Restraining Unions' industrial action: A new consumer right

This paper discusses the revolutionary new right introduced by the Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act 1993 for consumers to seek a court order to halt unlawful industrial action which disrupts the supply of goods or services, regardless of whether they have any enforceable right to the goods or services in question. Even more unusually, public funding is available to conduct these proceedings irrespective of the applicant's means where the industrial action is organised by a trade union. The paper analyses the nature of the right, locates it within the broader framework of remedies for the non-provision or inadequate provision of goods or services, and assesses the wider implications of the right for consumer policy.     

DISCOUNT RATES AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Empirical studies provide compelling evidence that economic agents do not adopt the complete range of energy-efficient technologies that are cost-effective under prevailing prices and market conditions. Analysts commonly attribute this anomaly to the use of high discount rates in energy-related decisions-an interpretation that is difficult to reconcile with standard models of rational choice. This paper recasts the controversy from the perspective of economic theory and finds that market failures related to asymmetric information, bounded rationality, and transaction costs are major contributors to the so-called "efficiency gap."     

The Horizontal Merger Guidelines of 1992

The 1992 Horizontal Merger Guidelines of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission outline an enforcement policy which makes a long overdue break with its predecessors in awarding no decisive or predominant role to market concentration as a criterion of anticompetitive effect. However, the new policy does not provide an adequate substitute criterion: the tests that it prescribes for screening merger proposals are so specified that a potentially large proportion of anticompetitive mergers can escape challenge without showing any promise of improving efficiency. The time is ripe for a comprehensive inquiry aimed at formulating a more satisfactory policy.     

Another Look at the Cross-section of Expected Stock Returns

Our examination of the cross-section of expected returns reveals economically and statistically significant compensation (about 6 to 9 percent per annum) for beta risk when betas are estimated from time-series regressions of annual portfolio returns on the annual return on the equally weighted market index. The relation between book-to-market equity and returns is weaker and less consistent than that in Fama and French (1992). We conjecture that past book-to-market results using COMPUS-TAT data are affected by a selection bias and provide indirect evidence.     

Antecedents of private label attitude and national brand promotion attitude: similarities and differences

A model that addresses the similarities and differences in conceptual antecedents of attitudes toward private label grocery products and national brand promotions is proposed and tested. The proposed model is tested using a sample of 300 consumers who were recruited from grocery stores, provided behavioral data from sales receipts of their shopping trip, and responded to a survey that contained multi-item construct measures. We predict and find in the study that both price and nonprice related constructs impact both private label attitude and national brand promotion attitude, but the directionality and strength of several of these relationships differ. Implications of these findings for retailers and national manufacturers are discussed.     

Regime Shifts in Asian Equity and Real Estate Markets

This paper applies a new statistical technology for identifying regime shifts to analyze recent data on real estate and equity markets in eight developing Far Eastern countries in the 1992–1998 time period. We find that regime shifts in volatility occur in the summer of 1997; however, most of the regime shifts in returns occur in the spring of 1998. While the clustering of regime breaks does not seem to follow any obvious pattern, the country's exposure to trade and firm leverage are important. An analysis of Granger causality suggests that, in most cases, equity returns cause real estate returns but the converse is not true. We also find two-way causality in volatility, suggesting that a common factor drives volatility in these markets. Finally, we provide evidence that the regime shifts generally imply higher relative risk for real estate securities after the estimated breaks.     

Länger leben — Siechtum und Pflege ohne Grenzen?

At present, our society and its social security system are not prepared to cope with the challenges resulting from the continuous increase of life expectancy. The traditional concept of disease has to be modified for serving the special needs of the elderly. The optimistic compression of disease theory is an intriguing model, but lacks prove by available data. The anti-aging boom diverts the focus from the social and financial burden that will be unevitably caused by long-term care in the future. If there will not be an — up to now unforeseeable — breakthrough in research, particularly dementia will have an enormous impact on social cost which is often underestimated.