Selected Elements of Henry George's Legitimacy as an Economist

A bstract . Henry George's legitimacy as an economist has been denied in much of the literature of the history of economic thought and by some economists who were his approximate contemporaries. These denials have shaped the prevailing negative view of George's economics. An examination of selected representative evidence from George's work fails to support the negative view. George's positions on "The Study of Political Economy," eloquently presented in his 1877 speech to the faculty at the University of California, ate consistent with (and predate) "accepted,""orthodox,""legitimate" views of political economy expressed a decade and more later by J. Laurence Laughlin and Charles F. Dunbar in early classic articles that signified the emergence of economics as an identifiable profession in the United States. Other evidence reveals that George avoided the Ricardian error of failing to understand the role of factor and product substitution in the process of market equilibrium adjustments.     

GRAFTED POLYNOMIALS AS APPROXIMATING FUNCTIONS

The use of segments of polynomials to approximate production surfaces and time-series trends is described and illustrated. These segmented curves are restricted to be continuous and have a continuous derivative(s) at the join points.     

Traditional vocations and modern professions among Tamil Brahmans in colonial and post-colonial south India

Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical data are particularly used as evidence about changing patterns of employment, education and migration. Caste traditionalism was not a determining constraint, for Tamil Brahmans were predominant in medicine and engineering as well as law and administration in the colonial period, even though medicine is ritually polluting and engineering resembles low-status artisans' work. Crucially though, as modern, English-language, credential-based professions that are wellpaid and prestigious, law, medicine and engineering were and are all deemed eminently suitable for Tamil Brahmans, who typically regard their professional success as a sign of their caste superiority in the modern world. In reality, though, it is mainly a product of how their old social and cultural capital and their economic capital in land were transformed as they seized new educational and employment opportunities by flexibly deploying their traditional, inherited skills and advantages.     

ETF Competition and Market Quality

This paper examines competition between exchange traded funds (ETFs) that hold nearly identical portfolios of securities. We provide evidence that incumbent‐fund liquidity is negatively affected when a new ETF is added to an asset class. The degradation in liquidity is even more severe whenever both funds follow the same benchmark. We also document a decline in primary‐market activity for the incumbent ETFs after the arrival of new competitors. Furthermore, increasing the number of funds in an asset class does not put downward pressure on fund management fees. Thus, the deterioration in market quality may not be offset by decreasing costs of fund ownership.     

Accession of the Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland to the European Union: Impacts on Agricultural Markets

We analyse the consequences on agricultural markets of enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We produce a market outlook up to 2010 for two enlargement scenarios assuming different policy restrictions on grain and dairy production in the acceding countries. Accession of the three Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) leads to a permanent but moderate decrease in EU prices for most commodities. In the three acceding CEECs, domestic prices increase drastically, final consumption of agricultural products decreases in most instances, while production increases. Higher domestic prices in the CEECs reduce exports of most commodities to non‐union countries. Consequently, excess supplies are placed in stocks or exported to the original 15 member countries. Supply management mechanisms in the dairy and grain sectors would reduce the build‐up of surpluses in the new member states, but limit their ability to take advantage of the expanded market. Accession of the three CEECs would increase the CAP budget over its proposed maximum if area payments are extended to incoming crop producers.     

Collaborative Strategic Management: Strategy Formulation and Implementation by Multi-Organizational Cross-Sector Social Partnerships

The focus of this article is on multi-organizational cross-sector social partnerships (CSSP), an increasingly common means of addressing complex social and ecological problems that are too extensive to be solved by any one organization. While there is a growing body of literature on CSSP, there is little focus on collaborative strategic management, especially where implementation and outcomes are concerned. This study addresses these gaps by offering a conceptual model of collaborative strategic management, which is then tested through the use of two qualitative empirical cases of collaborative regional sustainable development strategies (CRSDS). The model augments previous collaboration models by highlighting two levels of implementation (the collaboration and the organizational levels) and by considering the different types of outcomes, and the feedback loops.     

The implications of the ‘learning curve’ for firm strategy and public policy

The objective of this paper is to examine the relationships between costs and cumulative output, and to explore the implications of these relationships for firm strategy and public policy.     

The Productive Tension of Trust and Distrust: The Coexistence and Relative Role of Trust and Distrust in Online Banking

This study examines the effects of trustworthiness perceptions and trustor dispositions on trust and distrust as well as the downstream influence of trust and distrust on intention to use online banking. More than 500 college students located across two universities completed a survey to provide data for the study. The findings from this study suggest that the “blind trust” and “blind distrust” perspectives used in isolation are incomplete and that a more comprehensive model of trust requires the inclusion of both perspectives. As hypothesized, results also support the assertion that trust and distrust are distinct constructs and that the established e-retailing trust nomological network holds in an online banking context. The study also contributes to the literature by establishing several distrust antecedents, as well as illustrating distrust's negative effect on intention to use online banking. Finally, the study illustrates how the influence of trust can overwhelm the effect of distrust in an online banking context.     

What does the timing of dividend reductions signal?

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Dividend reduction theory suggests that during an economy-wide shock, a relatively early dividend reduction indicates that a firm reduces its cash...