Challenges to employment at will: A survey of the natural gas transmission industry

The natural gas transmission industry, once paternalistic towards its employees, is feeling the effects of challenges to the doctrine of employment at will, and is responding with policies that will increase managerial prerogatives. This article approaches the issue from the points of view both of law and of economics, and includes a survey of pipeline managers who must develop viable work rules in an environment of increasing expectations of employee rights and tightening market competition.     

The Intertemporal Relation Between the U.S. and Japanese Stock Markets

This paper finds a high correlation between the open to close returns for U.S. stocks in the previous trading day and the Japanese equity market performance in the current period. In contrast, the Japanese market has only a small impact on the U.S. return in the current period. High correlations among open to close returns are a violation of the efficient market hypothesis; however, in trading simulations, the excess profits in Japan vanish when transactions costs and transfer taxes are included.     

Information society: wireless ICTs’ transformative potential

This paper sets mobile technology and services against the backdrop of existing debates on ‘information’ and ‘post-industrial’ societies. This paper posits the suggestion that mobile technology has the potential to realise the information society aspirations of states in a way that information and communication technologies more generally have failed to do in recent years. Essentially, mobile services and the devices that enable access to them are becoming constitutive of the lives of users both in a work and a social dimension. This essential nature of the technology renders it different from on-line networking that has become a part of normal working environments in the developed world.The paper starts with a discussion on the meaning of the information society and post-industrialism (The coming of post-industrial society: a venture in social forecasting, Heinemann, London, 1974; The rise of the network society, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002; The wealth of information, Methuen, London, 1983) and considers criticisms (Inf. Commun. Soc. 3(2) (2000) 139; Theories of the information society, Routledge, London, p. 30) that they are unrealised constructs (in part because economies remain defined by manufacturing) and that the advocates’ primary definitions are meaningless. Moreover, in order to address the dangers of exclusion from the benefits of the technology utilisation, the paper considers the concept of ‘social exclusion’ in a bid to challenge policy-makers’ assertions that the information society—wireless or otherwise—can and will bridge the social divide. The paper concludes with a discussion on policy implications for the achievement of inclusivity and openness.     

The effects of zoning on population and employment density

This article examines zoning's impacts on population and employment density. It develops a model to explore the effects of zoning on the density of residential and nonresidential land use. Drawing on this model, density gradients that incorporate the effects of zoning are estimated for Greensboro, North Carolina. The model is used to simulate the effects of a change in restrictive-use residential zoning. The simulation shows that a 1 percent increase in the level of restrictive-use residential zoning across all neighborhoods in the city is associated with a 0.3 percent increase in gross population density and a 0.1 percent decline in net density (intensity). It suggests that restrictive-use zoning affects both the density and the intensity of residential land use through its effects on the value of residential land.     

The world bank in Africa: Historical reflections on the African present

This paper offers a historical commentary on the World Bank's influential report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. A very broad perspective is adopted, partly to identify the main points of connection between historians and development economists, and partly because the Report, though widely commented on, has not been addressed directly by historians of Africa. The principal aim of the paper is to show how Africa's past bears upon its present by linking the economic history of the continent to its contemporary development problems. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part deals with some of the unstated assumptions underlying the Report. The second part focuses on the World Bank's assessment of the current “crisis” in Africa, and offers a long-run interpretation of the relationship between population, resource use, institutional change, and political incorporation. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the dangers of excessive specialization among experts, and by pressing the case for reuniting history and development economics.