Liquidity, Quality, Production Cost, and Welfare in a Search Model of Money

This paper examines a search model of money with divisible commodities of high and low quality, while keeping the assumptions of indivisible money and unit-inventory constraint. With no direct barter and a higher fixed cost of producing high relative to low quality, an increase in the money stock encourages the production of high-quality output by trading off the larger trading opportunities against the significance of higher fixed cost. As long as the fixed-cost differential between high and low quality is sufficiently small relative to the utility gain from high-quality consumption, the quality improvement outweighs the negative effect of higher money stocks on aggregate production, and hence implies higher welfare.     

The upward trend in women’s college-going: the role of teenagers’ anticipated future labour force attachment

This article focuses on the role of teenagers’ anticipated labour force participation in explaining the upward trend in U.S. women’s college-going. A simple conceptual model implies that individuals with more anticipated lifetime hours of work are more likely to invest in college education. My analysis using data from three National Longitudinal Surveys supports the theoretical implication. This finding, combined with the trend towards higher work expectations of young women across birth cohorts, may account in part for the upward trends in women’s college attendance and completion.     

Nobelity and novelty: Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott’s contributions viewed from Vienna

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2004 to Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott represents an opportunity to evaluate their contributions in light of Austrian economics. We lay out the basics of their contributions—the general equilibrium approach to economic fluctuations and the game theoretic approach to policy—and argue that they have tenets similar to those of Austrianism. We argue that their methodology parallels Austrian methodology in several significant ways that have gone unnoticed. We conclude that Kydland and Prescott’s Nobel Prize suggests Austrian approaches can have a more prominent impact than they have had in the past.     

CONVERTIBLE BOND PRICING MODELS

Convertible bonds are an important segment of the corporate bond market, with worldwide outstandings approaching US$235 billion. Simple pricing models value a convertible bond as being equivalent to a straight bond with an embedded option that enables the bond holder to convert to a specific amount of common stock. The straight bond is subject to both interest rate and credit risk, whereas the option to convert is dependent on the underlying stock price, which exposes the convertible bond holder to equity risk. The complexity of these features means that convertible bonds tend to be treated casually in major derivatives and corporate finance textbooks. This paper presents a survey of the theoretical and empirical aspects of convertible bond pricing. The limitations of these studies are highlighted to identify those areas of research that may improve the valuation process and facilitate the application of these securities for corporate financing.     

Are we operating effectively? A lean analysis of operating theatre changeovers

Hospital operating theatres are a critical but costly resource in healthcare processes. Their efficiency and utilisation impact upon hospital finances, clinical effectiveness and patient outcomes. Operations management techniques have now been applied widely to optimise flow. An important challenge is to balance the needs of process flexibility, efficiency and work standardisation with clinical requirements. This paper applies operations management methods to analyse elective orthopaedic surgery at five international hospitals to describe the issues that affect operating theatre productivity. It utilises an innovative method of video analysis to observe patient changeovers over 29 days of surgery and data is analysed to understand the causes of variability and waste. The findings suggest that processes which are standardised via operations management methodologies can improve productivity in a process that exhibits wide variation in practice. There are apparent trade-offs associated with efficiency and clinical concerns such infection control, that lead to different standard process archetypes being utilised. Recommendations for standardising patient changeovers are provided.     

Retaining the visitor,enhancing the experience: identifying attributes of choice in repeat museum visitation

• How people make choices in relation to cultural and leisure consumption has been explored from the viewpoint of motivation, lifestyle segmentation, and lifecycle. Little is known about the specific characteristics associated with choices to visit, re‐visit, or not to visit a museum. Understanding characteristics of choice, developing incentives, bundled packages, and levels of pricing is an essential element in marketing strategies for museums operating in a competitive leisure marketplace. However, determining what really matters to cultural consumers is complex and methodologies to assist in unraveling such complexities are not easily identified. This study aimed to address ways in which people respond to specific incentives as influences in choosing museum visitation. The study was conducted in two major museums in Australia to determine how useful choice modeling is in identifying features that matter to cultural consumers. The results suggest that choice modeling has much to offer in relation to understanding the benefits people are seeking from a museum experience as well as offering strategic insight into potential collaborative ventures and re‐combinations of existing museum products and services.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Liberalizing Reforms and the European Union: Accession,Membership, and Convergence

The European Union (EU) may promote reforms to policies and institutions through at least two distinct mechanisms. First, accession to the EU requires countries to undertake reforms. Second, the EU common market may promote Tiebout jurisdictional competition. We empirically evaluate these two mechanisms using an unbalanced panel of up to 45 European countries during 1970–2010. We find that relationships between EU accession/membership and measures of policies/institutions are often statistically insignificant. Furthermore, when the estimated effects are statistically significant they are generally modest.     

Auditors' Responses to Workload Imbalance and the Impact on Audit Quality*

Using detailed data for fieldwork hours and audit hours by rank from audit engagements in Korea, we examine whether audits conducted under workload imbalance, proxied by busy‐season audits, impair audit quality, and how auditors adjust staff assignments for busy‐season audits. We generally find that busy‐season audits are associated with lower audit quality, and that audit firms reduce the involvement of senior auditors during busy‐season audits. In addition, the greater the involvement of senior auditors and junior auditors, the lesser the deterioration in audit quality. Finally, although there is no increase in interim audits in response to workload imbalance during busy seasons, increasing interim audits can mitigate the negative impact of busy‐season audits on audit quality. Our results are relevant to auditors and regulators, who have expressed concerns about the adverse effects of workload imbalance on audit quality.     

Economic Stagnation and Crisis in Korea during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In contrast to rapid economic growth in the twentieth century, Korea suffered a long economic decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the failure accelerating from 1850 to 1890. According to 36 different harvest records, rice productivity continuously declined from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries due to deforestation and increase in natural disasters. Contraction of rural markets after the interruption of trade with Japan also contributed to the decrease in rice production. The third reason for the nineteenth‐century crisis was the dissolution of the government‐led grain storage and redistribution system. Finally, the ultimate culprit for the crisis could be found in Confucianism with which the Joseon Dynasty was unable to properly understand and respond to the crisis.