Our fans in the north: the demand for British Rugby League

This paper reports the results of estimating a single equation model of an attendance function for British Rugby League over the seasons 1982/83 to 1990/91. The data are panel data covering virtually every team which played in the two division league over the nine year time period. Diagnostic tests indicate that the appropriate model is a semilog random effects model, where the dependent variable is league attendance weighted by population. The major results are as follows: there are significant positive relationships between league attendance and various measures of team success (although the direction of causality is moot), team quality (as proxied by the two divisions) and the economic quality of team location (as proxied by the unemployment rate); but there is no discernible relationship between league attendance and either success in nonleague trophy competitions or measures of exceptional player quality.     

Hedonic price equilibria, stable matching, and optimal transport: equivalence, topology, and uniqueness

Hedonic pricing with quasi-linear preferences is shown to be equivalent to stable matching with transferable utilities and a participation constraint, and to an optimal transportation (Monge–Kantorovich) linear programming problem. Optimal assignments in the latter correspond to stable matchings, and to hedonic equilibria. These assignments are shown to exist in great generality; their marginal indirect payoffs with respect to agent type are shown to be unique whenever direct payoffs vary smoothly with type. Under a generalized Spence-Mirrlees condition (also known as a twist condition) the assignments are shown to be unique and to be pure, meaning the matching is one-to-one outside a negligible set. For smooth problems set on compact, connected type spaces such as the circle, there is a topological obstruction to purity, but we give a weaker condition still guaranteeing uniqueness of the stable match.     

Slovakia's Surge: The New System's Impact on Fiscal Decentralisation

Slovakia's transition history long paralleled that of the Czech Republic, but the former adopted bold new reforms early in this decade. This article is a comparative treatment of fiscal decentralisation since 1993 and more recent reforms of public administration, the two efforts representing the foundation of the New System. Czech experience is invoked simply to provide an appropriate benchmark for the evaluation of Slovakia's New System introduced in 2004, including the 19% ‘flat tax’ and other striking measures in local public finance.

The second focus of the article is on the macroeconomic impact of the New System. It is too early to perceive what its long-term effects will be, so this treatment is more tentative. But because one would like to know whether Slovakia's return to an economic growth path is actually a result of the New System and whether this recent growth will persist, these issues are given some consideration.     

On the Contribution of David J. M. Hooson to the Geographical Study of the Soviet Union

One of the aims of this article it to clarify the nature of the debate over ‘civil society’ and its relationship to the state. It begins by suggesting that the EU's borderland provides a context in which deep-rooted ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ understandings of state and civil society meet and overlap. The second section outlines the geo-political reshaping of the ‘Neighbourhood’. It concentrates on the influence of non-EU actors, notably Russia, complementing the EU-focused literature on the subject. The third section elaborates the consensus in the literature on the weakness of civil society in the EU ‘Neighbourhood’. This is followed by a discussion of ‘Western’ debates over the role and significance of civil society. This discussion suggests that the ‘export’ of a Western model eastwards begs many questions about which particular model is to be promoted. It concludes that the precise characteristics of state-civil society relationship remains central to the prospects for enhancing civil society co-operation.     

Re-Orientating Vertical Geopolitics

Geopolitics has a tradition of adopting a downward looking view-from-above, which is imbued with an imperialistic ‘god's eye’ perspective. Although acknowledged and critiqued, this paper argues that it needs to be actively re-orientated to encompass the discourses and practices of looking up. The paper analyses the practices of looking up and surveilling the sky through which air defence is achieved. It interrogates the ways in which UK air defence is represented in official documents and analyses the activities of the Royal Air Force's Air Surveillance and Control System. The paper argues that this system enacts a vertical geopolitics that goes beyond those understood in other geopolitical literatures and offers suggestions for developing our understandings of a volumetric vertical geopolitics that recognises the aerial view as generated from below as well as from above.     

A Structuralist Approach to the Economic Trajectories of Russia and the Countries of East-Central Europe since 1900

I introduce geographical specificity to world-systems concepts of core and periphery to develop a structuralist approach on semiperipheral development in the world-economy. I apply this approach to the historical trajectory of economic growth in Russia and east-central Europe since 1900. I find circumstantial support for Wallerstein's classic assertion that mercantilist semi-withdrawal is a potentially effective development strategy for semiperipheral countries and show that Russia raised its economic output above historical trend levels during the Soviet period. In contrast, east-central Europe fell short of historical trends during the Soviet period, suggesting that Russia's gains may have been made at the expense of its satellite empire. With the end of communism, both Russia and the countries of east-central Europe quickly returned to their long-term historical output levels relative to the core countries of western Europe.     

Crude oil price forecasting based on internet concern using an extreme learning machine

The growing internet concern (IC) over the crude oil market and related events influences market trading, thus creating further instability within the oil market itself. We propose a modeling framework for analyzing the effects of IC on the oil market and for predicting the price volatility of crude oil’s futures market. This novel approach decomposes the original time series into intrinsic modes at different time scales using bivariate empirical mode decomposition (BEMD). The relationship between the oil price volatility and IC at an individual frequency is investigated. By utilizing decomposed intrinsic modes as specified characteristics, we also construct extreme learning machine (ELM) models with variant forecasting schemes. The experimental results illustrate that ELM models that incorporate intrinsic modes and IC outperform the baseline ELM and other benchmarks at distinct horizons. Having the power to improve the accuracy of baseline models, internet searching is a practical way of quantifying investor attention, which can help to predict short-run price fluctuations in the oil market.     

Telling their own stories: Māori entrepreneurship in the mainstream screen industry

We examined how factors from Indigenous entrepreneurship research (social capital, cultural capital, self-efficacy) help explain the high level of Māori entrepreneurial performance in the mainstream screen industry. Results, based on ten case studies and a one-year series of structured interviews, extend prior research by showing that these Indigenous entrepreneurs benefit jointly from two forms of capital: cultural and social. We found high levels of both forms to increase the desire for emancipation of cultural and community identity – not just individual identity – through entrepreneurship. Self-efficacy and storytelling helped ameliorate discontinuities across Indigenous and mainstream contexts. Our research sheds new light on how Indigenous ventures can pursue mainstream entrepreneurship while maintaining cultural identity. It also makes several distinct contributions to the Indigenous entrepreneurship literature. First, it provides an integrative theoretic review. Second, it illustrates a culturally appropriate methodology for researching Māori entrepreneurs with implications for other Indigenous communities. Third, it proposes cultural capital and social capital as a two-part framework for explaining Indigenous entrepreneurial action. Fourth, it shows how entrepreneurship can be empowering for Indigenous communities. Finally, our paper demonstrates that entrepreneurship is a promising mechanism for preserving and promoting the cultures of Māori and other Indigenous peoples.