Impact of the 1975 tax cut on income and employment in the black community

Summary The Tax Reform Act of 1975 should more properly be called the Tax Reduction Act of 1975 because it provides little in the way of reform beyond the fact that a disproportionately large share of the reduction (43.5 percent) goes to persons with incomes below $10,000. The main purpose of the act is to stimulate consumer spending, in the expectation that this rise in spending will impart some buoyancy to the sagging economy.     

Stromersparnis der Zeitumstellung bei privaten Haushalten

This paper presents an investigation into the extent to which seasonal time adjustments (summer and winter time) lead to energy savings for private households. The work is based on data from two selected electricity providers in the cities of Kassel and Kempten. By means of a multiple regression model, the electricity utilization of German households was explained with respect to hours of darkness, temperature and global radiation. These variables formed the basis for calculating scenarios with and without seasonal time adjustments. On a comparative basis, summer time throughout the year is associated with the greatest energy savings. We argue that the reason for this is that the highest energy consumption can be observed in the evenings, and continual summer time takes the greatest advantage of the available light of the evening hours.     

Capitalizing on Franchisee Autonomy: Relational Forms of Governance as Controls in Idiosyncratic Franchise Dyads*

Franchisee autonomy not only fosters system‐wide adaptability and outlet owners' satisfaction but also raises the costs from agency problems present in franchisee–franchisor dyads. Advancing upon the understanding of agency issues involved in franchising, we test the argument that chains counterbalance the loss in control inherent to autonomy with relational governance mechanisms. The empirical results provided strong support for this presumption. In addition, and most notably, we found that the more relational governance becomes important, the weaker agents' incentives are aligned with the interests of the entire network. The moderating effects of five franchisee characteristics influencing goal congruencies were considered: multiunit ownership, age of the relationship, geographic distance, franchisee success, and the level of perceived intra‐chain competition. Implications for chain management are provided.     

Do extrinsic cues affect purchase risk at international e-tailers: The mediating effect of perceived e-tailer service quality

The inherent nature of the international e-tailing environment leads to the consideration of purchase risk. In this study, an attempt is made to investigate the effect of three extrinsic cues, e-tailer brand equity, Country-Of-e-tailers (COE) and guarantee quality, within such an environment in Taiwan. The research findings support the proposed hypotheses that these exogenous factors affect a mediator, i.e., perceived e-tailer service quality, which in turn affects purchase risk perceived by online shoppers in a borderless marketplace. In conclusion, managerial implications of the research results as well as future research directions are presented and discussed.     

Financial Distress and Bank Restructuring of Small to Medium Size UK Companies

We use a unique data set to study how U.K. banks deal with financially distressed small and medium-sized companies under a contractualist bankruptcy system. Unlike in the U.S., these procedures limit the discretion of courts to strict enforcement of debt contracts, without any dilution of creditors claims. We show that lenders and borrowers select a debt structure that avoids some of the market failures often attributed to a contractualist system. Collateral and liquidation rights are highly concentrated in the hands of the main bank, giving it a dominant position in restructuring or liquidating a defaulting firm. There is little litigation, and no evidence of co-ordination failures or creditors runs. However, there is some evidence that the banks dominance makes it lazy in monitoring, relying heavily on the value of its collateral in timing the bankruptcy decision.     

Competition, Collusion, and Confusion: The State and the Reorganization of the British Cotton Industry, 1931-1939

British industrial policy in the 1930s has generated considerablehistorical controversy. This article furthers the debate byusing the cotton industry as a case study. The biggest constrainton active government policies toward cotton was not institutionalinertia or "industrial diplomacy," as some historians claim,but the sheer practical difficulty of intervening in such acomplex industry. Cotton also poses problems for historianswho see British industrial policy in the 1930s as largely aboutrestraining competition. The government feared that restrictionwould make matters worse in the cotton industry and was thereforehesitant about backing schemes designed to limit competition.Its dilemma was how best to maintain private-sector confidence.     

Optimal card payment systems

This paper presents a model of a card payment system to address the pricing and rules that govern such systems. It evaluates the social optimality of privately set interchange fees and the adoption of a rule by payment systems to prevent merchants surcharging for card transactions using two extremes of merchant pricing—monopolistic pricing and perfect competition. Both types of merchant pricing constrain the ability of card schemes to use interchange fees and the no-surcharge rule in anticompetitive ways, although for quite different reasons. The positive role of the no-surcharge rule in preventing excessive merchant surcharging is also highlighted.     

An analysis of the antecedents of satisfaction for superannuation fund members

The factors influencing the satisfaction of superannuation fund members are poorly understood at present, due to a paucity of research. This study looks at the relative influence that five key aspects of the superannuation offering of a mid-size Australian Superannuation Fund have on overall satisfaction. A survey of 500 members suggests that despite the long-term nature of the product and efforts to educate members to think otherwise, short-term financial performance remains a strong influence on member satisfaction levels. Furthermore, the strong focus on short-term returns mean that many of the favourable actions undertaken by this fund were comparatively unimportant to members. With financial returns varying annually and to a large degree being out of the control of fund managers, the focus of members on this aspect as the main influence on satisfaction levels is problematic. The evidence suggests that shifting the focus of members towards longer period assessments (eg returns over the past five years) and towards aspects of the funds' offering that are points of differentiation (eg enquiry handling) is the only way to prevent large, uncontrollable fluctuations in satisfaction levels and possible defections.