Visitor management in the public planning policy context: A case study of Cambridge

Visitor management plans are increasingly seen by local authorities as an essential contribution they can make towards sustainable tourism. However, tourism is subject to many external influences and is only part of the system of activities and land uses at the destination. Successful visitor management must, therefore, be broadly based and rooted in a wide range of policies. The objectives for sustainable tourism in Cambridge are supported by policies at the European, national, regional, county and local level covering tourism, recreation, transport, the environment, land use and economic development. This results in an integrated policy framework that ensures consistency, encourages cooperation and long‐term planning, makes the best use of resources, opens up additional sources of finance and provides a firm justification for refusing undesirable development. Achieving integration requires the visitor management plan to be seen neither as an end nor as a beginning, but as part of a process. In Cambridge this has involved a commitment to monitoring and reviewing strategies and to ensuring a policy input on tourism issues at all levels of decision making. Appropriate ad hoc bodies have been set up. Visitor management cannot succeed in isolation: other policies must be made to work for it, not frustrate action.     

Surviving leisure time racism: the burden of racial harassment on Britain's black footballers

This paper explores the burden of racial harassment and abuse on Britain's black footballers and places this in the context of leisure time racism. It is based on research carried out between 1989 and 1994. It is suggested that the source of such racism has been a neglected issue and only gained significant recognition in 1993 when the Commission for Racial Equality launched its Let's Kick Racism Out of Football campaign. It is argued that the racial abuse and chanting aimed at black footballers are examples of racial harassment. The research gathered evidence from two locations - Leeds and Newcastle - to assess the extent to which players were being disproportionately affected by this harassment and introduces the concept of 'burden of abuse'. Some historical background is provided and football stadia are considered as key symbolic leisure sites where a basic white working class racism has found expression. The growth of black footballers since the 1970s is considered, as well as the way such players have survived the racial harassment, some of whom were interviewed as part of the research exercise.     

Directors' remuneration and the DTI review of company law

This article considers how directors' remuneration should be set. It does so in both general terms and in the light of the DTI (1999) paper entitled Directors' Remuneration. A Consultative Document . The DTI document forms part of a general review of company law that is being undertaken by the Department of Trade and Industry. This article explores the extent to which these government-directed developments can be seen as an extension of the Cadbury, Greenbury and Hampel Reports and the extent to which self-regulation as opposed to government regulation looks set to dominate this area.     

The dark side of financial innovation: A case study of the pricing of a retail financial product

The offering prices of 64 issues of a popular retail structured equity product were, on average, almost 8% greater than estimates of the products' fair market values obtained using option pricing methods. Under reasonable assumptions about the underlying stocks' expected returns, the mean expected return estimate on the structured products is slightly below zero. The products do not provide tax, liquidity, or other benefits, and it is difficult to rationalize their purchase by informed rational investors. Our findings are, however, consistent with the recent hypothesis that issuing firms might shroud some aspects of innovative securities or introduce complexity to exploit uninformed investors.     

Credibility in Loss Reserving

This article proposes using credibility theory in the context of stochastic claims reserving. We consider the situation where an insurer has access to the claims experience of its peer competitors and has the potential to improve prediction of outstanding liabilities by incorporating information from other insurers. Based on the framework of Bayesian linear models, we show that the development factor in the classical chain-ladder setting has a credibility expression: a weighted average of the prior mean and the best estimate from the data. In the empirical analysis, we examine loss triangles for the line of commercial auto insurance from a portfolio of insurers in the United States. We employ hierarchical model for the specification of prior and show that prediction could be improved through borrowing strength among insurers based on a hold-out sample validation.     

Can broker-dealer client surveys provide signals for debt investing?

We use a novel data set to study return predictability in debt markets. The data are collected from J.P. Morgan’s periodic surveys on its clients’ outlook for changes in US Treasury yields and corporate credit spreads. We document that simple signals constructed from such surveys predict excess returns on debt portfolios formed on the basis of duration (2-years minus zero) or credit quality (BBB minus AAA). A linear trading strategy placing equal weight on Treasury and Credit signals has an annualized Information Ratio equal to 1.18, before transaction costs. We also show that predictability is likely to stem from private information possessed by survey respondents rather than from risk premia.     

2013 Nobel Prize Revisited: Do Shiller's Models Really Have Predictive Power?

The authors take a critical view of the investment approach advocated by recent Nobel laureate Robert Shiller. A critic of efficient markets theory, Shiller has proposed that investors, when attempting to determine whether the S&P Index is under‐ or overvalued, should use a P/E ratio whose denominator is the 120‐month moving average of the company's EPS. But the authors find that such an approach does not provide consistently superior insights to those provided by conventional PEs—and that, for example, the use of both conventional and Shiller PE multiples would have indicated a highly overvalued S&P not only in early 2000—before the bursting of the dotcom bubble—but also in 1996, when Fed Governor Greenspan spoke prematurely of “irrational exuberance.” The authors also show that both the Shiller PE and the conventional PE ratios fail a critical statistical test: they are not mean‐reverting—and as a consequence, both ratios can be expected to indicate either undervaluation or overvaluation for very long periods of time. Complicating matters, current earnings are useful to investors in predicting future stock prices only insofar as they provide a reliable guide to future earnings and cash flows. And as one would expect in competitive capital markets, even perfect foreknowledge of future earnings is not likely to be much help since, according to the authors' analysis, five‐year earnings explain on average less than 20% of the variation in prices over consecutive five‐year periods.     

Decomposing the market,industry, and firm components of profitability: implications for forecasts of profitability

Academics and practitioners frequently highlight that overall market and industry performance is an important aspect of a firm’s profitability. However, few studies allow for the decomposition of a firm’s profitability into market, industry, and idiosyncratic components, and those that do often assume that the market and industry components are cross-sectional constants. In this study, we allow for variation in firm-specific sensitivities to market, industry, and idiosyncratic economic shocks, and then assess whether and when this decomposition results in improved forecasts of profitability. For the overall sample, we find significant improvements in terms of the magnitude of forecast errors and the frequency with which forecasts based on the decomposed values are superior versus forecasts using only total profitability. Across the sample as a whole, decomposing profitability in the forecasting process results in more accurate forecasts greater than two-thirds of the time (increasing to almost 80% within certain subsamples). Our results provide strong support for the role that firm-specific measures of market and industry profitability play in predicting a firm’s future performance, as well as highlighting settings where the decomposition provides the greatest benefit in terms of predicting future changes in profitability.     

“I just like the stock”: The role of Reddit sentiment in the GameStop share rally

This paper investigates the role played by the social media platform Reddit in the events around the GameStop (GME) share rally in early 2021. In particular, we analyze the impact of discussions on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit on the price dynamics of the American online retailer GameStop. We customize a sentiment analysis dictionary for Reddit platform users based on the Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER) sentiment analysis package and perform textual analysis on 10.8 million comments. The analysis of the relationships between Reddit sentiments and 1-, 5-, 10-, and 30-min GameStop returns contribute to the growing body of literature on “meme stocks” and the impact of discussions on investment forums on intraday stock price movements.