Re‐Examining Advances in Occupational Licensing Research: Issues and Policy Implications

Much has changed in the realms of occupational licensing since BJIR last ran a special issue on the subject in 2010. The number of occupations subject to licensing has been growing, the data available to investigate the incidence and effects of licensing have improved immeasurably, and the policy environment surrounding licensing has changed. This issue reflects these changes with eight papers from North America and Europe covering the incidence of licensing, and its effects on wages, inequality, employment, quality of service provision and rent extraction by the organizations who undertake licensing.     

Beyond the agroecological and sustainable agricultural intensification debate: Is blended sustainability the way forward?

With the sustainable development goals has come a renewed global interest in ending hunger and achieving food security, while preventing natural resource degradation. Despite this renewed interest and increased commitments to invest in agricultural development, there is an outstanding debate over the technological trajectories to sustainability. The debate centres on sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI) and agroecological intensification (AEI) pathways to agricultural sustainability. Using a systematic literature review approach, this study examines the debate over AEI and SAI. This study employs a theoretical framework based on the economic, social, and ecological dimensions of sustainable agriculture within a policy and institutional space. Based on the sustainability dimensions, a discourse analytical technique is applied to unravel the debate. The results reveal differences in actor composition in the SAI and AEI pathways. Both pathways aim to promote food security with optimal and sustainable use of inputs; however, the actors differ on discourse relating to the concept of farming, the role of genetic engineering, the scale of operation, land use and soil health. Resolving these differences requires a blended sustainability approach that moves beyond the current AEI and SAI debate by acknowledging the tradeoffs and synergies of the socio-economic and ecological dimensions.     

Encouraging Professional Skepticism in the Industry Specialization Era

This paper provides theory and experimental evidence that, under common audit conditions, industry specialization inhibits some aspects of auditors’ professional skepticism. As auditors amass industry experience, they develop extensive knowledge of non-misstatement explanations for unusual financial statement fluctuations. This knowledge coupled with confidence in their ability to analyze audit evidence inhibits their inclination to be skeptical when there are no overt indicators of elevated misstatement risk. Although these conditions are, by definition, the conditions where misstatements are least likely, they are also the same conditions where the PCAOB has alleged pervasive insufficient professional skepticism and where well-concealed fraud is possible. These results pose an ethical dilemma for the PCAOB in terms of weighing its charge to protect the public interest against the fairness of its inspections to audit firms. Encouragingly, I also predict and find that audit firm efforts to promote professional skepticism are more effective for specialists as non-specialists are skeptical regardless of these efforts.     

Disentangling location-based advertising: the effects of location congruency and medium type on consumers' ad attention and brand choice

Research on location-based advertising (LBA) suggests that the merits of LBA lie in the fact that consumers can be targeted with location-congruent ads on their personal mobile devices. However, LBA consists of two underlying constructs: a mobile (vs. point-of-sales) advertising medium and location congruency (vs. location incongruency). This study aims to disentangle these underlying constructs by showing that they differentially affect the efficacy of an ad. Using a virtual reality lab experiment, this study shows that location-congruent ads result in increased choice for the target brand as compared to location-incongruent ads, independent of medium type. However, in location-incongruent situations, mobile ads attracted more attention than point-of-sales display ads. The advantages of LBA thus do not seem to emanate from medium type, but rather from the congruency between the ad and product location. When the ad is received at a different location than the product, the mobile medium is able to enhance consumers' ad attention.     

Double vision: Insights about the origin and interpretation of multiple IRRs

The ability of a project's internal rate of return (IRR) to quantify its economic return has been questioned by many scholars over the past 60 years, most recently by Magni (2010 Magni, C.A. (2010) Average internal rate of return and investment decisions: a new perspective. The Engineering Economist, 55(2), 150–180. [Google Scholar], 2013 Magni, C.A. (2013) The internal rate of return approach and the AIRR paradigm: a refutation and a corroboration. The Engineering Economist, 58(2), 73–111. [Google Scholar]). Although IRR is a plausible—albeit imperfect—measure of a project's economic return when the cash flow stream is conventional, IRR can be an untenable measure of an unconventional project's economic return. The goal of this article is to identify a simple, intuitive explanation of IRR, one that can be applied to any cash flow pattern. To do this, the article shows how a project's IRR systematically changes when it first crosses from the conventional into the unconventional realm (i.e., a small cash outflow is appended to a conventional cash flow stream) and then as it becomes progressively more unconventional. This process reveals that the most robust economic interpretation of IRR—for both conventional and unconventional projects—is that a project's IRRs are external benchmarks that divide the set of all plausible discount rates into positive and negative net present value (NPV) ranges, rather than internally generated returns. Because it can be difficult to estimate a project's cost of capital with precision, this information can help guide the sensitivity analysis of a project.     

伦敦交通拥挤的代价

本文通过描述伦敦交通拥挤收费制的起源以及现实中如何克服理论和实践层面的两难实施过程,对道路收费所引致的各种效应进行了论证.作者认为伦敦交通拥挤收费制的引入,应该归功于经济学的贡献,道路定价行动在克服交通拥挤的外部性上,不过是一种应对公众和政治利益诉求的适宜性政策回应.     

Factors explaining the diffusion of hybrid maize in Latin America and the Caribbean region

If future demand for maize in Latin America and the Caribbean region (LAC) is to be met from local sources, domestic production must continue to increase. Because further expansion in the area planted to maize is precluded by the limited availability of arable land, future increases in production will have to rely heavily on the spread of productivity‐enhancing hybrid technology. Until now, the diffusion of hybrid maize in LAC has been quite variable. Using data from 18 countries, we investigate factors affecting the hybrid maize diffusion rate. Our findings validate conventional profitability‐based explanations of producer adoption behavior, but they also confirm the importance of supply‐side factors, thereby providing empirical support for the life cycle theory of seed industry development. We conclude that if policy makers in LAC are to accelerate the diffusion of hybrid maize, they will have to ensure an environment in which it is not only profitable for producers to adopt improved germplasm, but also profitable for the seed industry to produce and sell high‐quality seed.     

AGRICULTURAL FLOOD ALLEVIATION BENEFIT ASSESSMENT: A CASE STUDY

The cost of flooding on farm land depends on land use, on the frequency, seasonality, duration and depth of flooding, and on water quality. This paper describes a method to calculate the average annual cost of flooding and the extra benefits or costs associated with given changes in flooding regime, illustrated by means of a simplified case study which examines the agricultural benefits of reduced summer flooding on grass in an area of environmental importance. Using hydrological and agro-economic data, the method derives the cost of individual flood events occurring in any one month for a given land use, weights these according to observed seasonality of flood flows, and derives average annual costs per hectare and for the floodplain as a whole for given levels of flood risk. The method is useful for appraising river flood alleviation schemes whereby the effects of changes in flood risk, flood seasonality or land use can be assessed.