Conflict resolution in Africa

In an attempt to draw lessons from African experience with conflictresolution, this paper examines three disputes: the WesternSahara conflict between Morocco and the Polisario, the thirty-yeararmed strife between North and South Sudan and the emergenceof the breakaway Somaliland following the overthrow of SiadBarre. The Western Sahara dispute, under consideration by theUnited Nations since 1965, would have long been settled hadit not been for late King Hassan's intransigence, US supportof his unjust claim to sovereignty of the former Spanish colonyand the reluctance of African leaders to incur his displeasure.The Southern Sudan was the victim of well-nigh-complete neglectunder the British colonial administration and, thanks to theprejudice and shortsightedness of Northern politicians, it hasfaired even worse after independence. Memories of past slaveryhave been rankled by present injustice and marginalisation.Moreover, any hope for reconciliation has been shattered bythe determination of the ruling Islamic fundamentalist regimeof Khartoum to transform the Sudan into an out-and-out Islamicstate. The former British protectorate of Somaliland, drivenby the irredentism then prevailing among the Somali-speakingpeople scattered in different parts of East Africa, precipitated,a week after independence, into union with the former Italian-administeredtrust territory to form the Republic of Somalia on 26 June 1965.Ten years after independence, however, Siad Barre seized powerby coup d'ét ushering two decades of misrule characterisedby a sinister mix of clanism, nepotism and an ignorant understandingof scientific socialism. Resentment which at first took theform of peaceful, political opposition in the north graduallydeveloped into a full-fledged countrywide civil war. When SiadBarre was overthrown, anarchy ensued in Mogadiscio. By contrast,the Somalilanders succeeded, through a series of traditionallystyled conferences, in resolving tribal conflicts, disbandingtribal militias and establishing a primordial but working systemof government. But the OAU, the Arab League and the rest ofthe international community rewarded them by refusing to recogniseSomaliland's claim to separate statehood.     

Competitive procurement with ex post moral hazard

Unlike standard auctions, we show that competitive procurement may optimally limit competition or use inefficient allocation rules that award the project to a less efficient firm with positive probability. Procurement projects often involve ex post moral hazard after the competitive process is over. A procurement mechanism must combine an incentive scheme with the auction to guard against firms bidding low to win the contract and then cutting back on effort. While competition helps reduce the rent of efficient firms, it exacerbates the problem due to moral hazard. If allocative efficiency is a requirement, limiting the number of participants may be optimal. Alternatively, the same incentives can be optimally provided using inefficient allocation rules.     

How Norway’s sovereign wealth fund negative screening affects firms’ value and behaviour

This paper examines the impact of negative screening by responsible sovereign wealth funds on the value of excluded firms. We focus on the main sovereign wealth fund, the Government Pension Fund Global of Norway, which excluded 149 firms from its portfolio during the period 2006–2018. Using an event study methodology, we document a significant decrease in excluded firms’ stock prices. Moreover, we find that the nature of screening matters: norm‐based exclusions suffer from a significant and permanent decrease in their stock value, suggesting that market participants reacted to the Government Pension Fund Global of Norway exclusions. Overall, it can be asserted that the Norwegian fund has a strong signalling effect on financial markets, in terms of social and environmental information. We conclude that sovereign wealth funds could be used by governments as investment vehicles in order to promote responsible investments on a large scale.     

An Extreme Value Approach to Test the Effect of Price Limits on Volatility

Many stock exchanges around the world enforcing daily price limits on the amount asset prices can change to prevent the market from overreacting and to reduce volatility. Price limits are artificial boundaries set by market regulators who restrict price changes of a stock to a pre-specified range during a trading day or a single trading session. The primary aim of price limit rules is to stabilize the markets during panic trading, to moderate vitality by repressing excessive speculation, and to allow stocks to be traded at prices close to their fair value. However, their impact on the market is a somewhat unresolved issue （Harris, 1998）. Using a methodology of comparing volatility based on the extreme value technique, the authors empirically investigate the impact of price limits on the volatility of the Stock Exchange of Thailand. The empirical results support price limits advocates, suggesting that price limits rules moderate stock price volatility.     

Job satisfaction and organizational commitment: validating the Arabic satisfaction and commitment questionnaire (ASCQ), testing the correlations,and investigating the effects of demographic variables in the Lebanese banking sector

The aim of this study was to assess the construct validity and the reliability of two measurement scores of organizational commitment and job satisfaction, to measure the correlation between the two variables, and to explore the effects of different demographic variables on satisfaction and commitment in a Lebanese context. A total of 298 cases from five major banks were analyzed. Rigorous forward and backward translation procedures have been applied to ensure the relevance of this instrumentation in a different cultural context. Results of exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, simple item-internal consistency estimates, and item intercorrelation analysis provided evidence that both instruments have produced reliable measurement scores with construct validity adequate to measure satisfaction and commitment in the Lebanese context. Results also showed that the constructs of satisfaction and commitment were significantly correlated and that satisfaction was a good predictor of commitment. Demographic analysis, discussion of these results, and suggestions for future research were proposed.     

Investors’ Behavior in an Emerging,Tax-Free Market

We provide empirical evidence on the stock market participants’ behavior in an emerging market, with a tax-free environment. Our results show that United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) investors exhibit overconfidence and home bias, and tend to sell prior winners and buy prior losers. We find that investors rely on familiarity and on their information channels to make decisions. The results indicate that investors are risk averse, especially after the global financial crisis, which has had contagion effect on UAE markets. Investors attribute this effect to the inability to manage systemic crisis and to problems of information asymmetry, insider trading, and lack of good governance during crisis.     

Understanding visitor's motivation at sites of death and disaster: the case of former transit camp Westerbork,the Netherlands

This study begins to fill the gap in research of people's motivations to visit sites of death and suffering and to contribute to a deeper understanding of dark tourism consumption within dark conflict sites. The article aims to examine the motivations of visitors to former transit camp Westerbork as an iconic dark site in the Netherlands. The research process involved a self-administered survey questionnaire filled by 238, randomly selected Dutch visitors. Data are analysed by means of exploratory factor analysis to decide upon the relevant factors for representing the motivations of visitors to Westerbork. The findings show that people visit Westerbork mainly for ‘self-understanding’, ‘curiosity’, ‘conscience’, a ‘must see’ this place and ‘exclusiveness’. This is the first study to examine visitors’ motivations to Westerbork as a dark site. Most research on visitor motivations is not based on empirical data, but on theoretical research.     

Forecasting passenger load for a fixed planning horizon

This paper presents a forecasting system for predicting the number of boarding passengers on each of the next N departure dates of a particular flight leg using as input the booking levels made for the next N departure dates of that flight leg. A forecasting system that gives good estimates of future boardings of a particular flight leg is an important and essential tool for route management in the airline industry. The proposed forecasting system consists of a Kalman filter, which optimally integrates a large class of reservation measurements from a variety of sources and at arbitrary times, which is the case of the data, considered here. The accuracy of the predictions for a case study proved to be promising.