The geography of air freight: connections to U.S. metropolitan economies

Despite the rapid growth of air freight shipments, much of the existing literature on the geography of air transportation has paid more attention to passenger travel than air freight. The purpose of this paper is to elevate our understanding of air freight by determining which specific variables most influence and shape the geographic distribution of air freight by metropolitan area using stepwise regression analysis. The empirical results suggest a regression model of five independent variables was the most parsimonious solution where the final model accounted for 71.1% of the variation in air freight shipments by metropolitan area (MA). The most important predictor was the traffic shadow effect, where less populated MAs under the traffic shadow of larger MAs tended to generate lower levels of freight. The model also suggested that other key predictors included the employment market share in transportation-shipping-logistics industries, per capita personal income, the number of medical diagnostic and supplier establishments, and above average wages in high technology. Overall, metropolitan markets with diverse and efficient ground support systems, freight forwarders and other transportation services, a more affluent population, an intense agglomeration of medical laboratories and related suppliers, and a well paid skilled workforce engaged in computer systems design and electronic product manufacturing are more likely to ship freight by air.     

Moving freight on public transit: Best practices,challenges, and opportunities

Freight on Transit (FOT) refers to an operational strategy where public transit vehicles and/or infrastructure are used to move freight. Examples include moving goods alongside passengers on buses, attaching cargo trailers to transit vehicles, and operating freight vehicles between trains on subway lines. This paper describes the methods and results of a three-round Delphi study engaging 34 transportation experts to explore challenges and opportunities of FOT and to conceptualize and evaluate potential FOT operations in Toronto. Traditional Delphi methods were used for the exploration of FOT challenges and opportunities, and a modified approach was formulated to integrate experts' opinions and develop new FOT concepts for Toronto. The results support previous claims that technical challenges of FOT may be easier to overcome than institutional barriers. Evaluation of potential FOT operating strategies in Toronto suggests that while the current public transit network does not have capacity to support additional movements, there may be realistic opportunities to include freight service in future projects as a means of offsetting operating costs and reducing the impacts of goods movements.     

The Benefit Function Approach to Modeling Price-Dependent Demand Systems: An Application of Duality Theory

In this article, we advocate more extensive use of the benefit function in specifying price-dependent or inverse demand models. We demonstrate how duality theory may be used to establish the interrelationships between the Marshallian (or Hicksian) inverse demands and Luenberger's adjusted price functions, allowing estimable inverse demands to be derived directly from a benefit function. We estimate two systems of inverse demands for Japanese quarterly fish consumption. Results indicate that the procedures and methods employed here appear promising, and may prove beneficial for quantity and welfare analysis when modeling systems of inverse demand functions.     

Stochastic efficiency analysis with risk aversion bounds: a correction

A recent paper by Hardaker et al. (The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 48, 2004a, 253) and book by Hardaker et al. (Coping with Risk in Agriculture, 2004b) describe a procedure for determining an efficient set from among a set of random alternatives. This procedure, called stochastic efficiency with respect to a function (SERF), is claimed to make the same assumption concerning the risk aversion measures as does stochastic dominance with respect to a function (SDRF). This is claim is incorrect. SERF imposes an additional requirement on the risk aversion measures of the decision makers. Both procedures assume a lower and an upper bound on risk aversion, but SERF also assumes that all risk aversion measures are of the same functional form as these lower and upper bound functions. This additional strong requirement on risk preferences implies that the efficient set identified under SERF is usually smaller than that identified using SDRF.     

Land Tenure and the Adoption of Conservation Practices

We use a logit adoption model with data on 941 U.S. corn producers from the 1996 Agricultural Resource Management Study to analyze the influence of land tenure on the adoption of conservation practices. We extend previous analyses by distinguishing renters according to lease type and by distinguishing practices according to the timing of costs and returns. We find that cash-renters are less likely than owner-operators to use conservation tillage, but share-renters are not. Both cash-renters and share-renters are less likely than owner-operators to adopt practices that provide benefits only over the longer term (grassed waterways, stripcropping, and contour farming).     

Decoupled Farm Payments and Expectations for Base Updating

The degree to which U.S. farm programs are decoupled from production has been a central issue in recent trade disputes. Several authors have suggested producer expectations for base acreage and yield updating in future farm bills create an incentive to alter planting and input decisions. This article reports analysis of the subjective expectations of producers for base updating and an analysis of the effect these expectations have on producer willingness to accept a buyout of the right to update. On average, producers think the chances of updating in the next farm bill are about 40%, but less than 17% indicate adjusting acreage or yields in anticipation of updating.     

Cost of capital and public loan guarantees to small firms

In this paper, we study the determinants of the spread charged by banks under a UK policy intervention scheme, aimed at supporting access to the credit market for small firms through guarantee backed loans. We exploit a unique dataset containing data on 29,266 guarantee backed loans under the UK SFLG scheme over the period 2000 to 2005. Results suggest that lower spreads are offered for loans of larger amounts and higher durations, for service firms, for larger firms, and for those located in the most advanced regions. Higher spreads are applied to high-tech manufacturing firms and to loans issued for working capital purposes. We also find that the presence of other extant debt is associated with a relatively higher spread and that this effect is especially significant for the subset of firms that have reached a maximum debt capacity based on collateralized assets. Further, we also find that the higher the incidence of the publicly guaranteed debt over the total amount of outstanding loans, the lower, on average, the spread. However, an increase in the guaranteed coverage leads to a contraction in the spread only for loans aimed at covering working capital needs rather than investments.     

Linking Ethics and Risk Management in Taxation: Evidence from an Exploratory Study in Ireland and the UK

Ethical dilemmas involving tax issues were identified by members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants as posing the most difficult ethical problem for them (Finn et al., Journal of Business Ethics 7(8), pp. 607–609, 1988). The KPMG tax shelter fraud case proves that the tax profession has not gone untainted in the age of numerous accounting and corporate scandals, such as the Enron débacle (Sikka and Hampton, Accounting Forum 29(3), 325–343, 2005). High-profile scandals serve to highlight the problems caused by differences in ethical judgement among accountants and tax practitioners and the issue of ethics has been brought publicly to the forefront of the profession. Nevertheless, the nature and dimension of ethical issues in tax practice have been largely unexplored (Erard, Journal of Public Economics 52(2), 163–197, 1993; Marshall et al., Journal of Business Ethics 17(12), 1265–1279, 1998; Frecknall Hughes, Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Leeds, 2002). This research aims to contribute to the debate on ethics in tax practice by reporting interview data on tax practitioners’ perceptions of ethics in the jurisdictions of Ireland and the United Kingdom and exploring the link or equation of ethics with risk management.