Developing an empirical socioeconomic typology of counties in five western states

County-level data representing a broad range of socioeconomic variables were obtained for the 190 counties in five western States-California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. A factor analysis of these variables produced eight orthogonal factors: (1) Urbanism, (2) Poverty vs affluence, (3) County tax revenues and services, relative to population, (4) Proportion of aged population, (5) Social stability vs instability, (6) New housing development vs cattle ranching, (7) Crop farming, welfare and unemployment, and (8) Small business activity vs level of federal employment. Several ways of examining scores on these factors were explored and demonstrated: distributions of scores on individual factors across counties were displayed graphically; individual county profiles, comprised of scores on all eight factors, were produced and examined; and groups of counties with similar profiles (representing county “types”) were identified through cluster analysis, and their average profiles and geographic distributions displayed and discussed. Groupings of clusters which were similar in some respects and varied in others were also presented. The utility of these methods for planning activities which may involve individual counties and/or groups of counties is discussed.     

The politics of relevance and the ITU

Ruben Näslund has done the telecommunications community a service by stimulating debate on the issues facing the ITU in the wake of the Nairobi Plenipotentiary Conference. The Nairobi Conference was important for both what was said and resolved and what was unsaid and unresolved. When sovereign nations meet for six weeks there is an interplay of emotions and perceptions which imperceptibly mould policy formulation well after the event. A Plenipotentiary Conference is a political event, however much the engineers, technicians and PTT administrators of the telecommunications community prefer or pretend that is not. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the outstanding ITU issues in light of certain basic facts which structure the interests of member countries.     

Inevitably reborn: The reawakening of extinct innovations

In our innovation-driven world we tend to lay concepts that have lost their attractiveness to rest and rush to embrace the next giant leap. However, in most fields of creation, patterns of reawakening of old, extinct innovations can be found. It often looks as if new technological and social concepts have a life of their own, survival instincts and adaptive properties: They simply refuse to die. Should these phenomena be resolved on an ad hoc basis or are they grounded in the foundation of social behavior or evolutionary processes of technology? In conditions in which continuum equations would predict the extinction of a population, the presently offered microscopic representation proves that individuals self-organize in spatiotemporally localized adaptive patches that ensure their survival, resilience, and development as a collective. A similar treatment can explain why so many innovations are inevitably reborn. Accordingly, in assessing the value of social ideas, trends and even wants we ought to consider longer time frames following the decline of innovations, otherwise we might prematurely and erroneously discard successful promising concepts.     

Teens and sex

The rate of births to teenagers is down, but who gets the credit? While policy initiatives have been deemed largely ineffective, efforts to shape popular culture through the media are faring better.     

Endogenous currency formation in an online environment: The case of Diablo II

This paper presents a case study of the emergence of currency from a barter economy in an online game community. We use this case study to attempt to shed light on the relative importance of various types of frictions that lead to the emergence of money in search-theoretic models of currency formation. In particular, our study highlights the importance of exchange frictions relative to epistemic frictions. Using the records of an online message board dedicated to facilitating trades within the game, we document the emergence of currency and its stability over time.     

Asymmetric Post-Announcement Drift to Good and Bad News: Evidence from Voluntary Trading Disclosures in the Chinese Stock Market

This article investigates the post-announcement drift (PAD) of stock returns in the Chinese stock market. We use a sample of voluntary trading disclosures to test the hypothesis that an asymmetric PAD exists in a market in which managers are more likely to suppress negative news. We show that a pattern of short-term momentum and long-term reversal in returns persists for up to 250 trading days following the announcement of trading statements in the Chinese stock market. This finding is stronger for positive announcements in terms of the magnitude and the variance of stock returns. Our findings are in line with both Shin’s theoretical predictions and the credibility hypothesis, in which disclosure and asset returns are jointly determined and the adoption of a “sanitisation strategy” in information disclosure generates more volatile returns for firms issuing good news. Further, we show that the latter effect is more pronounced for firms which are partially state-owned, suggesting that they potentially receive more government support, a finding which is in line with the hypothesis that the incentive to suppress negative information is related to a country’s legal/judicial system.     

EU Food Safety Standards,Pesticide Use and Farm‐level Productivity: The Case of High‐value Crops in Kenya

This article provides an empirical analysis of the impact of European Union (EU) private food safety standards on pesticide use and farm‐level productivity among small‐scale vegetable producers in Kenya. We apply an extended three‐stage damage control production framework, accounting for multiple endogeneity problems, to farm‐level data collected from a random cross‐sectional sample of 539 small‐scale producers. Estimation results show that farmers producing vegetables for the domestic market use significantly lower quantities of pesticides than do export farmers. However, contrary to findings elsewhere, the econometric evidence here shows that both domestic and export‐oriented vegetable farmers in Kenya use pesticides at levels below the economic optimum. The results also show that the adoption of standards by export farmers does not have any significant impact on total pesticide use. However, adopter categories are distinguishable in terms of types of pesticide used, i.e. adopters use safer pesticides based on World Health Organization (WHO) classification. The third‐stage structural revenue model results demonstrate that adoption of standards has a positive and significant impact on revenue raised in vegetable production. Nevertheless, farmers producing for the export market are indistinguishable from those producing for the domestic farmers in terms of the total revenue earned from producing vegetables during the rainy season, on a ‘per acre’ basis. Although standards can potentially prevent resource‐poor smallholders from maintaining their position in the lucrative export markets, they can also result in positive changes in the production systems of those small‐scale farmers who adopt it, as shown by these results.     

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION AND EMPLOYMENT IN DERIVED LABOUR DEMAND MODELS: A HIERARCHICAL META‐REGRESSION ANALYSIS

The effect of technological innovation on employment is of major concern for workers and their unions, policy makers and academic researchers. We meta‐analyse 570 estimates from 35 primary studies that estimate a derived labour demand model. We contribute to existing attempts at evidence synthesis by addressing the risks of selection bias and that of data dependence in observational studies. Our findings indicate that: (i) hierarchical meta‐regression models are sufficiently versatile for addressing both selection bias and data dependence in observational data; (ii) innovation's effect on employment is positive but small and highly heterogeneous; (iii) only a small part of residual heterogeneity is explained by moderating factors; (iv) selection bias tends to reflect preference for upholding prevalent hypotheses on the employment effects of process and product innovations; (v) country‐specific effect‐size estimates are related to labour market and product market regulation in six OECD countries in a U‐shaped fashion; and (vi) OLS estimates reflect upward bias whereas those based on time‐differenced or within estimators reflect a downward bias. Our findings point out to a range of data quality and modelling issues that should be addressed in future research.