Cultural futures for thailand: An ethnographic enquiry

The author outlines an ethnographic and cultural approach developed during a study of Thailand's future-a study which necessitated different approaches from those commonly used in futures research in dealing with the developed world. The study was based on interviews with Thais currently living in California and shows widespread agreement among the interviewees, particularly on the possibility of large-scale violence in Thailand in the 1980s.     

Interstate banking and the payments system

Interstate banking will improve the efficiency of the payments system. This will occur because the number of handlings for multiple-bank payments (transit items) will fall and because some multiple-bank payments will be transformed into single-bank payments (on-us items). These effects are simulated using data on the current cross-section relationship between banking structure and check clearing patterns in a multinomial logit model. The Federal Reserve, which currently processes almost one-third of all checks, is predicted to lose 43 to 60 percent of its market share. The annual impact is expected to be gradual, however, since interstate banking will be phased in and because of offsetting growth in the total check clearing market.     

Market microstructure

It is assumed that a collection of market agents can be treated as a statistical ensemble. Their market activities are depicted as the stochastic generation of market orders according to a Poisson process. The objective is to effectively describe the ‘temporal microstructure’, or moment-to-moment trading activities in asset markets. Two basic models, ‘dealership’ vs. ‘auction’ markets (and their variants) are put forth. Implications are drawn from each model. The implications include several testable hypotheses regarding the aggregate behavior of markets and market-makers as well as some qualitative insight into the transaction-to-transaction nature of realistic exchange processes.     

Are employers pursuing value-based purchasing?

Some employers have begun to undertake a variety of initiatives, collectively termed value-based purchasing (VBP), which aim at factoring quality into the purchasing decision-making process when negotiating costs with providers and insurers. There is evidence that the VBP movement has begun gaining momentum; yet it is unclear whether employers are firmly committed to VBP principles. By surveying a national sample of employers, this study investigates the extent to which employers are currently engaged in VBP activities and also increases our understanding of barriers hampering the broader implementation of these activities.     

Developing Dividend and Financing Policies with a Computer Terminal

This study examines the value relevance of mandated disclosures by UK firms of the investor‐firm share of liabilities of equity‐accounted associate and joint venture investees. It does so for the six years following the introduction of FRS 9: Associates and Joint Ventures, which forced a substantial increase in such disclosures by UK firms. Since the increased disclosure requirements were partly motivated by concern that single‐line equity accounting concealed the level of group gearing, and in light of previous US results, it is predicted that the mandated investee‐liability disclosures have a negative coefficient in a value‐relevance regression. The study also examines whether value‐relevance regression coefficients on investee‐liability disclosures are more negative for joint ventures than for associates and whether they are more negative in the presence of investor‐firm guarantees of investee‐firm obligations than in the absence of such guarantees. The study reports that the coefficient on all investee‐liability disclosures taken together has the predicted negative sign, and is significantly different from zero. It finds little evidence that the negative valuation impact of liability disclosures is stronger for joint venture investees overall than for associate investees overall, or stronger for guarantee cases overall than for non‐guarantee cases overall. There is, however, some evidence that the impact for joint venture guarantee cases is stronger than that for joint venture non‐guarantee cases and stronger than that for associate guarantee cases.