Promoting passenger comfort and wellbeing in the air: An examination of the in-flight health advice provided by international airlines

Cases of airline passengers developing deep vein thromboses and contracting infectious diseases during flights have led to airlines' provision of in-flight customer health advice coming under increased scrutiny. By means of a manifest content analysis of the information provided in 50 international airlines’ in-flight magazines, this paper examines the nature and presentation of the health advice that is supplied and comments on the different approaches individual airlines adopt.     

A Different Perspective on the Evolution of UK Income Inequality

This paper scrutinizes the conventional wisdom about trends in UK income inequality and also places contemporary inequality in a much longer historical perspective. We combine household survey and income tax data to provide better coverage of all income ranges from the bottom to the very top (and make our estimates available to other researchers). We make a case for studying distributions of income between tax units (i.e. not assuming the full income sharing that goes with the use of the household as the unit of analysis) for reasons of principle as well as data harmonization. We present evidence that income inequality in the UK is as least as high today as it was just before the start of World War 2.     

Profit or politics? Understanding renationalizations in Russia

This study examines firm-level determinants of the government incentives to acquire controlling stakes in private companies. Using a novel hand-collected dataset of 153 largest listed and unlisted Russian companies, I investigate the methods and the rationales of a 2004–2008 wave of selected nationalizations in a post-privatization market. I find robust evidence that formerly privatized and domestically-owned companies in strategically important sectors face the highest risks of corporate control transfers from private to state hands. I also find that the corporate tax evasion is another significant determinant of a firm nationalization. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, there is little evidence that renationalizations in Russia are driven by firm profitability factors: the government neither systematically “cherry-picks” best performers nor addresses market failures by rescuing national champions in financial distress. These results contribute to t'he politics and finance literature by providing new firm-level evidence on the importance of strategic nationalism in the government's decision to intervene into the corporate control structures.     

GDSS research: An overview and historical analysis

Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) is a relatively new area of Information Systems research, but some patterns have begun to emerge in the focus of this research and in the approaches to conducting it. This article represents a substantial review of a large body of GDSS literature and an analysis of that literature according to a specific classification scheme. The dimensions of the classification scheme include the age of the research publication, the general research approach, the philosophy underlying the data collection, the type of GDSS support, whether the research is longitudinal, and the primary focus of the research, as well as a few demographic variables such as author and source. The results of the literature analysis lead to recommendations to GDSS researchers by the authors of a need for greater use of the available research approaches and other data analysis philosophies, a greater emphasis on field work, more longitudinal research, and some changes in the focus of the research.     

Circuit Breakers with Uncertainty about the Presence of Informed Agents: I Know What You Know … I Think

This study conducts experimental asset markets to examine the effects of circuit breaker rules on market behavior when agents are uncertain about the presence of private information. Our results unequivocally indicate that circuit breakers fail to temper unwarranted price movements in periods without private information. Agents appear to mistakenly infer that others possess private information, causing price to move away from fundamental value. Allocative efficiencies in our markets are high across all regimes. Circuit breakers perform no useful function in our experimental asset markets.     

WEALTH DISTRIBUTION AND INVESTMENT INCOME IN BRITAIN*

This paper examines two different approaches to the estimation of the size distribution of wealth. The first section describes new estimates for the distribution in Britain in 1968 using the estate method and discusses the sensitivity of the results to the main assumptions. The second section presents preliminary estimates using the investment data, a method which has not been widely used. In the final section the results obtained for the upper tail of the distribution from the two methods are compared.     

A note on the allocation of time

A multi-commodity model in which time as well as nominal income is necessary in the process of consumption is analyzed. Duality theory is used to provide a counter example to the ‘Linder Theorem’ that a rise in real wages will decrease consumption of some good if it is more time intensive than the weighted average of the time intensity of all other commodities.