Tourism as an agent of change: A Spanish basque case

Beginning with a brief general discussion of mass tourism in historical and social scientific perspective, this article reviews the history and effects of international tourism in the Spanish Basque municipality of Fuenterrabia. Paying particular attention to the effects of tourism on the local people, the article details the process by which tourism first benefited them, only later to come to be controlled by outside developers who have captured most of the major economic rewards. It also discusses changes in local social stratification and political structure wrought by tourism development. The need for a systematic, broadly conceived appraisal of the costs and benefits of tourism as an agent of economic development is stressed.     

New Goods and the Transition to a New Economy

The U.S. went through a remarkable structural transformation between 1800 and 2000. A precipitous decline in the importance of agricultural goods in the economy was matched by the rapid ascent of a plethora of new non-agricultural goods and services. A competitive model is presented here where consumption evolves along the extensive margin. This lessens the need to rely on satiation points, subsistence levels of consumption, and the like to explain agriculture’s demise. The analysis suggests that between 1800 and 2000 economic welfare grew by at least 1.5% a year, and may be as much as 10% annually, the exact number depending upon the metric preferred.The authors thank (Richard) Ming Hon Suen and two referees for comments. They are also grateful to Shouyong Shi for suggesting Figure 8. This research was supported by the NSF (award number 0136055).     

Investor activism and takeovers

Recent work documents large positive abnormal returns when a hedge fund announces activist intentions regarding a publicly listed firm. We show that these returns are largely explained by the ability of activists to force target firms into a takeover. For a comprehensive sample of 13D filings by portfolio investors between 1993 and 2006, announcement returns and long-term abnormal returns are high for targets that are ultimately acquired, but not detectably different from zero for firms that remain independent. Firms targeted by activists are more likely than control firms to get acquired. Finally, activist investors’ portfolios perform poorly during a period in which market wide takeover interest declined.     

Transnational regulation of professional services: Governance dynamics of field level organizational change

This paper examines the role of large accounting firms in the emergence of a transnational regulatory field in professional services. We use neo-institutional theory to illuminate the process by which new fields are created. We observe a shift in the structural boundaries of professional regulation to include new actors, specifically Big Four accounting firms and non-governmental organizations. We also observe a shift in regulatory logics in which historical efforts to separate professional practice from commercial interest are embraced rather than suppressed. New logics also include pressures to adopt new occupational identities. Finally we describe a shift in institutional power structures from coercive structures of domination to inclusive power structures of membership and identity.     

Stock price fragility

We study the relation between the ownership structure of financial assets and non-fundamental risk. We define an asset to be fragile if it is susceptible to non-fundamental shifts in demand. An asset can be fragile because of concentrated ownership, or because its owners face correlated or volatile liquidity shocks, i.e., they must buy or sell at the same time. We formalize this idea and apply it to mutual fund ownership of US stocks. Consistent with our predictions, fragility strongly predicts price volatility. We then extend the logic of fragility to investigate two natural extensions: (1) the forecast of stock return comovement and (2) the potentially destabilizing impact of arbitrageurs on stock prices.