Exploring Casino Special Events: An Empirical Analysis for Determining Which Themed Celebrations and Tournaments Have An Indirect Effect on Increasing Slot Volumes

This empirical study sheds light on the indirect effects of slot-player special events on casino revenues. Slot departments provide the largest gaming percentage profit for U.S. casinos, almost twice that of table-game departments, making it crucial to cultivate robust slot operations. Casino special events, which include culture-, recreation-, and sports-themed experiences as well as slot tournaments, are experiential marketing techniques used to sustain slot-player relationships and/or increase casino gaming volumes. This exploratory study uses multiple regression analysis to identify which special events, including the corresponding complimentary rooms, have significant indirect effects on slot machine wagers, providing a model for casino managers to predict their special events’ indirect effects on slot revenues.     

Moving on up: The Rooney rule and minority hiring in the NFL

Detecting and quantifying racial discrimination in the labor market is difficult. The sports industry offers a wealth of data and specific hiring practices which mitigates this difficulty. The Rooney Rule requires National Football League teams to interview at least one minority candidate when hiring a head coach. We examine a unique data set of high-level assistant coaches (offensive and defensive coordinators) from the beginning of the 1970 season through the beginning of the 2009 season to determine whether race is a factor in NFL teams' decisions to promote these assistants to head coach. Using logit and hazard models that control for age, experience and performance, we conclude that conditional on a coach reaching coordinator status, there is no evidence that race influences head coach hiring decisions. We also find no evidence that the Rooney Rule has increased the number of minority head coaches.     

Extending the investment development path model to include the human environment factor

This article aims to address Dunning's call to include the “human environment” (HE) as a new trend and trajectory for research in international business (IB). Dunning argues that the most important driver for economic advancement is knowledge, which arises from the HE. We extend Dunning's IB theory of the five stages of a country's investment development path (IDP) to include the HE factor. Further, we use China as an example in which to examine the role of human resource management (HRM). We identify and analyze an important link between foreign direct investment, multinational enterprises, and both domestic and global HRM. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Power to the people: working-class demand for household power in 1930s Britain

The 1930s witnessed an intense struggle between gas and electricity suppliers for the working class market, where the incumbent utility—gas—was also a reasonably efficient (and cheaper) General Purpose Technology for most domestic uses. Local monopolies for each supplier boosted substitution effects between fuel types—as alternative fuels constituted the only local competition. Using newly-rediscovered returns from a major national household expenditure survey, we employ geographically-determined instrumental variables, more commonly used in the industrial organization literature, to show that gas provided a significant competitor, tempering electricity prices, while electricity demand was also responsive to marketing initiatives.     

Technological diffusion and the Union blockade

This paper answers the following question. If returns from smuggling cotton and contraband through the blockade of Confederate ports during the American Civil War were significantly lower than earnings from alternative investments, why did private firms so quickly adopt costly purpose-built steam ships in the face of the strengthening Northern blockade? First, we note that the rate of diffusion of steam ships, specially designed to run the blockade significantly exceeded any reported for innovations from the late 19th or early 20th century. Second, we correct an error in Stanley Lebergott's (1981) seminal work and conclude that that returns to infamous steamer, the Banshee (I) of 700% to be quite plausible. This finding of high returns is confirmed by two other historical sources, which have not been previously used. Additionally, we calculate that investors in the one of the leading blockade running firms, known as the Bee Company, earned in excess of 86% return on their investment, over double the profits previously reported. Finally, we demonstrate that adoption of purpose-built ships, significantly decreased the arrival rate of capture, thus increasing expected profits.     

An Analysis of Regional Economic Growth in the U.S. Midwest

In this paper, we examine more closely some of the forces that underlie economic growth at the county level. In an effort to describe a much more comprehensive regional economic growth model, we address a variety of different hypotheses by introducing a large number of growth-related variables. When formulating our hypotheses and specifying our growth model, we make liberal use of geographic mapping software to describe the data so as to "paint" a picture of where growth spots exist. Our empirical estimation indicates amenities, state and local tax burdens, population density, amount of primary agriculture activity, and demographics have important impacts on economic growth.     

Determinants of futures-oriented environmental policies: A multi-country analysis

This research explores the validity of several hypotheses concerning the future-orientedness of countries. Nine hypotheses that relate futures-orientedness to characteristics of countries are presented. Several of these hypotheses represent ‘conventional wisdom’ about the differences between developed and developing countries and their respective values and political systems. As an example, it can be argued that conventional wisdom holds that more democratic countries will be more futures-oriented. The number of international environmental agreements signed by a country and the number of provisions related to AGENDA21 being implemented by a country were used as proxies for measures of futures-orientedness. Almost 30 independent variables drawn from a variety of secondary sources were used in two multiple regression models to investigate the hypotheses. The results do not support several pieces of conventional wisdom. Specifically, the results suggest that there is: a negative relationship between democracy and futures-orientedness; no relationship between the level of development and futures-orientedness; and a negative relationship exists between wealth and life expectancy and futures-orientedness. These results call into question a view that more democratic, developed, and rich countries are more concerned about the future than their ‘less developed’ counterparts. The results did indicate that countries with more environmental problems tend to be more futures-oriented as are countries that may be experiencing population pressures. Countries with more land tend to be less futures-oriented. More work is needed to better understand the relationships between culture and governmental decision-making structures on futures-orientedness. Future research should also focus on constructing better measures of futures-orientedness.     

Market Efficiency versus Behavioral Finance

Two prominent economists—one the author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street and the other a leading scholar in behavioral finance—debate the current validity of the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH). For over 30 years, the idea that capital markets are efficient and that stock prices reflect all publicly available information dominated academic thinking. But the bubble of the late 1990s and recent advances in behavioral finance have forced a re-thinking.
Behavioralists argue that markets are at least "weakly" predictable. They also point to evidence that small investors —typically day traders— consistently lose money as a result of "loss aversion,""overconfidence," and other behaviors that are not part of the focus of EMH (though, as Malkiel notes, there is room for irrational investors in an EMH world provided there are enough rational investors to counteract and correct them). Proponents of EMH, of course, argue that neither individual investors nor active fund managers reliably outperform markets, so there is no point paying for active management.
Yet these seemingly disparate views lead to important areas of common ground. In particular, both camps agree that individual investors should stick to broad-based, low-cost index funds. And retirement accounts—either 401Ks or social security accounts—should have limited investment selections in order to minimize the possibility that behavioral problems lead to investor mismanagement.