Risk sharing and transition costs in the reform of pension systems in Europe

Unfunded pay-as-you-go state pension schemes are financially unsustainable in Europe as elsewhere. Proponents of reform argue that, by switching to a fully funded scheme that takes advantage of the high return on assets such as equities, the solvency of the state scheme could be restored at little or no financial burden to current taxpayers. We show that this is mistaken for two reasons.
First, making the transition is itself costly. Unless this cost is substantially financed by debt, it will fall on current generations, who are therefore likely to oppose the reform. Second, potentially higher returns are accompanied by significantly higher risk, which we quantify. We explain how an insurance scheme could be designed to mitigate both risk and moral hazard.     

A Spectral Analysis of Australia's Leading and Coincident Indexes of Cyclical Economic Growth

Using the methodology of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Boehm and Moore (1984) have recently constructed leading and coincident indexes of Australian cyclical economic growth. The present article examines the reliability of the leading index by investigating the coherence between these two measures of economic activity at different cycle-lengths using the technique of cross-spectral analysis.     

The role of clustering,cooperation and complementarities in the visitor attraction sector

Cooperation and complementarity are important but understudied components of tourism clusters, in general, and of the tourist attraction sector, in particular. This paper addresses product similarities, in general, and thematic similarity, in particular, in the context of spatial proximity and clustering among tourist attractions. These relationships are examined by exploring cooperation between tourist attractions in two tourism clusters in Cornwall, UK. Interviews with attraction managers and other key informants, and case studies, reveal that tourist attractions have established cooperative–complementary relationships of production based on external economies at both the local and the regional scales. Differences between the two clusters in terms of interviewees' perceptions of the relationships between factors indicate the importance of understanding the specific features of individual clusters.     

Applying Burke’s Dramatic Pentad to scenarios

Describing the evolution of possible futures in the narrative form is widely practised. However, while stories are intuitively recognized, the ability to compose a comprehensible story is often difficult. Ambiguities or inconsistencies within a scenario-as-story are not simply aesthetic faults, but are failings which can weaken the use of the technique in a learning or decision-making process. This paper provides a working understanding of narrative as a particular kind of knowledge and proposes an adaptation of Kenneth Burke’s Dramatic Pentad as a way to explicitly capture this kind of knowledge within a scenario construction process.     

Mexico and the United States: Common border,common negotiating orientations

With a growing cadre of people conducting business across the U.S.–Mexico border, there is a need for information about the negotiation orientations they are likely to encounter. While information on negotiating orientations is available, it is often anecdotal, stereotyped, and contradictory. Empirical work that systematically compares Mexico and the United States across a range of negotiating dimensions is scarce. We have clarified, refined, and operationalized 12 negotiation dimensions in a comprehensive conceptual framework proposed over 20 years ago by Weiss and Stripp (1985). Our findings suggest that U.S. and Mexican negotiators may have more in common than they think and that negotiation orientations in both countries may run counter to conventional wisdom. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Tight money and inflation: Further Results

The Sargent-Wallace results on inflationary effects of monetary restraint are considered in a Sidrauski money growth model when the utility function is unrestricted except for separability. Temporary monetary tightening will eventually lead to higher inflation when the deficit is fixed only if the elasticity of money demand with respect to the money growth rate is less than unity. It is also shown that for inflation to rise immediately further requires the elasticity with respect to the nominal interest rate to be no less than unity.