A neoclassical model of interregional economic growth

Interregional economic growth is characterized by free trade, capital movements and labour migration. An interregional equilibrium and a steady state are likely to exist, and if a disturbance occurs, there might be a tendency back to equilibrium. Output and income grow at the same rate in all regions, although the regions differ in technology, propensity to save and natural growth of labour; these factors also determine the speed of expansion. Yet if the natural growth of labour is too fast (too slow), then capital and labour tend to a single region.     

Idiosyncratic Volatility and Firm‐Specific News: Beyond Limited Arbitrage

We examine the relation between idiosyncratic volatility and returns around news announcements. Mispricing is most likely to occur during news announcements. If idiosyncratic volatility generates a limit to arbitrage, then the negative relation between returns and news volatility should be stronger than the relation to nonnews volatility. Instead, we find nonnews volatility has a robust negative relation to returns and lacks key features expected if volatility were a reflection of limits to arbitrage. Pricing of nonnews volatility is related to lottery‐like features of a stock's return. Our results suggest that volatility has a price effect beyond a limit to arbitrage.     

Executive Network Centrality and Stock Liquidity

We examine the relationship between stock market liquidity and the network centrality of firm executives. We find that firms whose executive officers are more central in the network of executives have narrower bid‐ask spreads. We use an exogenous network centrality shock of executive turnover and report that liquidity improves after firms hire executives with greater centrality. We present evidence that improved liquidity is attributable to efficient information flows around executives in more advantageous network positions.     

Retail Shelf Allocation: A Comparative Analysis of Heuristic and Meta-Heuristic Approaches

This research presents a retail shelf-space decision model that incorporates a nonlinear profit function, vertical and horizontal location effects, and product cross-elasticity. We propose a linear programming formulation of the nonlinear profit function that can solve the shelf-space problem optimally. We describe potential advances in heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms and compare the approaches through simulations and a field experiment. We discuss the impact of the number of item facings, vertical location, and horizontal location (e.g., we find the vertical location effect is approximately double the size of the horizontal location effect on profit performance).     

Reading, writing, and religion: Institutions and human capital formation

In this paper, we empirically test the role that religious and political institutions play in the accumulation of human capital. Using a new data set on literacy in colonial India, we find that Muslim literacy is negatively correlated with the proportion of Muslims in the district, although we find no similar result for Hindu literacy. We employ a theoretical model which suggests that districts which experienced a more recent collapse of Muslim political authority had more powerful and better funded religious authorities, who established religious schools which were less effective at promoting literacy on the margin than state schools. We test this hypothesis econometrically, finding that the period of Muslim political collapse has a statistically significant effect on Muslim literacy while controlling for it eliminates the significance of the proportion of Muslims on Muslim literacy. This suggests that the “long hand of history” has played some role in subsequent differences in human capital formation through the persistence of institutions discouraging literacy.     

Passive Institutional Ownership,R2 Trends,and Price Informativeness

A distinctive trend in the capital markets over the past two decades is the rise in equity ownership of passive financial institutions. We propose that this rise has a negative effect on price informativeness. By not trading around firm‐specific news, passive investors reduce the firm‐specific component of total volatility and increase stock correlations. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that the growth in passive institutional ownership is robustly associated with the growth in market model R²s of individual stocks since the early 1990s. Additionally, we find a negative relation between passive ownership and earnings predictability, an informativeness proxy.     

A multiobjective integer programming model for the land acquisition problem

The purpose of this paper is to present a multiobjective integer programming formulation for the analysis of the land acquisition problem. There are two important contributions of this paper. First, the model incorporates the discrete and multiobjective nature of land acquisition. Second, we present an efficient, specialized algorithm for finding non-inferior solutions of a multiobjective integer program, a problem for which a general-purpose algorithm, applicable to moderately sized problems, does not exist.     

Strategy and Value in Commodity Organizations: Oklahoma Wheat in the 21st Century

The Oklahoma Wheat Commission is the generic promotion organization for Oklahoma wheat. As agricultural marketing systems change, the value provided may need to adjust. This case illustrates the strategic challenges faced by producer organizations and many agricultural industries. Overall an opportunity to use strategic management tools is provided with a focus on balancing efforts to accomplish program activities with efforts to increase funding levels.