Managing Some Motorised Recreational Boating Challenges in South African Estuaries: A Case Study at the Kromme River Estuary

Estuaries in South Africa face negative crowding effects with respect to motorised boat use because of competing demand. This paper proposes this be managed through user charges and that the setting of these charges be informed by applying a choice experiment to estimate user preferences for reduced motorised boat congestion on the Kromme River Estuary, Eastern Cape. The application of this method led the paper to deduce that users are willing to pay an additional supplementary charge of R548 per annum during peak periods (only) in order to experience a decrease in negative crowding effects.     

Bildungspolitik, interdisziplin?re Personalentwicklung und Ressourcenabh?ngigkeit: Abh?ngigkeitsreduzierung durch staatlich beeinflusste Personalentwicklung?

High quality human resources are the keystone of global competitive capability for German companies. The availability of these resources, however, will change for the worse because of the downward trend of demographical developments in connection with the imperative of advanced job experience. In order to assure the supply of human resources and to diminish the resource dependency, companies foster??in best case interdisciplinarily??HR development. Also the German government is concerned in human resource supply to preserve competitiveness. By starting an educational policy initiative, the government tried to influence HR development of companies. This article aims against the background of the resource dependence perspective of Pfeffer and Salancik at examining in which way this educational policy initiative can actually assure a human resources supply and on which way a higher degree of efficiency can be achieved.     

The Economic Problem of Happiness: Keynes on Happiness and Economics

By stressing the substantial continuity of vision between John Maynard Keynes’s early unpublished essays and his more mature writings, the paper discusses Keynes’s ethics and focuses on his thoughts about happiness. In particular, we emphasize the anti-utilitarianism of Keynes’s vision and his belief that material wealth is but a precondition to enjoy the possibilities of a good life, and direct attention to problems of incommensurability raised by the multidimensional nature of happiness as considered by Keynes. We then argue that the rediscovery of Keynes’s legacy in this respect may be a precious counterweight to the most controversial aspects of today’s happiness research.     

Asymmetric volatility spillover in the Tokyo stock exchange

This paper examines volatility transfers between size-based stock indexes from the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We use a bivariate EGARCH model to test for volatility spillover effects between large- and small-cap stock indexes. We find an asymmetric volatility spillover from large-cap stock returns to small-cap returns, but not vice versa. We also find a small-firm January effect, but not a June seasonality, in either large-and small-cap stock returns. Instead, we find that the conditional correlation between large- and small-cap indexes is time-varying, showing a tendency to increase during the month of June.(JEL G12, G15)     

Bilateral versus Multilateral Trade and Investment Liberalisation

To assess the welfare effects of bilateral versus multilateral trade and/or investment liberalisation in general equilibrium, we set up a three‐country and three‐factor knowledge‐capital model of trade and multinational activity. Numerical simulation results indicate that multilateral liberalisation tends to dominate bilateral liberalisation in welfare terms. A transition economy tends to prefer bilateral over multilateral liberalisation to avoid plant relocation. For similar reasons, a developed country may prefer bilateral over multilateral liberalisation, if the other economies exhibit big relative factor endowment differences.     

The Determinants of the Leasing Decision of Small and Large Companies

We analyse the leasing decision of more than 3000 UK quoted and unquoted companies over the sample period 1982–1996. We show that, for the sample as a whole, companies that use leasing are more likely to have tax losses, high fixed capital investment, high debt-to-equity ratio and to be larger than companies that do not use leasing. We show, however, that the determinants of leasing are not homogeneous across firms of different size. For large companies, leasing, profitability, leverage and taxation are positively correlated. In contrast, for small companies, the leasing decision is not driven by taxation or by profitability, but by growth opportunities. We show that small firms with high Tobin's q and those that are less profitable are more likely to use leasing.     

Child Labor and School Achievement in Latin America

Child labor’s effect on academic achievement is estimatedusing unique data on third and fourth graders in nine Latin-Americancountries. Cross-country variation in truancy regulations providesan exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in thesegrades, providing exogenous variation in the opportunity costof children’s time. Least squares estimates suggest thatchild labor lowers test scores, but those estimates are biasedtoward zero. Corrected estimates are still negative and statisticallysignificant. Children working 1 standard deviation above themean have average scores that are 16 percent lower on mathematicsexaminations and 11 percent lower on language examinations,consistent with the estimates of the adverse impact of childlabor on returns to schooling.     

On the relationship between absolute prudence and absolute risk aversion

Abstract For a utility function , the functions and are the Arrow-Pratt coefficient of absolute risk aversion (ara) and the coefficient of absolute prudence (ap). They measure respectively an agent’s sensitivity to risk and the strength of the precautionary saving motive under income uncertainty.