Walking the walk? Bank ESG disclosures and home mortgage lending

Review of Accounting Studies - We show that banks with high environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings issue fewer mortgages in poor localities—in number and dollar amount—than...     

Kenyan Competition Policy After Ten Years of the Competition Act: A Progress Report

Review of Industrial Organization - With the coming into force of the Competition Act (2010), Kenya entered the world of modern competition policy. The 10 years that has passed since has...     

Longer term housing market effects of a major US airport closure

Using a unique dataset, we examine various effects of closing Denver's Stapleton Airport, and subsequent redevelopment, on nearby housing markets. We find immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but no price changes at closing and little evidence of upward trending prices between announcement and closing. Post-closure, more higher income and fewer Black households moved in, and developers built larger houses on larger lots. Increases in the price of pre-existing housing are also found. Finally, we find that post-closing price increases were largest in areas that were closest to the center of new commercial development and that had greater exposure to new housing construction.     

Who moves? A logit model analysis of inter-provincial migration in Canada

This paper addresses the topic of inter-provincial migration in terms of the basic question: ‘Who moves?’. Panel logit models of the probability that an individual changes his or her province of residence from one year to the next over the 1982–1995 period are estimated using tax-based longitudinal data. It is found that moving is (i) inversely related to the home province's population size, presumably reflecting local economic conditions and labour market scale effects, while language also plays an important role; (ii) more common among residents of smaller cities, towns, and especially rural areas than those in larger cities; (iii) negatively related to age, marriage, and the presence of children for both men and women; (iv) positively related to the provincial unemployment rate, the individuals’ receipt of unemployment insurance (except Entry Men), having no market income (except for Entry Men and Entry Women), and the receipt of social assistance (especially for men); (v) (slightly) positively related to earnings levels (beyond the zero earnings point) for prime aged men, but not for others; and (vi) more or less stable over time, with men's rates declining slightly and women's holding steadier or rising slightly, indicating a divergence in trends along gender lines.     

Improvements in the safety screening of resin manufacturing processes

Consequences of acrylic resin reactor runaways can be devastating, as it is evident in investigation reports of industrial accidents. Critical in preventing major accidents is the safety screening of any acrylic resin formula to be manufactured in large scale. Computer model simulations facilitate the evaluation of “layers of protection” against acrylic polymerization runaways. This work describes the adaptation of a chemical process dynamic simulator (DuPont™ TMODS™) for use in simulating acrylic polymerization runaways. “Loss of cooling” and “monomer pooling (accumulation)” scenarios are the causes of these runaways. Simulations show that scenarios leading to “monomer pooling” result in more energetic runaways and to larger emergency relief capacity requirements than “loss of cooling” scenarios. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2009     

Critical social marketing – The impact of alcohol marketing on youth drinking: Qualitative findings

• This paper presents findings from exploratory qualitative research as part of a critical social marketing study examining the impact of alcohol marketing communications on youth drinking. The findings from stakeholder interviews (regulators and marketers) suggest that some alcohol marketing might target young people, and that marketers are cognisant of growing concern at alcohol issues, including control of alcohol marketing. Focus groups with young people (aged 13–15 years) revealed a sophisticated level of awareness of, and involvement in, alcohol marketing across several channels. It was found that some marketing activities featured content that could appeal to young people and appeared to influence their, well‐developed, brand attitudes. The research demonstrates the utility of taking a critical social marketing approach when examining the impact of alcohol marketing. The implications of these findings for research, regulation and policy around alcohol marketing are also examined. The contribution that studies such as this make to the debate around marketing principles and practice, and to social marketing, is also discussed.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Incentive properties of coincident peak pricing

Coincident peak pricing is used in several electricity markets to recover the embedded cost of infrastructure, such as transmission. In this approach, measured consumption at the time of the peak is used to set charges for that pricing period or a subsequent period. If transmission costs are truly sunk, then such a recovery is unlikely to be efficient. However, in the context of growing peak demand, new additions must be built. We consider the incentive properties of coincident peak pricing when related investments are not considered to be sunk, finding that it can reproduce the incentive properties of an ideal time-varying price. We also consider several variations on this assumption.     

The rise of economics in competition policy: A Canadian perspective

Competition policy in Canada and elsewhere has changed remarkably over the last 50 years—in large measure due to advances in economics. In this article, we trace the impact of developments in industrial organization on the three central areas of competition policy: cartels, single firm conduct and mergers. We focus on Canadian competition policy but draw comparisons with developments in the United States and Europe.