Rosemary Feurer. Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950

For more than a decade, workers in the Midwest electrical manufacturingindustry, as well as many other blue-collar workers in the Americanheartland, rallied around an openly Communist union organizerwho promised to deliver an alternative vision of democracy andeconomic development. William Sentner's ability to thrive inwhat one would expect to be a hostile environment for Leftistsrested on a community-based organizing strategy attuned moreto local conditions than national or international events. Thisstory, Rosemary Feurer suggests, holds     

Advertising and male nudity: An experimental investigation

This study examines the predictive capability of Peterson and Kerin's product/model congruency hypothesis when extended to the use of male models. The results indicate that too little male nudity and too much male nudity operate against the liking and belief of an ad. This is some-what consistent with the product/model congruency hypothesis but however, is not predictable. The authors conclude that the use of male nudity in advertising is a practice which requires further investigation before any consistent generalizations can be made.     

A Closer Look at Barrier Exchange Options

A barrier exchange option is an exchange option that is knocked out the first time the prices of two underlying assets become equal. Lindset, S., & Persson, S.‐A. (2006) present a simple dynamic replication argument to show that, in the absence of arbitrage, the current value of the barrier exchange option is equal to the difference in the current prices of the underlying assets and that this pricing formula applies irrespective of whether the option is European or American. In this study, we take a closer look at barrier exchange options and show, despite the simplicity of the pricing formula presented by Lindset, S., & Persson, S.‐A. (2006), that the barrier exchange option in fact involves a surprising array of key concepts associated with the pricing of derivative securities including: put–call parity, barrier in–out parity, static vs. dynamic replication, martingale pricing, continuous vs. discontinuous price processes, and numeraires. We provide valuable intuition behind the pricing formula which explains its apparent simplicity. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 33:29–43, 2013     

Transplants and Implants: The Economics of Self‐Improvement

This article examines equilibrium self‐improvement and marriage proposal strategies in a two‐sided search model with nontransferable utility. Singles are vertically differentiated—some make better marriage partners than others. A complete characterization of equilibrium is provided. It is shown there are two externalities to self‐improvement decisions. Further, these externalities may support multiple Pareto rankable equilibria. By encouraging everybody to self‐improve, society can create a situation where everybody is forced to improve to remain “acceptable.” But a preferred equilibrium may exist where there is less (costly) self‐improvement.     

Management buy-outs,trade unions and employee ownership

Management buy-outs developed rapidly throughout the 1980s in the UK and continental Europe. The shift to managerial and employee ownership involved, has major implications for trade unions and industrial relations. This article examines these issues using survey and case study evidence from the UK.     

Do Black-Owned Banks Discriminate against Black Borrowers?

Black-owned and white-owned banks are studied to test for lending discrimination based on applicant's race. Using single-equation models the rndings suggest that black-owned banks may utilize applicant race in the mortgage granting decision. The result holds in a naive HMDA model and in an enhanced HMDA model with bank-specirc, demographic, and neighborhood characteristics added.     

Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Review and Synthesis

This paper reviews the existing literature on venture capital and private equity. The paper emphasises the importance of examining venture capital in the light of recent developments in corporate finance and its distinctiveness from other forms of finance. In order to understand current developments, the paper adopts a framework which combines industry/market and firm levels of analysis. Existing literature is reviewed using this framework. Industry level issues relate to rivalry between firms, the power of suppliers and customers, and the threats from new entrants and substitutes. Firm level issues concern deal generation, initial and second screening, valuation and due diligence, deal approval and structuring, post-contractual monitoring, investment realisation, and entrepreneurs' exit and recontracting with venture capitalists. This is followed by a review of the evidence on the performance of venture capital firms. The paper suggests potentially fruitful areas for further research including the extension of analysis to cover all stages of venture capital investment, examination of the inter-linkages between industry and firm level issues and between stages in the venture capital process, as well as further analysis of deal structuring issues and investment realisation and recontracting.     

On-Site Effects of Imperata Burning by Indonesian Smallholders: A Bioeconomic Model

Periodic burning of the vast Imperata grassland areas of Indonesia is thought to have a number of negative consequences, both on and off site. We assess on-site biophysical and economic consequences by adapting a bioeconomic model to conditions prevalent in the Indonesian uplands. Burning is shown to exacerbate soil degradation both directly through loss of soil nutrients and indirectly through erosion. Despite this, it is demonstrated that burning is the most profitable method of Imperata control in an upland ‘shifting cultivation’ system Changing factor prices may alter this A 25% reduction in herbicide prices would make herbicide use more attractive than burning. If off-site costs are considered, Imperata control with herbicide may be preferable to burning.

Upland cropping within an Imperata fallow system is marginally profitable under prevailing economic and biophysical conditions Abandonment of these upland areas by smallholders, or adoption of more productive farming systems, seems inevitable.     

Some rationalizability results for dynamic games

We study the relation between dynamical systems describing the equilibrium behavior in dynamic games and those resulting from (single‐player) dynamic optimization problems. More specifically, we derive conditions under which the dynamics generated by a model in one of these two classes can be rationalized by a model from the other class. We study this question under different assumptions about which fundamentals (e.g. technology, utility functions and time‐preference) should be preserved by the rationalization. One interesting result is that rationalizing the equilibrium dynamics of a symmetric dynamic game by a dynamic optimization problem that preserves the technology and the utility function requires a higher degree of impatience compared to that of the players in the game.