Empirical evidence of the value of monitoring in joint ownership

Joint ownership of assets by two partners can have an adverse effect on the incentives to invest and can result in unstable and inefficient organizational structures. Control sharing, however, plays an important role in economic, political, and social institutions. There is scarce empirical evidence on the benefits of joint ownership in corporate finance. We analyze acquisitions of corporate assets by joint ventures to empirically ascertain the value of joint ownership in economic activities. The results indicate that firms experience significantly larger returns in joint acquisitions than in full-control acquisitions and that this difference is restricted to the sample of firms in which both partners share equal ownership in the target. These findings suggest that monitoring in joint ownership structures ameliorates the possibility of value-destroying corporate decisions.     

‘Madison Avenue puts on its best hair shirt’: US advertising & its social critics

This paper examines how the American advertising industry responded to its critics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Criticism of advertising was not new. Advertising had come under scrutiny during the Progressive era and the New Deal years. What made this wave of criticism novel was that it occurred during a period of economic affluence and relative social stability. Although recent academic scholarship from authors such as Michael Schudson (1984) and Jackson Lears (1994) has challenged the social critics, popular discourse in the English-speaking world concerning advertising's social impact still reflects the views of Vance Packard (1957) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1958). Likewise, the arguments put forward by leading advertising practitioners almost four decades ago are still found in public relations initiatives on behalf of the industry.     

MAINTAINING MARKET POSITION: TEAM PERFORMANCE,REVENUE AND WAGE EXPENDITURE IN THE ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE

This paper investigates the relationship between playing success and commercial success in team sports. Utilizing a data set relating to the English Premier League that combines both financial measures and indicators of playing skills and performances, our empirical analysis is based on three behavioural equations. Our analysis indicates that on‐field success can be directly related to players’ skills and abilities and that revenue is positively related to on‐field success. Wage expenditure is also shown to systematically reflect player skills and performances. One interpretation of this evidence is that investment in players’ skills and ability buys on‐field success, with richer teams becoming ever richer and able to maintain or even build upon success by spending more on players than less successful clubs. To the extent that richer clubs are successful in their objective there is a causal link between revenue earned and competitive imbalance via investments in players. The implications of this tendency within a league are discussed in our conclusion, which also considers the potentially wider implications of our study as they relate to the evolution of firm size and issues of market share.     

Racial Harassment,Ethnic Concentration,and Economic Conditions*

In this paper, we analyse the association between the spatial concentration of ethnic minorities and racial harassment. Ethnic concentration relates to racial harassment through at least three channels: hostility in the attitudes of majority individuals that finds expression in harassment behaviour, the probability that minority individuals meet majority individuals, and the cost of expressing hostility aggressively. Thus, harassment cannot simply be modelled as a stronger form of hostility. Using unique data for Britain, we show that, in areas of higher local ethnic concentration, experience of harassment is lower, even though hostility on the side of the majority population is not.     

Signalling,Disclosure And The Implications Of Financial Structure For Uk Corporate R&D ∗

This paper investigates the impact of R&D disclosure and finance variables on the level of R&D expenditures. The question addressed is: what is the impact of changes in disclosure requirements on the relationship between R&D expenditure and the financing of firms? The question is motivated by the possible signalling role that elective disclosure may have had prior to changes in accounting practices to ensure R&D disclosure.     

Jevons's Theory of Political Economy and the ‘Marginalist Revolution’ *

Very many statements have been made about the (non-)existence and characterisation of the ‘marginal revolution’ but it is urged here that detailed study of the relevant texts is far more valuable than the making of grand statements about such matters. In particular, a close reading of Jevons's Theory of Political Economyis proposed as an antidote to over-easy generalisation. Jevons by no means rejected all elements of classical theory. He did not propose a catallatic revolution; he attributed such an emphasis to earlier authors and himself stressed the role of production. It is shown that Jevons was very aware of the necessarily general equilibrium nature of his theory but that he was simply not able to cope with it satisfactorily; it is suggested that this explains, at least in part, his fluctuating and apparently inconsistent statements relating utility and labour to value. Jevons certainly attempted to sketch a complete marginal productivity theory of distribution, even if he was far from successful in providing one.     

Modelling and Mapping Agricultural Output Values Using Farm Specific Details and Environmental Databases

Ongoing concerns regarding the economic losses associated with the CAP and the negative environmental impacts of present land use have led to calls for land use change and consequent efforts to identify areas which are, from both a financial and social perspective, most appropriate for such conversion. This paper develops and applies an output value modelling methodology in which site-specific biophysical factors are combined with farm level data in order to predict input usage and, subsequently, farm profit. The spatial analytic capabilities of a geographical information system (GIS) are used to combine the variety of data employed to permit analysis of a large study area (the entirety of Wales) and yield models of both the market and shadow value of output from the two principal agricultural sectors of the area: dairying and sheep farming. The GIS is then used to produce readily interpretable maps of these values across the study area. The resulting maps are highly compatible both with value maps of alternative land uses given in the recent literature and with approaches to policy formulation currently under development by a range of UK agencies. Such maps may be used to assist estimation of the extent and location of farming response to land use policy change.     

Sraffian Thoughts in Full Marginalist Dress

In the single‐products economy considered here, every industry has a constant‐elasticity‐of‐substitution unit cost function; moreover that constant‐elasticity‐of‐substitution is the same for each industry (0 < σ < 1). When this strongly ‘marginalist’ system is looked at from a Sraffian perspective, it is found that some significant properties of the system are not in line with normal marginalist expectations.     

世界感受中国经济放缓之痛

【美国《华尔街日报》10月21日】中国蓬勃发展的经济正在以快于大多数人所预料的速度冷却，在发达国家遭遇金融危机之际，对于那些希望中国需求有助于保持全球经济平稳增长的人来说，这不啻是当头一棒。