Botswana: Poverty amid plenty

This paper uses the technological capabilities framework for examining differences in technological intensities and economic performance between foreign and local food and beverage, and textile and garment firms and metal engineering firms in Kenya. Foreign firms had statistically significant higher labour productivity means than local firms in textile and garment manufacturing. Foreign firms were also more export- and technology-intensive than local firms in textile and garment (process technology and R&D) and metal engineering (HR). Foreign firms had higher and statistically significant skills and overall technology (TI) means than local firms in food and beverages. The econometric exercise showed that foreign ownership had a statistically significant and positive relationship with overall technological and HR intensities. In labour productivity, the coefficient of TI was higher in the foreign firms' sample than in the local firms' sample. Local firms had higher value added in domestic than export markets. Export intensity had a positive relationship in the process technology regressions, but an inverse relationship in the HR regressions in the foreign firms' sample. Overall, the statistically significant results suggest that foreign firms' technology, productivity and export intensity levels in economies with weak institutions tend to be superior to local firms.     

Property taxes and the transition of land to urban use

This paper examines the land and improvements tax effects on development timing and structural density at the urban fringe. It presents new results concerning structural density effects and resolves the ambiguity surrounding timing effects. This paper also studies the role of structural durability in the land tax non-neutrality phenomenon.     

Price trends and patterns in technical analysis: A theoretical and empirical examination

While many technical trading rules are based upon patterns in asset prices, we lack convincing explanations of how and why these patterns arise, and why trading rules based on technical analysis are profitable. This paper provides a model that explains the success of certain trading rules that are based on patterns in past prices. We point to the importance of confirmation bias, which has been shown to play a key role in other types of decision making. Traders who acquire information and trade on the basis of that information tend to bias their interpretation of subsequent information in the direction of their original view. This produces autocorrelations and patterns of price movement that can predict future prices, such as the “head-and-shoulders” and “double-top” patterns. The model also predicts that sequential price jumps for a particular stock will be positively autocorrelated. We test this prediction and find that jumps exhibit statistically and economically significant positive autocorrelations.     

Evaluating off‐site environmental mitigation using choice modelling*

Evaluation of off‐site mitigation entails comparison of utility changes between two sites. Choice modelling has been used to identify community willingness to trade‐off attributes for two different types of stream in New Zealand. Estimated utility functions are used to derive marginal rates of substitution and stream attribute part worths which can be used to design or evaluate both on‐site and off‐site mitigation policy. Latent class multinomial logit models identified classes of citizens who valued stream attributes quite differently. Significant differences in values for some attributes on different stream types imply heterogeneous mitigation ratios across environmental attributes.     

Shareholder wealth maximization,business ethics and social responsibility

The primary objective of this article is to develop a framework for analyzing the ethical foundations and implications of shareholder wealth maximization (SWM). Distinctions between SWM and the more widely examined construct of profit maximization are identified, the most significant being the central role played in SWM by the market mechanism for pricing the corporation's securities. It is argued that empirical tests concerned with evaluating the ethical implications of SWM will almost surely involve a joint hypothesis. A number of recent empirical studies aimed at testing hypotheses with explicit ethical content are reviewed.Geoffrey Poitras is an Associate Professor of Finance and International Business in the Faculty of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University. The author's published work has appeared in various journals includingThe Journal of Futures Markets, Canadian Journal of Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation andApplied Economics. This paper was written while the author was a visiting Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore.