“Our five year mission— to boldly go where no man has been before… .”

The paper presents research conducted in New Zealand on the content, creation, use and impact of mission statements. Following a review of the literature the paper goes on to report an empirical study comparing the reality of mission statements with the theory. The paper concludes that practice rarely coincides with theory and that there are a wide variety of types of mission statement in current use. Recommendations are made for creating more actionable mission statements.     

Timothy Cuff. The Hidden Cost of Economic Development: The Biological Standard of Living in Antebellum Pennsylvania. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. xvii + 277 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4119-8, $99.95 (cloth).

In recent years studies of "the body" have broadened the rangeof sources employed by social and cultural historians. SimonNewman and Walter Johnson, for example, recently focused onphysical characteristics to rebuild the lived experience ofunderrepresented historical actors such as Philadelphia’spoor or the South’s enslaved African Americans. Some economichistorians have targeted "the body" as well, but with differentquestions in mind. Econometric studies of physical characteristics     

Shareholder Returns from Supplying Trade Credit

We examine shareholder wealth implications of supplying financing to customers. Robust results suggest that excess returns and changes in trade receivables are directly and significantly related. Further evidence indicates the value of receivables is higher for suppliers with stronger motives relating to operating and contracting costs. The results also suggest a discounted value of receivables for financially unconstrained firms. Overall, we conclude that investors recognize trade credit as an effective instrument in mitigating frictions hindering sales growth. Thus, certain suppliers are positioned to derive increased strategic benefits from credit policy.     

Market Value of REIT Liquidity

We examine the relation between firm value and liquidity among REITs. Results show shareholders benefit from both cash and unused credit line capacity. The market values an additional dollar of cash at a premium and, as theory predicts, unused credit lines are significantly less valued than cash. Evidence suggests an increase in the market value of liquidity during the recent financial crisis. We also find that financial characteristics quantifying financial constraint influence the value of REIT financial flexibility. Most notably, the value of cash decreases with remaining credit line capacity. Although prior studies argue that cash and credit lines are substitutes, this is one of the first tests of whether the market prices this substitutability.     

Disentangling the Short and Long-Run Effects of Occupied Stock in the Rental Adjustment Process

In the current stand of literature on the rental adjustment process starting with Hendershott et al. (Real Estate Economics, 30, 165-183, 2002a, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 24, 59-87, 2002b) it has become practice to treat the compound variable “occupied stock” as a supply variable. In this study we show that this variable deserves a more critical investigation and that the general view of a supply variable may be misleading. Using panel data covering 30 urban areas for 17 years, we investigate the rental adjustment process in the German office market. The application of recently developed cointegration techniques for non-stationary panel data in conjunction with the corresponding error correction model (ECM) enables us to overcome the data limitations, particularly existent for most European real estate markets. Hence, our primary motivation is (a) to demonstrate how “occupied stock” should be interpreted correctly and (b) to provide useful insights into the long-term relationships and short-run dynamics of real office prime rents. The empirical evidence suggests that a one percent rise in office employment increases real rents on average by 1.64% through higher demand for office space. On the other hand, a one percent increase in the supply of office space decreases real rents in the long run by 2.25%. The results from the error correction model show that deviations from the long-run equilibrium lead to an adjustment process which restores equilibrium within approximately 3 years.