Urban Warfare Ecology: A Study of Water Supply in Basrah

This article assesses the impact of armed conflict on the drinking water service of Basrah from 1978 to 2013 through an ‘urban warfare ecology’ lens in order to draw out the implications for relief programming and relevance to urban studies. It interprets an extensive range of unpublished literature through a frame that incorporates the accumulation of direct and indirect impacts upon the hardware, consumables and people upon which urban services rely. The analysis attributes a step‐wise decline in service quality to the lack of water treatment chemicals, lack of spare parts, and, primarily, an extended ‘brain‐drain’ of qualified water service staff. The service is found to have been vulnerable to dependence upon foreign parts and people, ‘vicious cycles’ of impact, and the politics of aid and of reconstruction. It follows that practitioners and donors eschew ideas of relief–rehabilitation–development (RRD) for an appreciation of the needs particular to complex urban warfare biospheres, where armed conflict and sanctions permeate all aspects of service provision through altered biological and social processes. The urban warfare ecology lens is found to be a useful complement to ‘infrastructural warfare’ research, suggesting the study of protracted armed conflict upon all aspects of urban life be both deepened technically and broadened to other cases.     

Bach,Beethoven, and benefactors: Facebook engagement between symphonies and their stakeholders

• This study analyzes Facebook engagement among the nation's symphonies and their stakeholder publics. Factors such as reliance on donor contributions, program revenues, government grants, investment income, and total assets are proposed as contributing factors in predicting effective stakeholder relations. Public relations scholarship emphasizes the significance of relationships between the organization and its stakeholders and argues that positive relationships are integral to organizational success. Stewardship theory suggests nonprofits rely on a number of tools, including relationship nurturing, to sustain relationships with supportive publics. Scholars have increasingly identified stewardship as an effective method by which to build and maintain relationships. This study assesses one particular aspect of stewardship – relationship nurturing – and the attributes of nonprofit organizations that are successfully cultivating relationships with their stakeholders via social media. We find that benefactors matter. As dependence on stakeholder contributions increases so does stakeholder engagement via Facebook. Findings regarding program revenues and total assets are also significant.

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Convertible bond arbitrage,liquidity externalities,and stock prices

In the context of convertible bond issuance, we examine the impact of arbitrage activity on underlying equity markets. In particular, we use changes in equity short interest following convertible bond issuance to identify convertible bond arbitrage activity and analyze its impact on stock market liquidity and prices for the period 1993 to 2006. There is considerable evidence of arbitrage-induced short selling resulting from issuance. Moreover, we find strong evidence that this activity is systematically related to liquidity improvements in the stock. These results are robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of arbitrage activity.     

New Corporate Forms: One Viable Solution to Advancing Environmental Sustainability

There is a clear trend in corporate governance toward increased attention to the environmental and social impacts of business operations. Major consulting firms are advising Fortune 500 companies on how to become more environmentally sustainable, private equity and “impact” investors are measuring environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, and voluntary reporting and shareholder resolutions on issues of environmental sustainability are on the rise. While traditional corporate forms allow companies to embrace social and environmental responsibility with some measure of success, various real and perceived risks encourage directors to focus on short‐term profitability. Even if a company has a strong social mission at inception, founders often have difficulty “anchoring their mission” over time. And the lack of required disclosure of social and environmental performance makes it more difficult for investors to evaluate and compare companies. Many believe that the institutionalized mispricing of natural resources and the continued failure to price externalities, combined with the progressive nature of climate change, require the transformation of both business and law. This article discusses social and environmental sustainability within the traditional corporate form and then explores three emerging alternatives that are now being used by businesses in California: limited liability corporations (LLCs); benefit corporations (B corps); and flexible purpose corporations (FPCs). Of these three alternatives, FPCs—a corporate form that requires shareholders to agree on one or more social missions with management and the board—may be best suited to meet the needs of the many small private firms (as well as some large public companies) that, whether for purely economic or altruistic reasons, plan to integrate ESG into their operations.     

Mixed planning approach at Geneva

This article reports on the proceedings of WARC-ORB-85, held in Geneva in August and September this year. Agreements reached included a priori allotment planning for new frequencies, improved coordination, with the possibility of burden sharing in accommodating new entrants for currently used C band and Ku band frequencies, and first come, first served for other frequencies — a mixed planning approach. The article also considers the issues remaining after the conference that will dominate the intersessional period to WARC-ORB-88.     

