Hospitality Staff Attitudes to Guests with Impaired Mobility: The Potential of Education as an Agent of Attitudinal Change

This study aims to determine whether the attitudes of students (and therefore future employers) towards people with physical disabilities can be modified by exposing them to the needs of disabled people, or whether perceptions of the needs of the disabled are too entrenched for education to effect any change. It also evaluates whether attitudinal changes are enduring and therefore continue to influence students' responses to the disabled after a period of time has elapsed.     

Perceived Onboard Service Needs of Passengers with Mobility Limitations: An Investigation among Flight Attendants

The purpose of this study is to explore flight attendants' perceptions of the in-flight service needs of passengers with mobility impairments. In addition, this study seeks out flight attendants' recommendations for improving services to passengers with mobility impairments. The existing literature draws attention to the service needs of passengers with disabilities from the customers' perspectives. However, this study aims to understand these service needs from the service provider's perspective. Participants of the study are flight attendants who have extensive in-flight service experience and have served passengers with disabilities. The study finds four types of in-flight needs from people with mobility impairments: (1) the need for help in using in-flight amenities, (2) the need to be treated the same as passengers without any disabilities, (3) the need for individualized services, and (4) the need for effective communication and accurate information. To address these needs, flight attendants suggest that airline managers should provide adequate flight information for people with disabilities and sufficient training to front line airline and airport employees.     

Advisory Councils in Franchising: Advancing a Theory-Based Typology

There is limited empirical data on the roles associated with Franchise Advisory Councils (FACs) yet much time, money, and energy is spent on these quasi-governing bodies. This qualitative research study combines a series of semistructured interviews with franchisors and franchisees who are part of systems with and without FACs, data from case studies involving interviews, and participant observations of FAC meetings and conference calls. The results identified four core roles FACs perform (i.e., supporting, partnering, representing, and monitoring) and uses a multitheoretical perspective to advance a typology to explain franchisor–franchisee dynamics within FACs.     

Insurance Derivatives: A New Asset Class for the Capital Markets and a New Hedging Tool for the Insurance Industry

The number and severity of natural catastrophes has increased dramatically over the last decade. As a result, there is now a shortage of capacity in the property catastrophe insurance industry in the U.S. This article discusses how insurance derivatives, particularly the Chicago Board of Trade's catastrophe options contracts, represent a possible solution to this problem. These new financial instruments enable the capital markets to provide the insurance industry with the reinsurance capacity it needs. The capital markets are willing to perform this role because of the new asset class characteristics of securitized insurance risk: positive excess returns and diversification benefits.
The article also demonstrates how insurance companies can use insurance derivatives such as catastrophe options and catastrophe-linked bonds as effective, low-cost risk management tools. In reviewing the performance of the catastrophe contracts to date, the authors report promising signs of growth and liquidity in these markets.     

Futures in global space//www.models.gis.media : [BBR]1[/BBR]

Geographers deal with global and local space and their interrelationships and thus bring new insights, perspectives, and methods to global questions. This is appealing to futurists since the principle of ‘think globally-act locally’ has been an inspiration for many years. In this paper I explore how old and new approaches in geography, as well as new information technologies such as the World Wide Web (WWW) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), might contribute to global modeling. I briefly review also the history of global economy models to discover lessons for future attempts to construct global models, not least how prevailing paradigms and institutional expediency determine the intellectual effort, and its impact. I then describe some of the new directions being undertaken by global modelers, quantitative geographers and regional scientists in the 1990s, and the possibilities and challenges for the next few years, and their contribution to the knowledge building process and its context.     

Long-term forecasting methods: Emphasis and institutions

There are many explanations why the more structured and formalised techniques of forecasting have not yet provided major input to government policy except in specialised areas. This article gives an assessment of the present state of the art in our ability to predict the consequences of current actions in the long-term future. The relevance of this to the ongoing debate about the place of formal methods in policy analysis is considered. In many instances it seems that the methods used run counter to the ideal of scientific liberalism to which the forecasters and officials involved often subscribe. The article indicates where institutional arrangements can be adjusted to ensure that the forecasting ability available is better employed, and points to areas in which forecasting methodologists should increase their attention if forecasting methods are to support more open and more flexible institutional arrangements.     

