Road infrastructure and economic development in the periphery: the case of A55 improvements in North Wales

This paper examines the impact of a major road improvement programme on the economic development of North Wales. The paper identifies the economic impacts of the road on a selection of firms and organisations in North Wales, and provides a modelling framework to examine the static and dynamic effects of road improvements. Road improvements across North Wales are found to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for economic development in this peripheral area.     

Personal perception and community speculation: A British resort in the 19th century

The paper presents a case history of the origin and early development of what later became a major UK seaside resort. Weston-super-Mare. Early developers were faced with considerable environmental difficulties, and by using a variety of contemporary documentary sources the paper considers how the problems were overcome within the context of both developers' and early visitors' perceptions, and of the regional market for tourism in the early nineteenth century. The reaction of the existing local community to development potential is also considered, and more general conclusions are reached on the nature of resort development in the nineteenth century.     

An Ecofeminist Narrative of Urban Nature Connection

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to explore meanings, experiences, and perceived impacts associated with an urban nature connection program as narrated by mothers of program participants. “Project Connect”, a charity organization established in 2008, delivers the program investigated in urban parks and green spaces in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on ecofeminism and narrative inquiry, the study reveals a community narrative that depicts how Project Connect serves a group of mothers as an incubator of relationships spanning social and environmental domains, and which enable resistance of status quo forces that shape contemporary cityscapes. Nature connection in this sense is very much a political and cultural process that opens opportunities to challenge but also reproduce aspects of the dominant nature-related discourses. Accordingly, this study prompts consideration of the power of mothers and an ethics of care to transform human-nature relationships, and weaves critical consciousness and cautious re-valuing around the nature narratives we tell.     

Lifecycle‐based donor performance analysis

With charities of all sizes now having the ability to collect and store very large quantities of data about their donors on in‐house database systems, detailed donor performance analyses have an increasingly essential role to play in the effective planning and management of fundraising. If, however, such activities are to support fully the work of fundraisers then it is important that they are undertaken from the perspective of the fundraiser rather than of the specialist data analyst. This paper introduces an approach to donor performance analysis that is founded on what is termed a ‘donor lifecycle model’. The aim of this is to provide a formal analysis methodology that provides end results that can be more easily interpreted by nonspecialists and so more effectively used in support of the efficient planning of fundraising programmes. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications     

Economic freedom and public,non-market institutions: evidence from criminal prosecution

Economic freedom, which measures the protection of property and freedom to contract, is generally argued to capture the quality of a state’s institutions regarding market activity. As to be expected, numerous studies have found that economic freedom is associated with good economic outcomes. Additionally, much effort in public economics has worked to identify the features of quality non-market public institutions. No effort has been made to connect institutions that influence market activity and institutions that govern non-market activities. We take a first step. We employ a linear programming method for measuring relative efficiencies known as Data Envelopment Analysis. We apply this technique to information on the use of inputs to the production of the prosecution of crime across the thousands of local prosecutor offices in the U.S. We then compare state-level measurements of prosecution productivity with data on state-level economic freedom from the Economic Freedom of North America index. We show that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between the two. Those states that develop institutions respecting economic freedom also tend to be the states that develop efficient publicly-provided services. The results are extended to complementary economic freedom measurements.     

Structural reliability of conjoint measurement in health care: an empirical investigation

This paper is concerned with the structural reliability of conjoint measurement when applied in a health care setting. The clinical context was the diagnosis and treatment of knee injuries. A conjoint measurement study was conducted which used the pairwise choice approach to preference elicitation. Each choice included two scenarios: a conventional treatment approach to management (arthroscopy) and an approach using magnetic resonance imaging. In order to test for structural reliability two separate conjoint measurement exercises were conducted: exercise A where scenarios were defined in terms of three attributes and exercise B where scenarios included all four attributes. The assessment of structural reliability involved a comparison of two random effects probit models, for exercises A and B. Data were collected on a total of 176 students of sports science. The results strongly indicate that the models for the two exercises are different, although the instability is limited to the constant term and a single model attribute (i.e. the avoidance of surgery). The finding of instability in the constant coefficient raises important questions about the appropriateness of labelling scenarios in conjoint measurement exercises.     

Access to Flexible Working and Informal Care

We use matched employer–employee data to explore the relationship between employees’ access to flexible working arrangements and the amount of informal care they provide to sick or elderly friends and relatives. Flexitime and the ability to reduce working hours are each associated with about 13% more hours of informal care. Workplaces do not respond to the presence of carers by providing flexible work, instead there is some underlying selection of carers into flexible workplaces. The wider workplace environment beyond formal flexible work may also facilitate care.     

Home sweet host: A cross‐country perspective on prudential and monetary policy spillovers through global banks

Prudential regulation of banks is multi‐layered: policy changes by home‐country authorities affect banks’ global operations across many jurisdictions; policy changes by host‐country authorities shape banks’ operations in the host jurisdiction regardless of the nationality of the parent bank. Do these policies create (unintended) cross‐border spillovers? Similarly, monetary policy actions by major central banks may also have effects on the behaviour of banks in other countries. This paper examines the effect that changes in home‐ and host‐country prudential measures have on cross‐border dollar credit provision, and how these interact with US monetary policy. We first run panel regressions with both layers of regulation, to examine which has a greater effect on cross‐border lending. We then use a novel approach to decompose growth in cross‐border bank lending into separate home, host and common components, and then match each with the corresponding home or host policies. Our results suggest that prudential policies can have spillover effects, which depend on the instrument used and on whether a bank's home or host country implemented them. Home policies tend to have larger spillovers on cross‐border US dollar lending than host policies. We also find that a tightening of US monetary policy can compound the spillovers of some prudential measures.     

Does housework lower wages? Evidence for Britain

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to present the first estimates of the housework-wage relationship in Britain. Controlling for permanent unobserved heterogeneity, we find that housework has a negative impact on the wages of men and women, both married and single, who work full-time. Among women working part-time, only single women suffer a housework penalty. The housework penalty is uniform across occupations within full-time jobs but some part-time jobs appear to be more compatible with housework than others. We find tentative evidence that the housework penalty is larger when there are children present.     

Firm-hosted online brand communities and new product success

Many firms use online brand communities to support the launch of their new products. This study proposes a typology of firm-hosted online brand communities and examines whether such a classification system can improve predictions of new product success. A cross-industry analysis of 81 firm-hosted online brand communities shows that these communities reflect three archetypes. A subsequent survey of 170 community-hosting firms in the consumer durable goods industry reveals that the three types of communities are not equally important for new product success. Moreover, one archetype generally underperforms the other two as a new product support mechanism. Overall, the results demonstrate that firm-hosted online brand communities can be a predictor of new product success.