Illuminations and distortions: Gregory King's Scheme calculated for the year 1688 and the social structure of later Stuart England1

This critique of King's well‐known Scheme of the social order in 1688 examines his purposes, the Scheme's evolutionary process, and the taxation data (hearth, poll, window, and marriage duty) that King used to construct it, before contrasting his conclusions with recent research. His social hierarchy emerges as a rather crude and backward‐looking stereotype based on too many intelligent guesses, with his treatment of the poorer families being least satisfactory. Overall, King's population totals appear sound, his national income estimate low, and various mean household sizes and family and children's totals unreliable.     

book reviews

THE CHANGING CONTOURS OF BRITISH INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS Nuffield College, Oxford WORK AND PEOPLE: AN ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF JOB ENRICHMENT Lodon School of Economics THE HIDDEN MEANING OF PAY CONFLICT University of Edinburgh COMPETITION AND CONTROL AT WORK Centre for Research in Industrial Democracy and Participation Glasgow University     

Stock Returns following Large One-Day Declines: Evidence on Short-Term Reversals and Longer-Term Performance

We examine stock returns following large one-day price declines and find that the bid-ask bounce and the degree of market liquidity explain short-term price reversals. Further, we do not find evidence consistent with the overreaction hypothesis. We observe that securities with large one-day price declines perform poorly over an extended time horizon.     

Regulation Fair Disclosure and the Cost of Adverse Selection

Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD), imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2000, was designed to prohibit disclosure of material private information to selected market participants. The informational advantage such select participants gain is unclear. If multiple “insiders” receive identical information, private information is immediately incorporated in price and each insider has zero expected profit. If, on the other hand, Regulation FD has curtailed the flow of information from firms, private information becomes longer‐lived and more valuable. Hence, market makers will demand increased compensation by widening the adverse selection component of the bid‐ask spread. We identify the cost components of the bid‐ask spread for a sample of NASDAQ stocks surrounding the implementation of Regulation FD. Controlling for other factors affecting the spread, we find that adverse selection costs increase approximately 36% after Regulation FD. We interpret our finding as Regulation FD failing to achieve one of its desired objectives.     

The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research

Recent years have seen an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the process of gentrification, accompanied by a surge of articles published on the topic. This article looks at some recent literature — both scholarly and popular — and considers the reasons why the often highly critical perspectives on gentrification that we saw in earlier decades have dwindled. Whilst a number of reasons could be put forward, three in particular are discussed. First, the resilience of theoretical and ideological squabbles over the causes of gentrification, at the expense of examining its effects; second, the demise of displacement as a defining feature of the process and as a research question; and third, the pervasive influence of neoliberal urban policies of ‘social mix’ in central city neighbourhoods. It is argued that the ‘eviction’ of critical perspectives from a field in which they were once plentiful has serious implications for those at risk from gentrification, and that reclaiming the term from those who have sugarcoated what was not so long ago a ‘dirty word’ ( Smith, 1996 ) is essential if political challenges to the process can be effective.     

Foreign Investors' Reaction to Lower Profitability – The Role of Information Asymmetry*

Owners of firms in trouble are more exposed to moral hazard problems than owners of successful firms. Foreign owners who face higher costs to monitor the firm should be more vulnerable to these problems than domestic ones. Consequently, a downward revision in a firm's expected future earnings should push foreign investors to sell their shares to a larger extent than domestic investors. We test this hypothesis on profit warnings issued at the Helsinki Stock Exchange. Our results reveal that in the wake of profit warnings foreign investors will predominantly sell, while domestic investors pick up the net sales by foreigners. Differences in the scale of the foreign investor sell‐out reaction are explained by a number of variables. The most significant one is our proxy for the magnitude of surprise in the warning. The reaction also increases with the degree of perceived information asymmetry for the firm that issued the warning, while foreign members on the firm's board have a moderating impact. By contrast, a number of general corporate governance‐related variables have no statistically significant impact on the reaction.     

Household Production and Capitalist Development in Contemporary Russia

This essay reviews four recent books based on research on the development of capitalism and the position of household‐based farming in post‐Soviet Russia. Each of the books represents a different set of conceptual assumptions and is based on different methods of enquiry. It is argued that a problematic feature of much of the literature on this topic is that it begins from the assumption that successful capitalist development in Russian agriculture should be based on the development of small‐scale family farming. This tends to obscure the variety of forms of production that have emerged so far and the range of different relationships between them.