Development,distribution and the future

The distribution of world output between countries, and between social groups within countries, is central to long-term development prospects. Unequal shares mean unequal influence over the future direction of world affairs. The level and structure of demand are conditioned by the distribution of financial resources; while the power to influence the course of development is itself tied to the resources that can be marshalled in support of one's objectives. Two forecasting techniques, scenario construction and global modelling, are used to assess these relationships and explore the consequences of one possible ‘future history’ in which distribution worldwide does eventually begin to improve. Striking limitations to most development strategies are identified; without a wide-ranging set of changes, the prospects for improved distribution—and relief of poverty—are bleak.     

Job preferences of students and new graduates in nursing

This article investigates the preferences of student and newly graduated nurses for pecuniary and nonpecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. It is the first study applying methods based on discrete choice experiments to a developed country nursing workforce. It is also the first to focus on the transition through university training and into work. This is particularly important as junior nurses have the lowest retention levels in the profession. We sample 526 individuals from nursing programmes in two Australian universities. Flexible and newly developed models combining heteroscedasticity with unobserved heterogeneity in scale and preference weights are estimated. Overall, salary remains the most important feature in increasing the probability that a job will be selected. ‘Supportive management/staff’ and ‘quality of care’ follow as the most important attributes from a list of 11 nonpecuniary characteristics. However, the subset of new graduates rank ‘supportive management/staff’ above salary increases, emphasizing the importance of a supportive workplace in the transition from university to the workplace. We find substantial preference heterogeneity and some attributes, such as the opportunity for clinical rotations, are found to be attractive to some nurses while seen as negative by others. Nursing retention could be improved by designing different employment packages to appeal to these different tastes.     

Moral Hazard,portfolio allocation,and asset returns for thrift institutions

This article examines the earnings performance of nontraditional assets allowed to thrifts since the early 1980s. It uses the statistical cost accounting methodology developed by Hester and Zoellner to estimate average returns on thrift portfolio investments for the years ending June 30, 1987 and June 30, 1988. Results show that average returns on land loans, service corporation investment, real estate investment, and commercial loans were significantly lower than returns on more traditional assets. The results are far more pronounced at capital deficient institutions, lending support to the hypothesis that they used nontraditional investments as a means of exploiting the deposit insurance system. Returns on nontraditional assets are significantly affected by geographic factors, even for well capitalized institutions. The article concludes with an evaluation of the reimposition of portfolio restrictions on thrifts by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989.The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the Federal Housing Finance Board, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. George Benston, Tom Fomby, Allen Berger, John Wolken, and anonymous referees made numerous constructive suggestions.     

Design vs. Content: A Study of Adolescent Girls' Website Design Preferences

This study considered the utility of gender schema theory in examining girls' website design preferences. It built on a previous study which identified eight website evaluation criteria related to biological sex: collaboration, social connectivity, flexibility, motility, contextuality, personal identification, inclusion, and graphic/multimedia concentration. Eleven fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old girls participated in the study. The participants completed the short form of the Children's Sex-Role Inventory (CSRI). Following 50-minute Web searching sessions, they were divided into a feminine-high group and a masculine-high group based on their CSRI scores. Each group then participated in interviews concerning their website evaluation and design preferences. Data analysis identified relationships between gender schema and five of the proposed criteria: social connectivity, flexibility, motility, inclusion, and graphic/multimedia concentration. More generally, members of the feminine-high group favored evaluation criteria relating to graphic and multimedia design, whereas members of the masculine-high group favored evaluation criteria relating to subject content. These results indicate that gender schema theory can indeed serve as a framework for making website design more appealing to female adolescent users. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.