Producer Willingness to Pay for Precision Application Technology: Implications for Government and the Technology Industry

This paper focuses on the willingness to pay (WTP) for precision application/site-specific management technologies on the part of agricultural producers. We use a contingent valuation survey to elicit WTP for a package of technologies and examine the impact of government subsidies on potential demand. Results suggest that producer WTP is significantly lower than current technology prices, necessitating a 60% government subsidy to induce adoption, on average. Agronomic factors such as soil characteristic variability and soil quality are important determinants of WTP. In addition, how well the technology integrates into current farming practices and equipment also appears important.     

Investment in a New Technology as a Signal of Firm Value Under Regulatory Opportunism

We examine the question of whether a regulated firm that makes a long-term investment in infrastructure can credibly signal its private information regarding the future demand for its output to the capital market. We show that necessary conditions for a separating equilibrium in which the magnitude of investment signals high future demand may include a low degree of managerial myopia, large variability of future demand, a lenient regulatory climate, and low sunk cost. Our model suggests that in estimating valuation models of regulated firms it is important to separate firms into two groups: firms for which a separating equilibrium is likely to obtain and firms for which the equilibrium is likely to be pooling. The market value of a firm in the first group is positively correlated with its level of investment, but uncorrelated with the level of actual demand, whereas for the second group the opposite holds.     

Guaranteeing quality in the EU: who gains most?

Regulating product quality benefits consumers in reducing uncertainty and allowing them to economize on search costs. Theoretical analysis suggests that not all consumers benefit to the same extent, with non-poor, less well educated and older people tending to gain most. These conclusions are supported by regression analysis of Eurobarometer data on attitudes to an EU priority to guarantee quality. The results also indicate the essential nature of the EU trade-off with countries having to compromise on their desired outcome when agreeing on a common EU standard. Institutional trust is also a critical factor in determining support for such a standard.      

Pre-holiday effects: International evidence on the decline and reversal of a stock market anomaly

The pre-holiday effect is one of the best known of the calendar effect anomalies. This paper extends prior work by examining whether the effect has declined for the U.S., U.K. and Hong Kong markets. For all three markets, the effect is shown to have declined, but only significantly in the U.S. The result is not surprising given the relative sophistication of the market. What is surprising, however, is the reversal of the pre-holiday effect during the period 1991–1997, with the mean return on pre-holiday days becoming negative, and the subsequent elimination of this effect during 1997–2003.     

Environmental flows: Telecommunications and the dematerialisation of cities?

This paper explores the relationship between telecommunications systems and urban environmental policy. It challenges the powerful, and often taken for granted, assumption that telecommunications improve the environmental performance of cities because the technologies are ‘inherently environmentally benign’ and that they simply ‘substitute’ for travel, inevitably leading towards the dematerialisation of the contemporary city. Instead the paper argues that telecommunications raise serious environmental problems and act as powerful materialisers, particularly as a generator of new demands for travel. It shows that the environmental implications of telecommunications are undoubtedly more complex and contradictory than is often assumed.     

Complementarities and the managerial challenges of state enterprise restructuring: evidence from two shipyards

The authors examine detailed organizational changes in two similar Polish state enterprises over the past five years. Effective restructuring requires a coherent package of complementary change in at least eight aspects of the business. The requirements on management are formidable and suggest that state enterprise restructuring will be more difficult than is widely believed.