Ecotourism as a conservation tool and its adoption by private protected areas in Brazil

Ecotourism in private reserves combines the establishment of protected areas with an incentive mechanism to conserve biodiversity. Brazil's private reserve system is well-established but little is known about its links to tourism. This study puts the global private protected area into context and quantifies the extent to which ecotourism has been adopted as a sustainable land-use practice on private reserves in Brazil. Our findings demonstrate that small reserves do contribute to conservation and are used for ecotourism. The belief that large reserves are necessary for ecotourism and conservation is challenged. Only 4% (n = 45) of the 1182 reserves are engaged in ecotourism, mainly those within the Atlantic Forest biome and these are generally small in size (<50 ha). Reserves provide modest to basic accommodation as well as education and economic opportunities that include adjacent communities. Hiking and bird watching are the most popular activities but many reserves are threatened by poaching and invasive species. The low adoption of ecotourism appears due to a combination of factors, including lack of landowner interest, constraints imposed by regulations, logistics and anthropogenic threats. Nonetheless, there is potential to expand ecotourism within private reserves as 143 further private reserves are located near those already engaged in ecotourism.     

Interweaving thematic threads and learning pathways: Noonautics and Wizdomes

The paper challenges the assumptions regarding the adequacy of the organization of information in support of communication and dialogue. Beyond the over simplification of bullet points, and recognition of nested menu items and discussion threads, the question is what further structuring can be envisaged and how can its many possible levels be fruitfully distinguished to enable the emergence of more integrative and mature modes of discourse. The argument is presented as important to the support of higher orders of collective intelligence. Use is made of the weaving metaphor to contrast with the cognitively alienating conventional representation of system diagrams and concept maps.     

IDENTIFYING THE RESPONSE OF FERTILITY TO FINANCIAL INCENTIVES

While using financial incentives to increase fertility has become relatively common, the effects of such policies are difficult to assess. We propose an identification strategy that relies on the fact that the variation in wages induces variation in benefits and tax credits among ‘comparable’ households. We implement our approach by estimating a discrete‐choice model of female participation and fertility using individual data from the French Labor Force Survey and a detailed representation of the French tax–benefit system. Our results suggest that financial incentives have had a significant effect on fertility decisions in France. As an example, we simulate the effects of an additional, unconditional child credit of 150 euros per month. The effects are strongest for the third child. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social Security with Heterogeneous Populations Subject to Demographic Shocks

In a previous paper, we showed how a pay-as-you-go social security scheme, based on voluntary contributions, can be an appropriate institution to reach an optimal sharing of risks among generations in the presence of demographic uncertainties. We study here the functioning of such schemes when there are different population strata, with different demographic shocks and wages. We show that while a collective voluntary pay-as-you-go scheme can provide efficient intergenerational risk sharing, it is likely to be destabilized by pensions funds specialized by agents' types. This is true both when there is a complete set of contingent markets, where the risk pooling capabilities of a collective fund are potentially of less interest, and when markets are incomplete. In this last circumstance, a collective fund may help the living agents to share their intragenerational risks. However, we show that the resulting allocation does not Pareto dominate the outcome of individual funds by agent types, and that there are incentives for agents to separate from any collective organization.     

Comparing Alternative Hedge Accounting Standards: Shareholders' Perspective

We study the economic consequences of alternative hedge accounting rules in terms of managerial hedging decisions and wealth effects for shareholders. The rules we consider include the fair-value and cash-flow hedge accounting methods prescribed by the recent SFAS No. 133. We illustrate that the accounting method used influences the manager's hedge decision. We show that under no-hedge accounting, the hedge choice is different from the optimal economic hedge the firm would make under symmetric and public information. However, under a certain definition of fair-value hedge accounting, the hedging decision preserves the optimal economic hedge. We then demonstrate that long-term and future shareholders prefer a certain definition of fair-value hedge accounting to no-hedge accounting, while short-term shareholders prefer either approach depending on risk preferences and the level of uncertainty. We speculate about circumstances in which a manager would choose not to adopt fair-value hedge accounting when he has the option not to do so.     

Basel’s value-at-risk capital requirement regulation: An efficiency analysis

We analyze the optimal portfolio policies of expected utility maximizing agents under VaR Capital Requirement (VaR-CR) regulation in comparison to the optimal policy under exogenously-imposed VaR Limit (VaR-L) and Limited-Expected-Loss (LEL) regulations. With VaR-CR regulation the agent strategy consists of simultaneous decisions on both the portfolio VaR and on the implied amount of required eligible capital. As a result, the performance of VaR-CR regulation depends on its design (the parameter n) and the agent preferences. We show that an optimal VaR-CR regulation allows the regulator on the one hand, to completely eliminate the exposure to the largest losses, which may jeopardize the existence of the institution, and on the other hand, to restrain the portfolio exposure to all other losses. These results rationalize the current Basel regulations. However, the analysis shows also that there is an optimal level of required eligible capital from the regulator standpoint. Counter-intuitively, any requirement above this optimal level is inefficient as it leads to a smaller amount of actually maintained eligible capital and thereby to a larger exposure to the most adverse states of the world. Unfortunately, the current Basel’s range of required levels (n = 3–4) is within this inefficient range. Moreover, with an inefficient regulation the agent might employ an inefficient reporting and disclosure procedure.     

Estimation of physical intensity models for default risk

The estimation of physical intensity processes in the context of default risk is investigated here. Using data from Moody's Corporate Bond Default Database, a term structure of default probabilities for different rating classes is constructed each year from 1970 to 2001. Two specifications used for modeling the dynamics of the (risk‐neutral) intensity process in the bond‐pricing literature are then examined empirically: the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck and square‐root cases. The results reveal that the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck case is not an adequate modeling alternative with a rejection of this specification in five out of seven credit classes and nonsignificant mean reverting behavior for all credit classes. The square‐root case obtains better results with four credit classes out of seven for which this specification cannot be rejected and significant mean reversion parameters in many cases. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 29:95–113, 2009     

CEO Pay,Shareholder Returns,and Accounting Profits

We assess the impact on CEO pay (including salary, cash bonus, and benefits in kind) of changes in both accounting and shareholder returns in 99 British companies in the years 1972-89. After correcting for heterogeneity biases inherent in the standard specifications of the problem, we find a strong positive relationship between CEO pay and within-company changes in shareholder returns, and no statistically significant relationship between CEO pay and within-company changes in accounting returns. Differences between firms in long-term average profitability do appear to have a substantial effect on CEO pay, while differences between firms in shareholder returns add nothing to the within-firm pay dynamics.These findings call into question the rationale for explicitly share-based incentive schemes.