The Urban Question under Planetary Urbanization

In Le Droit à la Ville (1968), Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day into the sci‐fi imaginary of Isaac Asimov's remarkable Foundation series, recognizing the germ of ‘Trantor’ in our midst, the planet of 40 billion inhabitants where urbanization has reached its absolute maximum; all 75 million square miles of Trantor's land surface are a single city. In La Révolution Urbaine (1970), Lefebvre had already begun hinting at a new reality, not only an urban society, but of planetary urbanization. Today, four decades on, Asimov's extraterrestrial universe seems closer to home than ever, and closer to Lefebvre's own terrestrial prognostications: planetary urbanization is creating a whole new spatial world (dis)order. But how shall we reclaim the shapeless, formless and boundless metropolis as a theoretical object and political object of the progressive struggle? If the arena of politics has no discernible form, what would be the form of these politics? What, exactly, are urban politics? This article tries to rethink theoretically the urban question and the question of urban politics in our era of planetary urbanization, working through the political role of the urban in the light of recent ‘Occupy’ mobilizations.     

Book reviews

Successful Product Development: Management Practices in American and British Firms by Axel Johne and Patricia Snelson. (Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1990). 240 pages. £29.50. ISBN 0 631 17448 6.

Customer Driven by Linda Silverman Goldzimer (Hutchinson Business Books, London, 1990). 233 pages. £14.95 hardback, ISBN 0 091 74442 3 (csd). £7.99 paperback, ISBN 0 091 74443 1 (ppr).

Marketing for the National Health Service by Rod Sheaff. (The Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1991). £11.95 paperback. ISBN 0 335 15427 1.     

On the Demand for Portfolio Insurance

While insurers manage underwriting risk with various methods including reinsurance, insurers increasingly manage asset risk with options, futures, and other derivatives. Previous research shows that buyers of portfolio insurance pay considerably for downside protection. We add to this literature by providing the first evidence on the cost of portfolio insurance, the payoff to portfolio insurance, and the relative demand for portfolio insurance across VIX levels. We find that the demand for portfolio insurance is relatively high at low levels of VIX, suggesting purchasers demand more downside protection when this protection is cheap on an absolute basis (but expensive on a relative basis). We also provide the first evidence on the hedging behavior of specific investor classes and show that the demand for portfolio insurance is driven by retail investors (individuals) who buy costly insurance from institutional investors. Results are consistent with other types of paradoxical insurance‐buying behavior.     

Stock Returns, Dividend Yields, and Taxes

Using an improved measure of a common stock's annualized dividend yield, we document that risk-adjusted NYSE stock returns increase in dividend yield during the period from 1963 to 1994. This relation between return and yield is robust to various specifications of multifactor asset pricing models that incorporate the Fama–French factors. The magnitude of the yield effect is too large to be explained by a "tax penalty" on dividend income and is not explained by previously documented anomalies. Interestingly, the effect is primarily driven by smaller market capitalization stocks and zero-yield stocks.     

Social and economic drivers of land use change in the British space economy

This paper considers factors influencing change that will affect future working patterns and practices, leisure time, employment levels and influential sectors within a 50-year time horizon (2010–2060). The main section of this paper sketches out the drivers (demographics, technology, industry and employment) and their implications for the future of work, employment, and leisure, whilst the next section draws together the implications and underlines the likely impact on land use. Finally, some more radical and non-normative, non-trend, events are introduced as a test of the robustness of the discussion.     

The impact of third-party logistics providers' capabilities on exporters' performance

Third-party logistics (3PL) services have experienced unprecedented growth. However, we are not aware of any study that explores the relationships among logistics outsourcing, competitive advantage, and business performance. We study the mediating role of logistics outsourcing as a strategy to develop firms' capabilities in the strategy-performance relationship. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, we develop a research model grounded in the outsourcing-competitive advantage-performance paradigm. We apply structural equation modeling to empirically test the model using data collected from 150 exporters in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region of China. The results show that there are positive relationships among exporters' strategic orientation towards third-party logistics (3PL) providers, 3PL providers' basic and augmented capabilities, exporters' competitive advantage, and exporters' export performance. We also find that 3PL providers' augmented capabilities and exporters' competitive advantage are strong mediators, supporting the theorized model underpinned by RBV.     

打击通胀，中国远未能取得胜利

【美国彭博新闻社6月12日】本周，中国主要股市指数发生一日暴跌8．1％的情况，显示投资者已经把目光从食品价格（这是稳定的）转向表面之下潜伏的其他通胀来源。     

Voluntary disclosures and the exercise of CEO stock options

We examine voluntary disclosures around the exercise of CEO stock options. Previous research shows that managerial incentives depend on the intended disposition of the exercised options' underlying shares. When CEOs intend to sell the underlying shares of exercised options, they have an incentive to increase stock prices in the pre-exercise period. In contrast, when CEOs intend to hold the underlying shares, they have a tax incentive to decrease stock prices in the pre-exercise period. Consistent with these private incentives, we find a significant increase in the frequency and magnitude of good (bad) news announcements in the pre-exercise period when CEOs implement exercise-and-sell (exercise-and-hold) strategies. We provide some evidence that CEOs' propensities for opportunistic disclosures are positively related to the value of their exercised stock options. Lastly, we find that the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) generally reduces, but does not eliminate, this type of managerial opportunism.     

Partnership,high performance work systems and quality of working life

The paper measures the effects of workplace partnership and selected high performance work practices on four different dimensions of employee experience. Whilst the partnership– high performance work systems nexus seems to have little impact on employees’ job satisfaction or sense of attachment, it does, however, have a negative impact on both workplace stress and employee evaluations of union performance. The analysis thus questions common assumptions about the inevitability of ‘mutual gain’ and the necessity of employer/union partnership.     

Derivative usage and firm value: The influence of agency costs and monitoring problems

Using derivative usage data on over 1746 firms headquartered in the U.S. during the 1991 through 2000 time period, we find that firms with greater agency and monitoring problems (i.e., firms that are less transparent, face greater agency costs, have weaker corporate governance, larger information asymmetry problems, and overall poorer monitoring) exhibit a negative association between Tobin's Q and derivative usage. The negative valuation effect is also economically significant with an impact of -8.4% on Tobin's Q from a one standard deviation change in the firm monitoring index. The results are robust to alternative specifications, time varying estimates, econometric procedures that correct for potential clustering of errors, endogeneity problems, and sample selection biases among other robustness checks discussed in the paper. We conclude that derivative usage has a negative impact on firm value in firms with greater agency and monitoring problems.