Marketing its Colonial Heritage: A New Lease of Life for Cape Coast,Ghana?

Most of the published works on place promotion and urban change have been undertaken within the western world. This essay goes beyond previous studies by examining the phenomenon within the African context. Specifically, it examines the utility of heritage tourism as an avenue for place promotion of Cape Coast, Ghana. The essay demonstrates how urban development in Ghana has become more centralized on towns such as Accra and Kumasi, so that once important towns like Cape Coast have lost their importance. The fact that such towns have attempted to improve their position via innovative urban development strategies, and the experience of Cape Coast, is a testimony of how heritage tourism is helping to fill this gap. However, there are significant structural constraints on the effective use of tourism in salvaging Cape Coast’s declining image, and these have to be addressed before too much faith is put in tourism as a tool for place promotion.     

Financial Innovations,Money Demand,and the Welfare Cost of Inflation

In the 1990s, the empirical relationship between money demand and interest rates began to fall apart. We analyze to what extent financial innovations can explain this breakdown. For this purpose, we construct a microfounded monetary model with a money market that provides insurance against liquidity shocks by offering short‐term loans and by paying interest on money market deposits. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that the introduction of the sweep technology at the beginning of the 1990s, which improved access to money markets, can explain the behavior of money demand very well. Furthermore, by allowing a more efficient allocation of money, the welfare cost of inflation decreased substantially.     

COUNT DATA REGRESSION USING SERIES EXPANSIONS: WITH APPLICATIONS

A new class of parametric regression models for both under- and overdispersed count data is proposed. These models are based on squared polynomial expansions around a Poisson baseline density. The approach is similar to that for continuous data using squared Hermite polynomials proposed by Gallant and Nychka and applied to financial data by, among others, Gallant and Tauchen. The count models are applied to underdispersed data on the number of takeover bids received by targeted firms, and to overdispersed data on the number of visits to health practitioners. The models appear to be particularly useful for underdispersed count data. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE CORPORATE SOCIAL PERFORMANCE–FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE LINK

Strategic managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in an environment that is placing more and more pressures on them. Recent scholarship in strategic management suggests that many of these pressures come directly from sources associated with social issues in management, rather than traditional arenas of strategic management. Using a greatly improved source of data on corporate social performance, this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance. Corporate social performance (CSP) is found to be positively associated with prior financial performance, supporting the theory that slack resource availability and CSP are positively related. CSP is also found to be positively associated with future financial performance, supporting the theory that good management and CSP are positively related.© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

Crisis Behind Closed Doors: Global Food Crisis and Local Hunger

The high and volatile food prices in 2007–8 triggered estimates of massive increases in poverty and hunger. However, hunger and volatile food prices have long been a feature of developing economies. This paper examines the impact of high global food prices on domestic terms‐of‐trade, food consumption and child undernutrition in the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Liberia and Sierra Leone, comparing findings with the impacts of ‘seasonality’. As high international food prices permeated domestic markets, households in all the case study areas resorted to coping strategies common in the annual hunger season. Though acute malnutrition has not risen as consistently as in a seasonal hunger crisis, reduced micronutrient intake threatens to have severe long‐term consequences for health and poverty reduction. The similar impacts of seasonal and global food price rises on households provide an opportunity to design appropriate interventions to protect livelihoods.     

CRIMINAL PERCEPTIONS AND VIOLENT CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION

This paper explores the relationship between various measures of prior victimization and indicators of both the perceived victimization risk and fear of crime. Equations are specified and estimated both for the fear of crime/perception of risk and for prior victimization. Since prior victimizations are exogenous to the determination of the current assessment of risk or fear of crime, it is possible to isolate the independent effects of victimization and extraneous factors, like racial neighborhood composition, in a recursive model structure. The analysis also examines the contribution that individual victimization and extraneous factors make to the overall gap between average victimization rates and average indicators of fear.
Prior victimization explains some of the rather enormous perception of future victimization, but a sizable gap between perceived risk and actual risk remains. Much of that gap appears to be related to proximity to nonwhites, a possible proxy for racial prejudices and beliefs that nonwhite neighborhoods contribute to heightened crime.     

It's the Economy Stupid: Macroeconomics and Federal Elections in Australia

In this paper we examine the impact of macroeconomic conditions on Federal electoral performance in 20th-century Australia. We find that the electorate penalizes a government for high inflation and high unemployment relative to trend. Real GDP growth and real wage growth were not found to have a systematic relationship with incumbent vote share at the Federal level. We also examine the voteshare of the Federal incumbent in three electorates: the safe Liberal seat of Kooyong, the safe Labor seat of Melbourne Pans, and the swinging seat of Latrobe. We find some evidence that unemployment affects electoral outcomes in the swinging seat, but no macroeconomic variables affect outcomes in the safe seats.     

The Intra-Industry Transfer of Information Inferred from Announcements of Corporate Security Offerings

This study investigates the extent to which information inferred by investors from initial announcements of corporate security offerings affects share prices in the capital markets. The empirical tests measure the response in the common stock prices of both firms announcing a security offering and non-announcing firms operating in the same industry. Small but significantly negative abnormal returns are shown by industry shares upon initial announcements of common stock, convertible debt, and straight debt public offerings. Such an industry response indicates that share prices incorporate an inside assessment of factors relevant to the valuation of an industry subset of firms.