Corruption: Where to Draw the Line?

Just what is corruption, and what should, or can, be done about it? The author is Head of the Management Centre at South Bank University, London.     

State promotion of high-definition television

Governments have used a number of mechanisms to support research and production in domestic industries that are considered strategic. In recent years the Japanese system of administrative guidance and support for pre-competitive research joint ventures has arguabh proved the most successul High-dgfnition teleuislon ( H D V provides an interesting new case study in government support for high-tech industries. Wzile the failure of the EC's venture in this jeld is perhaps unsurprising, the MUSE pryect in Japan has suffered a similar fate. Success in HDTV har been achieved by the US government's novel use ofpre-competitive contests in which domestic and overseas companies are free to form consortia and to arrange side-payments which share out the winning 'prize'. This innovation in the state's promotion of innovation may haue wider applications, though its repeated use could inhibit research by individual companies able tojee-ride on the contest winners.     

Humor and cognitive responses to advertising stimuli: A trace consolidation approach

Despite the predictions of several attitude change theories, most empirical research suggests that humorous communications are no more persuasive than their serious counterparts. The present study adopted a trace consolidation theory approach and tested the hypothesis that humorous appeals are more persuasive than serious appeals when time for trace consolidation is allowed. The trace consolidation theory hypothesis was supported most directly by shifts in cognitive responses. On some measures, sex differences were also observed. Specifically, males were found to be more susceptible than females to the humorous persuasive appeal.     

A stochastic control approach to buffer stock management in the Taiwan rice market

Buffer stock management of agricultural commodities is an intertemporal optimization problem under uncertainty. Stochastic optimal control techniques are presented as a means of solving this problem and then applied to the problem of farmer income support and price stabilization of the rice market in Taiwan. Deterministic results show that the price variation of a free market solution can be substantially reduced with little favoring of one group over another. Operation of a buffer stock under supply uncertainty is shown to generate greater variability in consumer expenditures and producer income than a free market solution.     

ON THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE BAUMOL-TOBIN AND MILLER-ORR OPTIMAL CASH BALANCE MODELS

In this note, the author identifies a correspondence relationship between the Baumol-Tobin (BT) and Miller-Orr (MO) optimal cash balance frameworks and specifies the conditions under which both models imply the same level of optimal cash balances. Realistic applications of these models will concern net cash flows that exhibit behavior somewhere between the two extremes of BT entirely deterministic and MO completely random. The author demonstrates that if the correspondence relationship is satisfied, either the BT or the MO cash balance model can be employed since both models imply the same result. One conjecture open for empirical verification is that cash balance models perform more (less) adequately for groups of firms that satisfy (violate) the correspondence relationship.     

Long-term dependence in common stock returns

The efficient market, martingale model of security price movements requires that the arrival of new information be promptly arbitraged away. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an arbitraged price is that statistical dependence among prices must decrease very rapidly. If persistent statistical dependence is present, the arbitraged price changes do not follow a martingale and should have an infinite variance. Using a technique for detecting long-term dependence, called R/S analysis, 200 daily stock return series are studied; many series are characterized by long-term dependence. Thus, in the presence of long-term dependence, the martingale model does not hold. Also, the distribution of security returns is non-normal stable Paretian as opposed to Gaussian.