An Integrated Epidemiological-Economic Analysis of Foot and Mouth Disease: Applications to the Southern Cone of South America

Animal disease outbreaks impose significant economic costs that evolve over space and time, but few studies have explicitly modeled their temporal and spatial impacts. Using an integrated epidemiological-economic model, this article demonstrates a methodology that captures the dynamic and spatial effects of animal disease. The model is applied to foot-and-mouth disease in the Southern Cone of South America. The results demonstrate the benefits of spatially sensitive policies in which certain regions within the Southern Cone employ different, coordinated interventions. Further, they highlight policy relevant differences between the dominant short-run and long-run control options.     

It Goes without Saying: The Effects of Intrinsic Motivational Orientation,Leadership Emphasis of Intrinsic Goals,and Audit Issue Ambiguity on Speaking Up

Regulation requires auditors to raise significant audit issues and concerns to the attention of audit engagement leadership and requires leadership to encourage such communication. This research demonstrates, using an experiment and a survey, that audit team members' willingness to speak up about such issues is associated with their intrinsic motivational orientation. Based on this result, we test whether audit leadership can leverage this relationship to increase speaking up, particularly when audit issues are more ambiguous, by emphasizing intrinsic goals. Results across three additional experiments indicate that auditors whose leaders emphasize intrinsic goals, whether directly or through tone at the top and firm culture, are more likely to speak up than are other auditors. We also find that auditors are more likely to speak up when an audit issue is less versus more ambiguous. We conclude that leadership can fulfill their obligation to encourage upward communication by emphasizing intrinsic versus extrinsic goals, regardless of the level of ambiguity surrounding the audit issue.     

NEW ZEALAND BEEF AND SHEEP SUPPLY RELATIONSHIPS

The primary purposes of this study are to measure major relationships describing the responses of different components of sheep and beef farming capital stock in New Zealand to changes in economic conditions, and to investigate the way in which this capital stock has changed over time. These objectives are pursued by attempting to specify an econometric model that recognises joint production between sheep and beef cattle and also takes account of joint firm/household decision making. Aggregate New Zealand data for the period 1952/53 to 1973/74 are fitted to the model using Full Information Maximum Likelihood estimation.     

Formal and Informal Corruption Environments and Multinational Enterprise Social Irresponsibility

Using an institutional theory framework we theorize, hypothesize, and empirically show that higher levels of formal and informal corruption environments found in a firm's operating portfolio are related to higher levels of corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Failing to consider corruption's informal dimension leads to potentially false perceptions about a multinational enterprise's (MNE) operating environment, particularly when the formal dimension is low but the informal corruption dimension is high, as is the case in about one third of our sample. Including the informal corruption environment component provides additional explanatory power over the formal corruption environment alone in predicting CSiR and yields a superior understanding of both the formal and informal dimensions of the corruption institutional environment's influence on corporate social irresponsibility levels of MNEs. Managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Bank Risk Taking at the Onset of the Current Banking Crisis

We analyze bank governance, share ownership, CEO compensation, and bank risk taking in the period leading to the current banking crisis. Using a sample of large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), we find that BHCs with greater managerial control, achieved through various corporate governance mechanisms, take less risk. BHCs that pay CEOs high base salaries also take less risk, while BHCs that grant CEOs more in stock options or that pay CEOs higher bonuses take more risk. The evidence is generally consistent with BHC managers exhibiting greater risk aversion than outside shareholders, but with several factors affecting managers’ risk‐taking incentives.     

Public–private partnerships and collective action in high value fruit and vegetable supply chains

Accessing developed country food markets entails meeting stringent food safety requirements. Food retailers impose protocols relating to pesticide residues, field and pack house operations, and traceability. To enable smallholders to remain competitive in such a system, new institutional arrangements are required. In particular, public–private partnerships can play a key role in creating farm to fork linkages that can satisfy market demands for food safety, while retaining smallholders in the supply chain. Furthermore, organized producer groups monitoring their own food safety standards through collective action often become attractive to buyers who are looking for ways to ensure traceability and reduce transaction costs. This paper compares the ways in which small producers of fruits and vegetables in Kenya and India have coped with increased demands for food safety from their main export markets.     

Feminist Knowledges as Interventions in Physical Cultures

Abstract

This collection explores how feminist knowledges work as interventions in physical cultures and recognizes the considerable contribution of feminist theories and methodologies in understanding the power relations implicated in embodied movement. Our introductory piece weaves together questions about the gendered formation of physical cultures (across leisure, sport, the arts, tourism, well-being, and various embodied practices) with key issues raised by contributing authors, from disciplinary perspectives to theory-method approaches. Exploring questions of digital and physical cultures, more-than-human relations, post- and decolonial ways of knowing, and contemporary onto-epistemologies, this feminist collection aims to contribute to the movement of ideas within and across physical cultural studies. Bringing together diverse perspectives around our common focus we entangle physical cultures with a range of gendered problematizations and interventions that produce different ways of knowing, imagining and doing feminisms.     

The Measurement and Behavior of Uncertainty: Evidence from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters

We examine matched point and density forecasts of output growth, inflation and unemployment from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. We construct measures of uncertainty from individual histograms, and find that the measures display countercyclical behavior and have increased across all forecast horizons since 2007. We also derive measures of forecast dispersion and forecast accuracy, and find that they are not reliable proxies for uncertainty. There is, however, evidence of a meaningful co‐movement between uncertainty and aggregate point predictions for output growth and unemployment. These results are robust to changes in the composition of the survey respondents over time. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intermediary Products: FDI Strategies,Imports, Exports,and Trade Balances in Developed Economies

Has the relationship between the dominant investment motives of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and national trade balances, imports, and exports changed over time? A 1996 study hypothesized and found that the MNE market versus resource seeking investment motives in developed countries (DCs) resulted in different aggregate impacts on national trade balances, imports, and exports. In this study, we ask whether the increased use of intermediary products, a major change in the way MNEs conduct business, affect the previously found patterns. Because firm‐level data on intermediary products is not widely available across countries, we indirectly test their impact, hypothesizing that the rise in use of intermediary products has changed MNE investment motives in DCs, resulting in stronger relationships between foreign direct investment (FDI) and imports/exports in high‐FDI DCs but weaker links between FDI and national trade balances. Implications and future research directions are discussed. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.