Estimating an origin–destination table for US imports of waterborne containerized freight

Containerized freight imports into the US are growing at an average of 10% per year. This traffic is concentrated at a small number of US seaports. It is therefore important to have an accurate understanding of the flow of containers from their origin country through these seaports to their final destination. This paper develops an optimization model to estimate route flows and a corresponding multi-modal origin–destination table for containers by synthesizing data on international trade and railcar movements with a gravity model for the demand of container traffic. This analysis provides insights into the balance of rail and truck inland transportation from each port.     

Sequential American Exchange Property Options

Property development activities often occur in stages, which are appropriately modeled as sequential American exchange property options, where there are interim expenditures required in order to keep the property development options “alive”. Normally American exchange options require a numerical solution, but herein there is a new closed-form approximate solution, which is computationally efficient and accurate. This method combines repeats of Margrabe European exchange and Geske compound option solutions with tight upper boundaries of either American perpetuities or European exchange options with a high volatility. Illustrations are provided of the sensitivity of the real sequential options and optimal timing to changes in several parameters, which provide a framework for property policy (tax, subsidy and regulatory) guidelines and for property development strategy evaluation. There are several plausible applications of these real option models in commercial and residential property development, within commercial property leases, with regard to switching tenants, and agricultural alternatives.     

Key institutions in business and management education research

The authors investigate institutional productivity in business and management education (BME) research based on the analysis of 4,464 articles published by 7,210 authors across 17 BME journals over a 10-year period, involving approximately 1,900 schools worldwide. Departing from traditional disciplinary silos, they examine the BME research field as a whole by including all traditional business disciplinary areas and producing two top 100 rankings, one based on raw number of author publications and the other based on weighted scores reflecting journal quality and coauthorship.     

Correction: Social Accountability,Ethics, and the Occupy Wall Street Protests

Journal of Business Ethics -     

Replicating Text: The Cumulation of Knowledge in Social Science

Obtaining a statistically significant result does not necessarily tell us whether we would obtain significant results in other, similar studies, particularly if the original sample sizes were small. This is why we are supposed to replicate experiments. The present study concerns social science events that cannot be repeated by virtue of their being historically situated. Among social science events, many textual data are datable and, by definition, unrepeatable. One solution to this quandary lies in bootstrap replications, which are based on the original data. A case in point is that of founding political speeches such as those that buoy the European construction. We analyze and compare 82 speeches made by President Delors over the period 1988–1994, and 28 by President Santer over the period 1995–1997. We have all these speeches (N = 110) concorded as to which words are used, how often, where, and when, with the help of a computer-aided content analysis package. We then test various hypotheses using replication bootstrap estimates, that is, by replicating the original sample a large number of times and recreating several thousand samples from the population so created.     

A Transaction Cost Primer on Farm Organization

Agricultural economists, with their knowledge of farming, are well positioned to take advantage of the fertile ground of economic organization. The transaction cost paradigm is particularly useful in addressing such questions and is outlined in this paper. The overriding theme in the transaction cost approach is that patterns of ownership and contracts are chosen to mitigate transaction costs, which result from attempts to establish and maintain property rights. In agriculture, transaction costs are heavily influenced by Mother Nature. Nature's uncertainty, via weather and pests, leads to moral hazard and seasonal forces impose constraints on production cycles that are not often found in the production of most other commodities. Applications in land contracts, asset control, and business organization are discussed.     

Accounting and networks of corruption

This study examines the nature and role of accounting practices in a network of corruption in an influence-market setting. The study focuses on the Canadian government’s Sponsorship Program (1994–2003), a national unification scheme that saw approximately $50 million diverted into the bank accounts of political parties, program administrators, and their families, friends and business colleagues. Relying on the institutional sociology of Bourdieu, the study demonstrates the precise role of accounting practices in the organization of a corrupt network imbued with a specific telos and certain accounting tasks. The study illustrates how accounting is accomplished and by whom, and it shows how the ‘skillful use’ of accounting practices and social interactions around these practices together enable corruption. In so doing, the study builds on a growing body of work examining criminogenic networks and the contextual, collaborative and systemic uses of accounting in such networks.     

Spatial Variation in the Determinants of House Prices and Apartment Rents in China

This paper provides an examination of China??s residential real estate market at the county level using data from that country??s 2000 census. The market is a new one, having only been fully established in 1998. The analysis in the paper is in the form of an aggregate (county-level) hedonic model specified in two versions. Global parameters results are estimated using spatial error model specifications while more local effects are estimated by geographically weighted regression. Global results are typical in that structural characteristics such as floor space and contextual characteristics such as level of in-migration are important in residential prices. Local results, however, indicate significant spatial variation in the effect of both structural amenities and locational context on housing prices. In a simpler specification, rents are shown to respond positively to both median house prices levels and the supply of apartments available at market prices, but also with significant spatial variation across China.     

Strategic insider trading around earnings announcements in Australia

This paper tests, within the Australian setting, whether directors strategically time trades in their own firms, around earnings announcements, in the context of impediments to trading in the immediately preceding period. I show that both signed and unsigned trade activity are insignificantly different from zero in the preceding period, and significantly negative and positive after the event. Further, directors in Australia significantly sell following positive earnings news, and buy after negative news, providing evidence of ‘indirect’ trading. Directors’ trades in the longer-term pre-announcement period are also negatively related to the news content sentiment, contrary to expectation. Finally, I find evidence of positive autocorrelation between directors’ trades over the longer-term past, and those executed after earnings announcements, which, in the absence of the ‘short-swing’ rule in Australia, casts doubt over short-term strategic insider trading, more generally.