Green consumption or sustainable lifestyles? Identifying the sustainable consumer

This paper examines green consumption in the context of an increasing focus on sustainable lifestyles. The authors argue that green buying must be seen in the context of wider debates surrounding the development of sustainable ways of living that incorporate other environmental actions in an holistic conceptualisation of sustainable lifestyles. This framework is operationalised in a study of environmental action in and around the home, in which 1600 households in Devon were asked questions concerning their everyday environmental actions. These results were manipulated so as to investigate how the different behaviours related to each other and also whether different groups of individuals could be identified, conforming to different lifestyles. The results suggest that conventional forms of green consumption can indeed be related to other forms of environmental action and that at least four different types of environmentalist can be identified. The implications of these results for policy makers are discussed at the end of the paper.     

Practical general equilibrium estimation of resource pulls under trade liberalization

This paper discusses the application of a model similar to the one developed in Leif Johansen's Multi-sectoral study of economic growth (1964) to the problem of determining general equilibrium responses of the economy to changes in commercial policy. This method amounts essentially to specifying a log-linear approximation to the general equilibrium solution for the economy, and solving the resulting linear equations for changes in endogenous variables as functions of exogenous variable changes. For a 35-sector model of the Chilean economy with labor as the only variable factor of production (to avoid the problem of overdetermination of many commodity price and output shifts when only two factors are considered in constant returns production functions), it is found that (i) the specification of the way in which intermediate inputs enter the production function is numerically important in determining output responses to tariff changes, detracting from the credibility of fixed coefficient effective rate of protection calculations if variable intermediate input coefficients are the rule (as appears likely empirically); (ii) exchange rate elasticities with respect to individual tariff changes are fairly large, so that the usual partial equilibrium assumption of exchange rate insensitivity to ‘small’ tariff revisions is not valid; (iii) employment effects of different tariff revisions are highly variable and in some cases substantial.     

How Work Gains Meaning in Contractual Time: A Narrative Model for Reconstructing the Work Ethic

The work ethic has been deeply challenged by two trends – the division of labor and the destruction of continuity in employment. Here a narrative model is proposed for reconstructing the work ethic. Narratives embody assumptions about the flow of time, and work becomes charged with meaning when "contractual time" is interrupted, when new functions are invented to cope with obstacles having to do human character and action. Content for this abstract model is provided by four historical movements in the U.S. having to do with the reorganization of work or work relations: scientific management, the human-relations movement, the human-potential movement, and early management thought.     

Liquidate Or Trade Out? An Expert System To Explain The Decision Process

The decision to liquidate or trade out a company in financial distress requires considerable judgment by a provisional liquidator or administrator. While some general procedures and guidelines are available, there is no explicit framework to assist a provisional liquidator or administrator in making a recommendation to liquidate or trade out. This paper reports on the development of an expert system as a method of studying the judgments made by provisional liquidators or administrators in cases of corporate financial distress. The results reveal the major factors that are assessed in making a liquidate or trade-out decision, and support recent calls for expanding the type of information provided by traditional accounting systems.     

BIASES IN PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT DURING CONTRIBUTIONS: A NOTE

This note demonstrates that a statistical error (e.g., due to pricing error) made in valuing an investment fund at the time of an intra-period contribution leads to an error in calculating the period's total return, even if the fund was valued correctly at the beginning and end of the period. On average, even if the valuation error is distributed randomly with mean zero, the fund's performance will be biased.