjustment to climate change

The present paper argues that the costs of climate change are primarily adjustment costs. The central result is that climate change will reduce welfare whenever it occurs more rapidly than the rate at which capital stocks (interpreted broadly to include natural resource stocks) would naturally adjust through market processes. The costs of climate change can be large even when lands are close to their climatic optimum, or evenly distributed both above and below that optimum.     

Bootstrapping the Box–Pierce Q test: A robust test of uncorrelatedness

This paper describes a test of the null hypothesis that the first K autocorrelations of a covariance stationary time series are zero in the presence of statistical dependence. The test is based on the Box–Pierce Q statistic with bootstrap-based P-values. The bootstrap is implemented using a double blocks-of-blocks procedure with prewhitening. The finite sample performance of the bootstrap Q   test is investigated by simulation. In our experiments, the performance is satisfactory for samples of n=500$n=500$. At this sample size, the differences between the empirical and nominal rejection probabilities are essentially eliminated.     

If you play well they will come—and vice versa: bidirectional causality in major‐league baseball

The Granger‐causality test is applied to the annual attendance and win‐percentage data for 29 major‐league teams. It is shown that bidirectional causality exists for these teams and that there are some essential differences between the original 10 of 16 franchises that comprised the majors in 1903 and the six that relocated between 1953 and 1961. Some differences and some similarities are also seen in the parameter estimates for both blocs of teams, the relocated teams, and seven long‐lived expansion franchises. Finally, the parameter estimates are manipulated to yield noise‐free equilibrium estimates for both attendance and performance. In tandem, these two sets of estimates provide fodder for speculation as to the futures of each of the extant 23 franchises considered here. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway. Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America. Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004. xviii + 172 pp. ISBN 0-534-61303-9, $25.95 (paper).

In the late 1980s Donald Stull and Michael Broadway launcheda remarkable collaborative project on the contemporary meatpackingindustry, on which Slaughterhouse Blues is based. With researchfunded in part by a massive Ford Foundation grant, Stull andBroadway brought a basketball team of social scientists to smalltowns in the Midwest where today’s huge packinghousesare located. The astounding productivity of this group runsto more than fifty articles in journals     

Market structure implications of export-price uncertainty

This paper considers the profit-seeking firm that has the opportunity to export, as a price taker, to an uncertain rest-of-the-world market. When that firm competes domestically as an oligopolist the competitive export option can impact on both the firm and its domestic competitiors. The latter conjecture is explored and the resulting inferences are offered as a possible explanation for the market structures that tend to evolve in international markets.     

Estimating compensating and equivalent income variations from hedonic price models

Estimates of welfare changes obtained from hedonic price models usually consist of changes in Marshallian consumer's surplus. This note shows how compensating and equivalent income variations can be computed from the information available in hedonicprice models.     

Runway safety at airports: A systematic approach for implementing ultra-safe options

Enhancing airport runway safety is a difficult problem because runway accidents are rare events. Nonetheless, investments are being directed at improving safety for US airport ground traffic control systems. This paper shows that under these circumstances it is difficult to assess and measure the added safety offered by new replacement systems. We develop a framework for introducing and sequencing system improvements to provide greater assurances in enhancing safety. This framework shows how a new method can first be introduced as a secondary system, to test and verify its efficacy prior to its adoption as a primary system.