Administrative Compensation and Organizational Performance in Texas Nursing Facilities

This study examines the link between compensation and performance by comparing profit-seeking versus nonprofit nursing homes in Texas. Using both cost and profit functions to measure facility performance, that is, resource allocation efficiency by firm management, we find that: (1) the highest paid administrators (profit-seekers) are also the most efficient allocators of firm resources; (2) rural administrators are paid more than their urban counterparts but there is no significant difference in their overall ability to allocate resources; and (3) chain administrators are not compensated more than independent administrators yet are significantly superior in resource allocation. Further, management compensation is strongly influenced by firm size and capacity utilization. These results provide very weak support for the agency theorist's pay/performance paradigm.     

The Diversity of Industrial Experience: Cabinet and Furniture Manufacture in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario

The diversity of paths to industrialization is illustrated bythe example of the cabinet- and furniture-manufacturing industryin Ontario, Canada. Complex and unpredictable demand combinedwith smaller markets and lower incomes than those in the UnitedStates and the relative abundance of wood to limit mechanizationand the size of enterprise in the Canadian industry. Small andunpowered workshops remained competitive throughout the nineteenthand into the twentieth century, creating a distinctive industrialexperience that reflects the unique interaction of local demandand supply.     

HECKSHER-OHLIN IN CANADA: NEW ESTIMATES OF REGIONAL WAGES AND LAND PRICES

Many immigrant-receiving and land-abundant countries experienced a diminishing ratio of wages to land prices during the globalisation era from 1870 to 1910. Factor price evidence suggests that Canada does not fit the pattern. We present the first Canadian estimates of region-specific wages and land prices that span the period from 1871 to 1925. Our evidence indicates that while Canada as a nation looks like an anomaly in the era of convergence, this is largely an artefact of aggregating the experience of the labour-abundant eastern provinces with the late-settling and land-abundant western provinces.     

Democratization and Politics in South African Townships

In South Africa, as in many other countries, there appears to have been a demobilization of mass urban movements following the achievement of representative democracy. This apparent demobilization has led to a perception that South Africa's neighbourhood‐based civic organizations are in crisis. This article builds on existing studies by sharpening analysis of the nature of this ‘crisis’. We show that there continue to be high levels of popular engagement with self‐governing civic structures at the local level. The decline in mass direct action in civil society appears to be linked to public confidence in political society, i.e. in the political parties and elected councillors that provide mechanisms for local representation in representative democracy. The crisis facing civic organizations is in large part a crisis of adjustment, as civic activists redefine their roles in the new institutional context and accept that their roles will be more limited than in specific extraordinary periods in the past. What makes this task of redefinition so difficult is that civil and political society cannot be easily separated, but, rather, form a tangled web in the minds of civic activists (and, we suspect, ordinary citizens also). The lesson of this South African case‐study is that changing patterns of popular politics need to be located in a careful analysis of political society as well as civil society, and especially of the real and perceived links between them. En Afrique du Sud, comme dans de nombreux pays, une démobilisation se dessine, semble‐t‐il, dans les mouvements urbains de masse depuis l'accès à une démocratie représentative. Cette sensation laisse à penser que les organisations civiques de quartier sont en crise en Afrique du Sud. S'appuyant sur des études existantes, l'article affine l'analyse de la nature de cette ‘crise’. Il montre qu'il existe toujours des niveaux élevés d'engagement populaire avec, au niveau local, des structures civiques autonomes. Le recul de l'action directe de masse au sein de la société civile semble liéà la confiance générale dans la société politique, c'est‐à‐dire dans les partis et les conseillers élus qui assurent les mécanismes locaux de la représentation démocratique. La crise que connaissent les organisations de citoyens est en grande partie une crise d'ajustement, les activistes devant redéfinir leur rôle dans le nouveau contexte institutionnel et accepter que celui‐ci soit plus limité que durant certaines périodes du passé. Cette opération de redéfinition est particulièrement problématique, car il n'est pas facile de séparer société civile et société politique, celles‐ci étant étroitement m7ecirc;lées dans l'esprit des activistes civiques (et, à notre avis, dans celui des citoyens ordinaires). Cette étude de cas sud‐africaine démontre qu'il faut situer les nouveaux schémas de politique générale par une analyse précise tant de la société politique que de la société civile, notamment en ce qui concerne les liens réels et supposés entre les deux.     

ECONOMETRICS MEETS SENTIMENT: AN OVERVIEW OF METHODOLOGY AND APPLICATIONS

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software.     

Henry George on Property Rights: Reply to John Pullen

John Pullen argues that Henry George's proposal to make land common property is inconsistent with his proposal to tax rent. This reply argues that George's two formulations are consistent, and that Pullen has confused common property with state property. On the other hand, Pullen's conception of property as composed of a basket of rights focuses attention on the question of whether, as trustee of the common property, a Georgist regime should be understood to have certain rights (and obligations) to constrain private land use decisions.     

The index of dissimilarity as a measure of inequality

Quality & Quantity -     

Market skewness risk and the cross section of stock returns

The cross section of stock returns has substantial exposure to risk captured by higher moments of market returns. We estimate these moments from daily Standard & Poor's 500 index option data. The resulting time series of factors are genuinely conditional and forward-looking. Stocks with high exposure to innovations in implied market skewness exhibit low returns on average. The results are robust to various permutations of the empirical setup. The market skewness risk premium is statistically and economically significant and cannot be explained by other common risk factors such as the market excess return or the size, book-to-market, momentum, and market volatility factors, or by firm characteristics.     

Market incompleteness and the equity premium puzzle: Evidence from state-level data

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rates of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete-markets case, we use consumption data for the 50 US states. We find that the rate of risk aversion under the incomplete-markets setup is much lower. Furthermore, including the second and third moments of the cross-sectional distribution of consumption growth in the pricing kernel lowers the estimate of risk aversion. These findings suggest that market incompleteness ought to be seen as an important component of solutions to the equity premium puzzle.