The cost of registering property: does legal origin matter?

There is a large literature that finds that common law countries perform better than civil law countries in various aspects of the institutional environment. This article extends these findings to another dimension of institutional quality??the cost of registering property. In a sample of 121 countries, we find that the cost of registering property is lower by 26 percent of the world average in common law compared with civil law countries, a result largely driven by differences in non-notary costs of registering property. We provide plausible explanations for these findings.     

Strategic compliments in sales

Salespersons often spend time and money giving prospective buyers compliments such as kind words, meals and gifts. Though prior research has shown that compliments will influence a prospective buyer’s decision, it is unknown the extent to which salespersons should make these investments. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to examine how seller and buyer characteristics affect the equilibrium provision of compliments by the seller. We establish that the optimal magnitude of compliments is non-monotonic in the buyer’s sensitivity to compliments. We identify conditions for when a seller of a high-quality product will offer greater (or lesser) compliments than a seller of a lower quality product. We show that, under certain conditions, an uninformed buyer earns greater utility than a buyer who knows the quality of the seller’s product. The findings have implications for sellers in their choice of compliments and buyers in the inferences they draw from the compliments received.     

Bursting the dot.com "Bubble': A Case Study in Investor Behaviour

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter considered innovation to be the driving force of economic growth and argued that innovations were also the main cause of cyclical fluctuations in the economy, an idea now well established in the economic literature. In this paper, the authors attempt to gain insights into the behaviour exhibited by investors before and after the market correction of the newly established Internet sector--a technology with revolutionary potential--in the Spring of 2000 by structuring their analysis around the psychological themes of heuristic-driven bias, frame dependence, and inefficient prices. Linear regression models are constructed using data collected on publicly traded Internet companies, market performance both before and after the collapse of the Internet sector stock prices in an attempt to assess whether or not market returns were correlated with certain specific measures of corporate internet performance. Finally, the authors draw inferences relating to the psychology of investor behaviour during this period based upon their empirical analysis, and conclude by summarizing the managerial implications of their findings.     

Continuity with change: A review of Zimbabwe's public sector urban low‐income housing production system

This article reviews Zimbabwe's public sector urban low‐income housing production system, in over one hundred years of urbanisation marked by changes in governments, political economies, ideologies and urban systems. By examining important features in organisation, construction, costing, finance and allocation, the study reveals that in essence. Zimbabwe's public sector housing production system has not changed significantly since the early years of urbanisation. The consistency and resilience of the more important features, both in the colonial and post‐colonial eras, overshadow what changes there have been.     

The quest for affordable urban housing: A study of approaches and results in Harare,Zimbabwe

Approaches aimed at achieving housing affordability have long emphasised the housing unit. Conventional wisdom prescribes that affordability will be enhanced if the unit cost of a house is reduced. Classic solutions include the reduction of standards, use of indigenous technologies and materials, adopting self-help modes of delivery and addressing market imperfections. This study shows that while it is not unwise to reduce the cost of housing, there is a limit to this approach. Unit costs cannot be reduced indefinitely and non-cost-reducing strategies are therefore called for. The approaches hinge on improving the economic status of low-income groups by implementing measures that reduce household expenditure and/or boost their incomes.     

Helpful governments

Using data on firm perceptions of how helpful the government is for doing business, we find strong evidence for the theory of legal origins: common law fares better than civil law. Advantages of using firm perceptions are discussed in detail.     

New technology and training: Missed opportunities

This article identifies the avenues used by UK firms to acquire the work skills needed to operate the new technologies. Having found that retraining is the most popular avenue, the author turns to issues such as who identified the retraining needs, how they were met and with what degree of success. In the process, disturbing tendencies are discovered.