Partnership working and the cultivated activist

Critics and advocates of union–management partnership agreements offer competing assessments of the potential outcomes for workplace union representation. These include the attenuation of the role of lay activists and intra‐union conflict. In this case study of Amicus‐MSF at Legal & General partnership involved centralised decision making, membership loss and activist‐leadership tensions, but these were temporary. With employer support the local union leadership ‘cultivated’ a cadre of pro‐partnership activists with extended reach into management decision making, increasing membership and strengthening workplace organisation.     

Consumer motivations and concerns in online auctions: an exploratory study

This investigates the reasons behind the dramatic growth of Internet auction companies such as eBay, exploring into why so many consumers have been motivated to turn to online auctions to purchase and sell goods. It is found that the ability to purchase items at lower prices than from retail stores is the primary motivation, along with having access to previously unobtainable items. Concerns mainly relate to potential fraudulent transactions, although the negative feedback system is found to be vital in the reduction of fears over fraud. Interaction with other auction users is found to be important for practical reasons such as information seeking, rather than for enjoyment. The main conclusion is that the benefits of using Internet auctions far outweigh the risks involved.     

On Designing Constructed Markets in Valuation Surveys

In this paper I consider some of the methodological issues involvedin designing valid contingent valuation (CV) scenarios. I identifythe several parts of these scenarios and the design issues particularto those parts. Although my principal example is the scenario I andothers used in the Exxon Valdez oil spill study of the naturalresource damages to Prince William Sound, Alaska, I generalize toother types of CV scenarios.     

Alternative Policy Instruments for Agriculture Support: Consequences for Trade, Farm Income and Competitiveness

The views expressed are solely those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.     

Exploring consumer ethics in Ghana,West Africa

Consumer ethics is a growing area of research that focused almost exclusively on consumers in the United States and, to a lesser degree, Europe and Asia. In this paper, we introduce an African element to the consumer ethics discourse by drawing on survey responses from over 300 Ghanaian consumers to explore their ethical beliefs and judgements. We analysed these data using regression techniques. Our findings show that Ghanaian consumers exhibit lower levels of ethics compared with their America counterparts, especially when the unethical actions facilitate the achievement of their goals. While Ghanaian consumers recognize the value of moral rules, they are prone to suspending their ethical positions as they deem necessary in a particular context. Implications for marketing strategy and future research are discussed.     

The Value Relevance of Accounting under Political Uncertainty: Evidence Related to Quebec's Independence Movement

The Canadian province of Quebec is a region of an advanced industrialized nation characterized by a strong independence movement and, therefore, provides an interesting context in which to test the effect of political uncertainty on the relationship between market values and accounting values. In this study we compare market‐to‐book value associations of a sample of firms headquartered in Quebec with those of a sample of Canadian firms headquartered outside Quebec, over the period 1988–2002. Our comparisons suggest that, on average, the value of Quebec‐based firms is significantly less than other Canadian firms when valuation is based on multiples of book value and earnings. In addition, we find that the “Quebec discount” decreased significantly in the period immediately following the 1995 provincial sovereignty referendum wherein Quebeckers voted (narrowly) against Quebec sovereignty. We conclude that the relative undervaluation of Quebec firms is related, at least in part, to political uncertainty associated with the Quebec independence movement.     

Cross-sectional forecasts of the equity premium

If investors are myopic mean-variance optimizers, a stock's expected return is linearly related to its beta in the cross-section. The slope of the relation is the cross-sectional price of risk, which should equal the expected equity premium. We use this simple observation to forecast the equity-premium time series with the cross-sectional price of risk. We also introduce novel statistical methods for testing stock-return predictability based on endogenous variables whose shocks are potentially correlated with return shocks. Our empirical tests show that the cross-sectional price of risk (1) is strongly correlated with the market's yield measures and (2) predicts equity-premium realizations, especially in the first half of our 1927–2002 sample.