Market segmentation for fund raisers

An analysis to define or segment contributor markets is fundamental to fund raising for charities and other nonprofit organizations. By using the concept on market segmentation, such organizations can aim their efforts toward those target segments most favorable to the particular philanthropy. The article shows how segmentation procedures, well tested in the field of marketing, can be applied by all types of fund-raising organizations. The procedures are particularly effective if based on marketing research. The article concludes by suggesting how tactical use of the marketing mix can be combined in a fund-raising strategy.     

Do Federal Home Loan Bank membership and advances increase bank risk-taking?

Since the early 1990s, commercial banks have turned to Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLBank) advances to plug the gap between loan and deposit growth. Is this trend worrisome? On the one hand, advances implicitly encourage risk by insulating borrowers from market discipline. On the other, advances give borrowers greater flexibility to managing interest rate and liquidity risk. And access to FHLBank funding encourages members to reshape their balance sheets in ways that could lower credit risk. Using quarterly financial and supervisory data for banks from 1992 to 2005, we assess the effect of FHLBank membership and advances on risk. The evidence suggests liquidity and leverage risks rose modestly, but interest-rate risk declined somewhat. Credit risk and overall failure risk were largely unaffected. Although the evidence suggest FHLBank membership and advances have had, at best, only a modest impact on bank risk, we caution that our sample period constitutes one observation and that moral hazard could be pronounced if leverage ratios revert to historical norms.     

A review of the FCC and AT&T positions

The author assesses the conflicting arguments put forward in the preceding ‘position’ articles by Wiley and deButts. He focuses on those points which he feels are unjustified or receive inadequate attention. These include the issues of subsidisation, possible market expansion, service substitution, the ‘threat’ to universal service, and possible ‘second-round’ effects. In summary, he considers possible aspects of the development of competition.     

The metropolitan hierarchy of occupations: An economic interpretation of central place theory

The usefulness of central place theory, as a general explanation of the spatial distribution of activities in a system of cities and of the spatial ordering of urban places within that system, clearly relies on economic phenomena. Christaller's original formulation of the theory was similarly economic in basis, yet economic phenomena have been ignored in subsequent empirical testing of the theory. These tests, chiefly by geographers, have relied on population size as the chief, if not sole, determinant. This paper demonstrates that an economic explanation is a necessary component of the general theory of central places. Moreover, explicit economic variables not only alter the ordering of activities based strictly on demographic size, but generally offer a more powerful explanation of ordering.     

The Perils of Base Money

Insecure linkage of ordinary money to fractional reserves of a distinct base money can sometimes endanger the smooth working of modern monetary systems. This danger applies most obviously to the analogous insecure pegging of domestic to foreign currency. Worry would better focus, however, not on the size of reserve ratios but on the very existence of something distinct to which ordinary money is linked.In the modern world money is a device for monitoring transactions, keeping records, calculating economic benefits and costs, and accomplishing multilateral clearing. Money enables people conveniently to use the entitlements acquired by delivering goods and services and securities to some trading partners to obtain others of these from other trading partners. The tickets and memoranda employed in these operations need not take the form of little disks of precious metal or even of certificates convertible into them or some other kind of ultimate base money.It would be economically advantageous and feasible to make all money inside money (in the sense of Gurley and Shaw), with the value of the money unit determined and maintained otherwise than through convertibility into a distinct base money, which would have been abolished.