Railroad Development and Land Value

Land owners in the rural Midwest experienced significant capital gains during the late 1840s and early 1850s. A primary catalyst of increasing land values was the construction of new railroads. Land in close proximity to new railroads became more valuable because of decreased transportation costs. We use a straightforward model of land price determination to estimate the impact on land values of distance from the railroad. The estimates allow us to infer a lower bound for capital gains attributable to the construction of railroads in Knox County, Illinois, during the 1850s. Knox County landowners reaped capital gains of more than $270,000—9% of the value of land.     

The Distributional Impact of Direct Payments on Irish Farm Incomes

The objective of this paper is to analyse the distributional effects of the different income components of Irish farm income with a Gini comparison method and by disaggregating the overall Gini coefficient of income inequality by income source. Using individual farm data for 1992 and 1996, the impact on farm income distribution of the MacSharry CAP reform is assessed. In addition, the change in the Gini coefficient between these years is decomposed into the changes in the within‐source distribution of each income stream and the share of each income stream. The favourable movement in the Gini coefficient is found to be due to the introduction of direct payments, which target less well‐off farmers. Market income remains the single largest influence on deciding the income ranking of a farm while contributing less to total income than before.     

Valuation-based accounting research: Implications for financial reporting and opportunities for future research

This paper discusses the relation between financial reporting research and practice, particularly standard setters. Many studies addressing financial reporting issues use a valuation approach. The paper describes alternative approaches to valuation research and summarises the findings relating to four major current issues: fair value accounting for financial, tangible, and intangible assets, cash flows versus accruals, recognition versus disclosure, and international harmonisation of accounting standards. The summaries include identifying what standard setters and others would like to learn from research, what we have learned, and what is left to learn. The paper concludes with observations about future financial reporting academic research.     

英特尔联袂阿里巴巴推出迅驰“侠商”群英会——如何利用商人社区互动推进网络精准营销

英特尔结缘阿里巴巴 随着移动互联网的发展，移动办公逐渐成为商务主流。如何与国际人群对接，加速普及移动办公的概念、技术和产品，是芯片创新领域的领先厂商英特尔以及整个产业所考虑的问题。     

Persistence of Regional Wage Differences in China

Regional wage differences in China appear to be persistent and even to have grown over the past two decades. We study potential explanations for this phenomenon. After adjusting for the difference in the cost of living across provinces, we find that some of the cross‐province differences in real wages could be related to the quality of labour, industry composition and geographic location of provinces. These factors, taken together, explain approximately half of the cross‐province real wage variation. Interestingly, we find that interprovincial government transfers have not offset regional wage differences during the time period we consider. We also demonstrate that interprovincial migration, while driven in part by levels and changes in wage differences across provinces, did not help offset these differences. These results are consistent with findings in the literature that cross‐province labour mobility in China is still limited.     

Attribute Identities Matter: Subjective Perceptions of Attribute Characteristics

Recent research indicates that attributes vary along multiple dimensions with implications for how trade-offs are resolved during choice. We present an exploratory study of the dimensionality underlying naïve subjects ratings of attributes on the characteristics commonly discussed in the literature on tradeoff resolution and decision difficulty. Factor analysis of attribute characteristic assessments indicates that subjects view decision attributes in a multi-dimensional fashion, including an importance/loss aversion dimension, an emotional potential/protection from tradeoffs dimension, and a cognitive difficulty dimension. These results suggest that a one-dimensional measure of attribute characteristics, such as a standard attribute importance rating, may obscure some factors determining individual responses to attributes during decision processing. However, the results also suggest that developing a relatively succinct set of scales in order to characterize the dimensions along with subjects response to attributes is a viable goal for future research.     

Bluffing in labor negotiations: Legal and ethical issues

This paper presents an analysis of bluffing in labor negotiations from legal, economic, and ethical perspectives. It is argued that many forms of bluffing in labor negotiations are legal and economically advantageous, but that they typically constitute lying. Nevertheless it is argued that it is generally morally acceptable to bluff given a typical labor-management relationship where one's negotiating partner is familiar with and most likely employing bluffing tactics him/herself. We also consider whether it is an indictment of our present negotiating practices and our economic system as a whole that, given the harsh realities of the marketplace, bluffing is usually morally acceptable.