Decisions nonindustrial forest landowners make: an empirical examination

Our purpose is to estimate a model of non-industrial forest landowner behavior that considers certain types of behavior that have escaped discussion and rigorous investigation in the literature, yet which are critical to future policy making. Our focus on the many different but related decisions landowners make broadens the typical understanding of landowner behavior to show how bequest motives, debt and participation in non-timber activities, and harvesting decisions are interrelated and dependent on landowner preferences, market, and land characteristics.     

Are Information Attributes Priced?

A seminal model in finance links cost of equity capital to information precision, composition and dissemination. Using realized returns to proxy for cost of equity capital and the probability of an informed trade (PIN) to proxy for composition, prior research documents results consistent with the model's prediction regarding composition. Nonetheless, prior research that examines the construct validity cautions against the use of future realized returns to proxy for cost of equity capital and recommend r_{DIV_PREM} or r_{PEG_PREM} instead. The authors speculate but do not demonstrate how the results in existing research might be incorrect due to their use of realized returns. This paper provides such evidence. We find that the authors inference regarding PIN is dependent on their choice of realized returns to proxy for cost of equity capital. We also estimate a more complete specification of the model that includes precision and dissemination, and we decompose PIN into its component parts to isolate that portion of PIN that varies with dissemination. These refinements allow for new insights regarding the veracity of the model's predictions. We conclude that cost of equity capital is increasing in composition, and decreasing in dissemination, and find some, albeit not conclusive support, for the prediction that cost of equity capital is decreasing in precision.     

Adolescents' perceptions of the costs and benefits of food additives and their presence in different foods

A questionnaire concerning the use of additives in foods was completed by 572 high school students aged 12-15 years. Participants recorded how often they ate each of 16 common foods, and rated the relative levels of colourings, flavourings, preservatives and traces of pesticides that each of these foods contained. They also rated the relative importance of eight reasons (e.g. taste, health) in their own food choices, and provided comparative evaluations of the concepts 'food with additives' and 'food without additives' in terms of these same eight attributes. Participants discriminated between the 16 foods in terms of the chemicals they believed they contained, but these estimates were unaffected by age or sex. When these estimates were weighted by participants' own reports of consumption, girls scored lower than boys on a measure of the assumed additive content of their own diet. Own additive consumption was significantly associated with ratings of reasons for food choice and comparisons of food with/without additives. However, the form of this association did not support standard expectancy-value formulations of attitude-behaviour relationships. Food with additives was seen overall as preferable in terms of ease of preparation and duration of freshness, but more problematic in terms of health and safety.     

Diffusing ‘best practice’ in Chinese multinationals: the motivation,facilitation and limitations

With increasing global integration, the diffusion of ‘best practice’ is a critical activity in MNCs, particularly for those from developing countries which have recently joined global markets. Recent research has suggested that ‘reverse diffusion’ is an important approach to the internationalization of management. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of this argument. This paper draws on in-depth case studies of the UK subsidiaries of Chinese MNCs to explore the nature and characteristics of diffusion activities. It confirms that ‘reverse diffusion’ played a positive part in the internationalization process of these companies, although the impact on the home firms is limited. It also found that new forms of management transfer are emerging in these Chinese MNCs. This suggests that the diffusion of ‘best practice’ in MNCs can be varied with different national and organizational characteristics.     

Pricing and information content of block trades on the Shanghai Stock Exchange

We study the pricing mechanisms and information content of block trades on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) for the six year period from 2003 to 2009.There is an average of about 4% block discount, which is large in magnitude and statistically significant, reflecting compensation for locating counterparties and the cost of negotiating terms. We also examine permanent price impacts of the trades and find that discount block trades (DBTs) have significant negative permanent price impacts for various periods extended up to 60 trading days after the block trades. Conversely, premium block trades (PBTs) have small and statistically insignificant negative permanent price impacts, suggesting that buyers do not possess valuable private information. Finally, we classify the trades into buys and sells using a set of stricter rules and note similar results to those of DBTs and PBTs. Of additional note, block sells on stocks with expirations of restricted shares seem to have significant information content. As these trades are more likely to be originated from insiders, our results suggest that they strategically time the sale of these shares to maximize gains.     

Financial Services Industry PAC Contributions and Senate Committee Membership

This paper explores the relationship between relevant senate committee membership and campaign contributions from financial services industry political action committees (PACs) from 1998 to 2002. Since this was a period of significant legislative activity affecting the industry, it provides a fruitful time period to investigate the relationship between contributions and committee membership. It is found that membership on the Senate Banking Committee is consistently related to contributions from financial services PACs. Membership on the Senate Finance Committee is related to PAC contributions from some sectors of the industry for some time periods. It is also found that contributions are significantly higher for those senators facing re-election in the particular election cycle. The importance of relevant committee membershipto PAC contributions in the senate is consistent with previous work dealing with the House.     

Falling Wage Shares in Europe and the United States: How Important is Aggregation Bias?

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of the 1980s and 1990s partly reflects changes in the sectoral composition of the economy. The application of a fixed-weight aggregation method changes the profile of the observed wage share in a significant way: in particular there is no longer sign of an overshooting of the wage share levels of the early-1970s. Error-correction wage equations based on the adjusted wage shares generally have a better regression fit and show long-run elasticities of real wages to unemployment that vary less across countries and are substantially lower than those obtained with observed shares.