The effect of government highway spending on road users' congestion costs

Policymakers attempt to reduce the growth of congestion by spending billions of dollars annually on our road system. We evaluate this policy by estimating the determinants of congestion costs for motorists, trucking operations, and shipping firms. We find that, on average, one dollar of highway spending in a given year reduces the congestion costs to road users only eleven cents in that year. We also find that even if the allocation of spending were optimized to minimize congestion costs that it still is not a cost-effective way to reduce congestion. We conclude the evidence strengthens the case for road pricing.     

Using house prices to compute the price of housing in the CPI

Rental-equivalence is often used in computing price changes of owner-occupied housing in the CPI. We use an alternative approach, employing interest-adjusted house prices. For Norway 2000–2008 our method yielded a 30% CPI-increase, compared to the official 17%.     

Working onboard - Job perception, organizational commitment and job satisfaction in the cruise sector

This paper focuses on the perceived work environment and its influence on organizational commitment and job satisfaction in the cruise sector. Two focus group interviews were conducted in addition to one survey among the crew in an upmarket cruise line. The focus groups elicited responses concerning crew experiences of working onboard. Based on this information, a questionnaire was constructed to measure job perceptions among crew members. The results indicate that all of the experience domains were related to job commitment and job satisfaction, but that the strongest effects were found to be perceived “Respect”, the “Social atmosphere”, and “Food and living quarters”.     

Nonparametric Kernel Method to Hedge Downside Risk

We propose a nonparametric kernel estimation method (KEM) that determines the optimal hedge ratio by minimizing the downside risk of a hedged portfolio, measured by conditional value‐at‐risk (CVaR). We also demonstrate that the KEM minimum‐CVaR hedge model is a convex optimization. The simulation results show that our KEM provides more accurate estimations and the empirical results suggest that, compared to other conventional methods, our KEM yields higher effectiveness in hedging the downside risk in the weather‐sensitive markets.     

A note on the existence of the power investor’s optimizer

Karatzas et al. (SIAM J. Control Optim. 29:707–730, 1991) ensure the existence of the expected utility maximizer for investors with constant relative risk aversion coefficients less than one. In this note, we explain a simple trick that allows us to use this result to provide the existence of utility maximizers for arbitrary coefficients of relative risk aversion. The simplicity of our approach is to be contrasted with the general existence result provided in Kramkov and Schachermayer (Ann. Appl. Probab. 9:904–950, 1999).     

The influence of dispositional affect on whistle-blowing

Consensus appears to be building that something must be done soon to stem the flood of corporate ethical lapses of the last decade. Businesses are being pressed to adopt policies, practices and procedures that advance integrity-in-action (not just talk). Provisions for whistle-blowing without retaliation might be one such practice. But, research is lacking. Our study probes why some people are willing to blow the whistle, while others are not? We examine the influence of dispositional affect on whistle blowing specifically, the affective states of sadness/demoralization, fear, arousal and contentedness/happiness. Environmental factors largely drive these affective states; environmental factors under the control of corporate management. Our hypotheses test tenets to the Toxic Triangle and Pro-Social Organizational Behavioral models. We report on a behavioral experiment using evening MBAs who express whistle blowing intent across a set of ethics laden case scenarios. Our findings provide strong support for the Toxic Triangle and Pro-Social Organizational Behavior models.     

Factor Utilization and Adjusted Productivity Estimates for the UK*

This paper derives series for capital utilization, labour effort and total factor productivity (TFP) for the UK from a general equilibrium model with variable utilization and labour adjustment costs. Capital utilization tracks survey‐based measures closely, but persistent movements in total hours worked mean our labour effort series is not as highly correlated with its comparators. Our estimated TFP series is less cyclical than the traditional Solow residual, although a weighted average of capital utilization and labour effort – aggregate factor utilization – and the Solow residual are not closely related.     

Is Oligopoly a Condition of Successful Privatization? The Case of Cotton in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe embarked on market liberalization in the early 1990s, leading towards increasing participation of private capital in the agricultural sector. This paper examines the emergent shape of the private marketing chain for cotton in Zimbabwe, based on fieldwork conducted in the 1999-2001 cotton marketing seasons. The privatization of the cotton marketing board replaced state monopoly with private oligopoly and competition is still seriously underdeveloped, especially on price. However, because of a concentrated market and collective private action, important aspects of earlier systems of coordination have been maintained, preventing downgrading of Zimbabwean cotton lint after liberalization. The paper concludes with a discussion about (absence of) competition and commodity system sustainability in liberalized markets.     

Lack of early engagement: a pre‐eminent barrier to Australian university bequest giving?

• Decreased government funding has placed increasing financial pressure on Australian universities. Currently Australian universities receive 6.6% of all donations to nonprofit organisations in Australia while universities in the United States attract 14%. These figures suggest there is considerable room for improvement for Australian universities. Efforts directed towards adding to knowledge of philanthropy to universities in Australia are, therefore, very topical at present. Despite acknowledged differences between the types of literature on gift‐giving it predominately centres on the motivation to donate to nonprofit organisations during an individual's lifetime (in vivo giving) with less focus on bequests. This exploratory study sought to gain insight into barriers to Australian University bequests. Lack of alumni engagement in Australian Universities was identified as a primary bequest barrier. Barriers identified previously in the literature (e.g. communications quality, performance, insensitive marketing) were considered secondary barriers to bequests. The results suggest a long term strategy is needed for Australian Universities seeking to improve donations. Universities need to engage students from the start of their academic tenure in order to be considered for a bequest. This paper proposes a model which highlights the consequences of this lack of early engagement and identifies key points in the academic and post‐academic process where successive challenges increasingly diverge the student from the university's bequest prospects.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.