Residents' perceptions of the environmental impacts of tourism in the Lake Bosomtwe Basin,Ghana

This study investigates residents' perceptions of tourism's physical impacts in the Lake Bosomtwe Basin in Ghana. Data were based on a resident survey conducted in the basin in January 2006. Residents perceived both positive and negative impacts of tourism development, but were more inclined to the positive side. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the district assemblies in partnership with the Ministry of Tourism should start managing the impacts, and also educate the local population on the dangers of underestimating the negative impacts of tourism on the environment.     

The relationship of perception of time and attributes of leisure in daily experiences

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between perceived passage of time (slowly versus quickly) and perceived freedom, enjoyment, interest and subjective meaning of leisure in daily experiences of married couples. Eleven college-age married couples participated in this study. Data were collected using experience sampling method that produced a total of 650 self-reports. Couples were signalled at random five times a day for one week. Using logistic regression results suggest that some leisure attributes are more relevant in influencing perception of passage of time in husbands' and wives' daily experiences.     

International capital flows under dispersed private information

It is well established that private information is critical to our understanding of asset prices. In this paper we argue that it also affects international capital flows and use a simple two-country DSGE model to illustrate its impact. We show that private information (i) increases the volatility of both net and gross capital flows, (ii) leads to a high correlation between capital inflows and outflows, (iii) leads to a disconnect of capital flows from observed macro fundamentals and (iv) implies that capital flows contain information about the future macro fundamentals. We also show that dispersed information affects capital flows both through asset prices and directly, so that the impact on flows is not just the mirror image of the impact on prices.     

Competence Building and Corporate Renewal

In 1996, the French business publication Capital carried an analysis of what it called the resurrection of the dinosaurs: the revival of corporations that had been viewed as moribund. Examples abound in every industrialised country: Chrysler, IBM or General Electric in the United States and Usinor-Sacilor, Siemens or Fiat in Europe. What strategies are behind these cases of revival? This article describes how, starting in 1993, a French company sought to renew itself by implementing one particular strategy which has been widely discussed among managers and academics alike: competence building. It then discusses the general lessons which can be drawn from the case. In particular, the article aims to reveal empirically the relationship between competence building and the corporate renewal process and then to use the case history to help develop the theory of competence-based competition between firms.     

Recycling and extending product-life: an evolutionary modelling

This paper presents a model-based analysis of firms’ economic incentives to extend product life and market recyclable products. We address this problem by developing an evolutionary simulation model to describe the behavior of business firms as interacting with consumers and recyclers. Market structure, business firms’ R&D strategies and consumers’ preferences are found to have an important influence here. The simulation results show that improvement in recycling is necessary but not sufficient to solve the issue of increase in waste. Recycling will need to be backed up with an extension in product-life to face such an unwanted increase. Adopting such a strategy could be positive for firms and for the environment because it could lead to high economic performance, both in terms of profits and market share, and to high environmental performance, both in terms of product recyclability and product lifetime. Our results suggest introducing regulation policies aimed at encouraging firms to invest in developing green products, i.e. those which are easily recyclable and which have a long lifetime, and getting consumers to buy them. It would also seem crucial to lend support to innovation outlay for such firms and to favor their seeking to improve product performance.

Heterogeneity effects from market interventions

The aim of this paper is to test whether the European Commission activities generate a heterogeneity effect on the merging parties. A sample of 74 firms involved in 45 contested merger and acquisition operations during the years 1990 to 1999 is used. The methodology is based on the GARCH framework. The main result is that, globally, the DGC interventions seem not to reduce significantly the heterogeneity among investors, except for the operations where it takes strong decisions like prohibition. In these last cases, the signal coming from the DGC encompasses valuable information and is well understood by market participants.     

Estimating the price elasticity of demand in the London stock market

The hypothesis that demand curves for individual stocks slope downwards is typically investigated by empirical analysis of stock price movements following events that cause shifts in demand or supply. However, it is difficult to attribute observed price movements between downward sloping demand curves and information conveyed by the event. In this paper an econometric approach, based on market-maker response to unexpected changes in inventory, is used to separate out the slope of the demand curve from information effects and estimate the slopes of the demand curves for twenty stocks included in the Financial Times-Stock Exchange 100 Share Index (FTSE100). The analysis suggests that downward sloping demand curves would decrease the price by about 7.5% for a 1% increase in the number of outstanding shares.     

Day-of-the-Week Autocorrelations, Cross-Autocorrelations, and the Weekend Phenomenon

This study examines whether autocorrelations or cross-autocorrelations are more closely associated with the weekend phenomenon. Our results show a significant day-of-the-week pattern in autocorrelations associated with the weekend phenomenon. However, we find no marginal influence of a day-of-the-week pattern in cross-autocorrelations on the weekend phenomenon.     

Differences in the Cost of Mortgage Credit Implications for Discrimination

This paper estimates the mortgage interest rate differences paid by Asian, Hispanic, and African–American borrowers to a national home mortgage lender in the years 1988–1989. Controlling for differences in market rates, rate lock protection, and borrower risk factors, conventional loan interest rates are almost perfectly race-neutral. The single deviation from race-neutrality is that when interest rates fall during the borrower's rate-lock period, only African–American borrowers are unable to capture a share of this decline. Government (FHA and VA) credit models show small premia paid by African–American borrowers of about $1.80 per month on average. In government lending, Hispanic borrowers alone are unable to capture rate declines occurring during the borrower's rate-lock period.