What should you pay to host a party? An economic analysis of hosting sports mega-events

Governments all over the world put huge amounts of money into bidding for, and then hosting, sports events like Football’s World Cup or the Olympic Games. They also give money to professional sports teams and other mega-events to encourage them to locate within a particular constituency. This article examines the statistical relationship between tourism and three Football World Cups and five Olympic Games, finding very little positive effect. Given this conclusion, the article looks at why governments continue to bid for these competitions. It presents evidence that shows that these sports contests make people happy, and argues that politicians capitalize on this feel-good factor; harnessing the hubris associated with these events for political gain. The article then contends that the best way to reduce the politics associated with bidding for mega-events is to allocate them via an auction, rather than the wasteful rent-seeking methods that are currently used.     

The Evolution of Bookkeeping in China: Integrating Historical Trends with Western Influences

This article reviews the development of Chinese single-entry bookkeeping, the emergence of Chinese double-entry bookkeeping and evolutionary trends from single entry to double entry. It identifies the invention and basic nature of Chinese double-entry methods which have reflected cultural changes from within the society. Given this historical perspective, conclusions are drawn about the nature of social and economic change in China and the impact of outside cultural influences. Of particular importance to the timing of progress is the primitive form of double entry entitled Three Feet. This had its gestation about the same time as European innovations were occurring in response to economic and cultural changes which sponsored bookkeeping methods as described by Pacioli. A critical question for examination at present is whether cultural evolution in China can yet support complete integration of its own accounting principles and fundamental philosophies with Western accounting methods. This has proved to be difficult in the past.     

A note on the Wang and Wang measure of the quality of the compass rose

H. Wang and C. Wang [Visibility of the compass rose in financial asset returns: A quantitative study, J. Bank. Financ. 26 (2002), 1099–1111] derive a measure of the visibility of the radial patterns that appear in a plot of current and past returns, which are more commonly known as the compass rose. In theory, this measure should be positively related to the tick/volatility ratio. In practice however, we find that this relationship does not hold for higher tick/volatility ratios that are common to stock market data. Thus, the use of this measure is limited in real world applications. We propose a correction factor that improves the behaviour of the quality measure over higher tick/volatility ratios, however, further research is required to fully identify and correct the problem.     

Healthcare costs of stroke and major bleeding in patients with atrial fibrillation treated with non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants

Objective: To assess long-term healthcare costs related to ischemic stroke and systemic embolism (stroke/SE) and major bleeding (MB) events in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) treated with non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs).

Materials and methods: Optum’s Clinformatics Data Mart database from 1/2009–12/2016 was analyzed. Adult patients with ≥1 stroke/SE hospitalization (index date) were matched 1:1 to patients without stroke/SE (random index date), based on propensity scores. Patients with an MB event were matched to patients without MB. All patients had an NOAC dispensing overlapping index date, ≥12?months of eligibility pre-index date, and ≥1 NVAF diagnosis. The observation period spanned from the index date until the earliest date of death, switch to warfarin, end of insurance coverage, or end of data availability. Mean costs were evaluated: (1) per-patient-per-year (PPPY) and (2) at 1, 2, 3, and 4?years using Lin's method.

Results: The cost differences were, respectively, $48,807 and $28,298 PPPY for NOAC users with stroke/SE (n?=?1,340) and those with MB (n?=?3,774) events compared to controls. Cost differences of patients with vs without stroke/SE were $49,876, $51,627, $57,822, and $60,691 at 1, 2, 3, and 4?years post-index, respectively (p?p?Limitations: Limitations include unobserved confounders, coding and/or billing inaccuracies, limited sample sizes over longer follow-up, and the under-reporting of mortality for deaths occurring after 2011.

Conclusions: The incremental healthcare costs incurred by patients with vs without stroke/SE was nearly twice as high as those of patients with vs without MB. Moreover, each additional year up to 4?years after the first event was associated with an incremental cost for patients with a stroke/SE or MB event compared to those without an event.     

The Effectiveness of Unconventional Monetary Policy in Japan

Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, central bankers around the world have been forced to abandon conventional monetary policy tools in favor of unconventional policies such as quantitative easing, forward guidance, and even lowering the interest rate paid on bank reserves into negative territory. Japan, which faced a crisis in its banking sector and came up against the theoretical zero lower bound on interest rates nearly a decade earlier, was a pioneer in the use of many of these unconventional policy tools. This article analyzes the effectiveness of Japan’s bold experiment with unconventional monetary policy. Using a panel of bi-annual bank data covering the full universe of Japanese commercial banks over a fifteen-year period, this study analyzes the effectiveness of quantitative easing policy on the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. Our findings suggest that Japan’s unconventional monetary policy worked: there is a bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission in Japan. These results are robust to the inclusion of time fixed effects and generalized method of moments analysis.