Raising the Regional Leviathan: A Relational‐Materialist Conceptualization of Regions‐in‐Becoming as Publics‐in‐Stabilization

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how spatial entities in general — and those spatial entities that are defined as ‘regions’ in particular — form, evolve and sometimes stabilize. Inspired by the scholarship of Noortje Marres, the article explores how regions‐in‐becoming may be gainfully conceptualized as publics‐in‐stabilization. In the article it is argued that some of the mechanisms involved in such processes pertain to how territorially framed issues sometimes become formulated as loosely articulated propositions for regionalization. These can, with time, generate emergent stakeholder communities, which in turn may become stabilized and delegated to more durable forms and materials which can eventually become naturalized as recognized regions. A suggested conceptual model is utilized to perform an analysis of empirical material from three contemporary processes of regionalization in Northern Europe with the purpose of examining and discussing some of the potential merits and shortcomings of the conceptual model. It is concluded that adopting the proposed perspective can enable scholars to highlight some of the mechanisms whereby vague and non‐coherent propositions for regionalization within time may be singularized and stabilized to such a degree that they become taken for granted as naturalized spatialities.     

Sociability and the Market

This paper addresses two classroom activities for exploring sociability and the role it plays in market and non-market allocations. Adam Smith’s moral sentiments theory provides a conceptual framework for understanding such behavior. In the Desert Island activity students have conversations about competing allocation methods (e.g., rationing, lottery, competition, brute force) that provide a backdrop for learning about market mechanisms and behavioral economics. Beginning students consistently pick egalitarian distributions that signal the implicit willingness to share for reasons that might be instinctual, reputational or other. Fairness in allocations mimics that found in the playing of the Ultimatum Game. The results suggest that economic instructors can successfully bring into the classroom concepts of sociability and the roles it serves in human institutions when introducing a new and different institution—the market.     

A PATCHWORK SAFETY NET: A SURVEY OF CLIOMETRIC STUDIES OF INCOME MAINTENANCE PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract Social welfare programs in the USA are designed to serve as safety nets for people in hard times, in contrast with the universal approach found in many other developed western nations. In a survey of cliometric studies of social welfare programs in the USA, we examine the variation in the safety net in the USA across states in the 20th century, the determinants of the variation and its impact on socioeconomic outcomes. The USA has always displayed substantial variation in the extent of the safety net because the features of most public social welfare programs have been and currently are determined by local and state governments, even after the federal government became involved in the 1930s. Differences across states persist strongly for typically a decade, although the persistence weakens with time, and there are some periods when federal intervention led to a re‐ordering. The rankings of state benefits differ from program to program, and economic and political factors have different weights in determining benefit levels in panel data estimation of their effects. Variation in benefits across programs during the early 1900s had significant impact on labour markets, economic activity, family formation, death rates and crime.     

The Value of Reputation in Corporate Finance and Investment Banking (and the Related Roles of Regulation and Market Efficiency)

This article explores the roles of reputation, efficient capital markets, and capital market regulation in preserving and creating economic value. Each of these three mechanisms serves as a substitute for the other two, with each playing a role in maintaining the credibility and reliability of markets. While efficient markets and effective regulation are market-wide phenomena that affect all firms, reputation is a firm-specific corporate asset. Companies develop reputational capital by treating customers and counterparties fairly (while forgoing the temptation to achieve short-term profits at their expense). At the same time, companies seeking access to the capital markets but lacking a reputation must typically employ reputational intermediaries. Investment banks, credit rating agencies, accounting firm s, law firms, and organized stock exchanges have all served as reputational intermediaries at various times during the last 200 years. One contributor to the recent financial crisis was a kind of experimentation by some reputational intermediaries with an opportunistic and two-tiered “customer differentiation” strategy in which some customers were treated very well, while others were treated with little or no regard for their legitimate expectations as to how they would be treated. This strategy has proved to be a failure, imposing significant costs on those organizations as well as their customers. The available substitutes for reputation, capital market effciency and effective regulation, did not provide sufcient offsetting protection for investors. While the two-tiered “customer differentiation” strategy has failed, the central message of the economic theory of reputation remains intact. This message is that a company's reputation is a valuable asset that must be preserved to ensure the future of the organization. For all financial intermediaries that rely heavily on their reputations when selling their products and services, the author recommends large and continuous investment in maintaining those reputations. For investment banks in particular—a group whose reputations have held up reasonably well—the author suggests that they continue to view their role as reputational intermediaries as a core part of their businesses.     

Independents�� day? Analyst behavior surrounding the Global Settlement

In this paper, we examine the impact of NASD Rule 2711, NYSE Rule 472, and the Global Research Settlement on the recommendation performance of independent, affiliated, and unaffiliated analysts. We find that analysts from all three types of institutions issued fewer strong buys following these regulations designed to separate investment banking and equity research. Affiliated analysts were less likely to issue innovative recommendations. While downgrades became more prevalent following the regulations, they were significantly less informative. Independent research firms set up after the Global Research Settlement are of inferior quality; they issue more optimistic and less innovative recommendations that generate lower announcement period returns than independent firms existing prior to the Settlement. Our overall findings question whether investors will be better served via the shift in equity research to analysts at independent research firms.     

Restructuring Managerial Labour in the USA,the UK and Japan: Challenging the Salience of ‘Varieties of Capitalism’

This article provides a cross‐national, qualitative investigation into the experiences of middle managers in large organizations in the USA, the UK and Japan, following organizational restructuring. Despite well‐documented national differences in administrative heritage, institutional regimes or ‘varieties of capitalism’, our data point towards considerable similitude across the three countries in terms of a general expression of the need for change, and the concrete impacts of organizational reforms on managerial work. Specifically we analyse the changing nature of work roles, career paths, working hours and spans of control of mid‐level managers in five large firms in each of the three countries. The data demonstrate that middle managers in all three countries face fundamental changes to key areas of their work experience. In Japan, although changes do not amount to a genuine shift towards ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ institutions or business practices, the robust use of organizational reforms with very similar aims and underpinning assumptions to those used in the USA and the UK entails similar impacts in terms of work processes of middle managers across the three nations. This shared experience involved the augmentation of middle management skill levels, responsibilities and span of control, but alongside the downgrading of career expectations, and increased workload and work intensity. We argue that these changes are in keeping with some, but not all, of the features explained and predicted in Bravermanian labour process theory.     

中国房地产市场疲态初显

中国南方两座最大城市出现了房地产市场走软的征兆，表明中国政府给房地产投资热降温的举措可能正在出现成效。     

Optimal Investment, Growth Options, and Security Returns

As a consequence of optimal investment choices, a firm's assets and growth options change in predictable ways. Using a dynamic model, we show that this imparts predictability to changes in a firm's systematic risk, and its expected return. Simulations show that the model simultaneously reproduces: (i) the time-series relation between the book-to-market ratio and asset returns; (ii) the cross-sectional relation between book-to-market, market value, and return; (iii) contrarian effects at short horizons; (iv) momentum effects at longer horizons; and (v) the inverse relation between interest rates and the market risk premium.