Influential Leadership and Media: How a Single Statement Can Affect an Industry

Historically, the most powerful political and organizational leaders have been described as being charismatic. With technology's increasing impact on society, these leaders have widespread access to the masses. Utilizing charismatic leadership and media saliency theories, this study aims to analyze the impact that occurred in the Las Vegas convention industry after the President made specific comments concerning Las Vegas. These comments implied that convention spending in Las Vegas was wasteful, and resulted in the cancellation or relocation of over 400 conventions in one week. This research utilizes monthly, aggregate convention data from January 2002 to March 2014 to evaluate the impact of this comment empirically. Time series regression analysis was conducted to estimate the effect of President Obama's comment, controlling for other factors. The results suggest that President Obama's comments had a significant negative effect on both convention attendance and the number of meetings held. The findings provide insight into the effect of singular comments made by influential leaders.     

Sovereign Dilemmas: Saudi Arabia and Sovereign Wealth Funds

While the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) can claim over half of SWF assets globally, the largest and most strategically important state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has heretofore lacked a dedicated investment fund. This paper challenges some of the conventional wisdom on SWFs in explaining the Saudi government's reticence to launch an SWF and its recent decision to cautiously move in this direction. First, while Washington policy makers raise fears of enemies using SWFs against US interests, Saudi foreign assets have been used in support of its continuing alliance with the United States. And second, while critics decry the lack of transparency of SWFs, the Saudi launch of a new SWF could represent a move toward greater transparency, by working to separate “private” sovereign funds from “public” ones. Indeed, the launch of a SWF fits into a broad pattern of reforms rationalising Saudi governing institutions as King Abdullah has moved to control spendthrift princes, to streamline decision making, and to attract more foreign investment.     

Young Muslim Women and Sport: the Impact of Identity Work

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between young Muslim women’s identity work and their involvement in sport and physical activities. The concept of ‘identity work’ is used to underline the dynamic aspect of identity construction. The study is based on life‐history interviews with 21 Muslim women with immigrant backgrounds living in Norway, aged between 16 and 25 years. The study demonstrates how young Muslim women’s identity work is influenced by their ethnic and religious collective identities. While some of the women situate themselves clearly within their ethnic identity, others challenge the boundaries of their ethnic identity and some of the young women choose to focus more on religion than ethnicity. The study illustrates two major patterns that link young Muslim women’s identity work to their involvement in sport and physical activity. First, being a young woman and participating in sport is seen as a challenge to the boundaries of their ethnic identities. Therefore, young women who position themselves clearly within the framework of their ethnic identities are not interested in sport because doing sport is not seen as a respectable femininity. The young women who challenge the ideal of femininity by participating in sport have experienced being sanctioned or harassed because they participate in sport. Second, among those who regard religion (Islam) as a more important source of identification than ethnicity, being physically active is seen as important because of Islam’s health aspects.     

Trade Linkages and Output‐Multiplier Effects: a Structural VAR Approach with a Focus on Asia*

This paper develops a structural VAR model to measure how a shock to one country affects other countries’ GDP. It uses trade linkages to estimate the multiplier effects as a shock is transmitted through output fluctuations and introduces a new specification strategy that reduces the number of unknowns and allows cross‐country relationships to vary over time. This model is used to examine the impact of shocks to 11 Asian countries, the US, and the rest of the OECD. Impulse‐response matrices suggest that these multiplier effects are large and can transmit shocks in very different patterns than predicted from a bilateral‐trade matrix.     

Think Globally,Teach Locally: Experiencing the Foreign Aid Debate Through Service Learning

Abstract

Novel curricular strategies are required if institutions want all students to actively experience the benefits of global knowledge and civic engagement, as financial and practical commitments frequently make study abroad inaccessible to many students. In this paper, we outline an innovative service-learning course, where local action coupled with an international target, offered a parallel and novel learning strategy that capitalized on the strengths of experiential education, while providing a practical and more inclusive student engagement opportunity available to a larger subset of students. We also describe our teaching strategy, which emphasizes the social context of the classroom: discovery, self-exploration, and shared learning. Together, service learning and a critical pedagogy can better help students relate to the otherwise abstract processes of foreign aid. In 2013 and 2014, approximately 30 undergraduate students participated in a student-led outreach project soliciting bicycle donations to support human development efforts in Uganda and Ghana. In addition to making reasonable progress toward learning outcomes during the two-year pilot, we found that the everyday challenges our students encountered in their service-learning project were microcosms for some of the large-scale, global challenges that foreign aid delivery faces.     

Measuring performance, development and growth when restricting flexibility

In industries with heterogeneous firms and fast-changing productivity, it is necessary to consider both firm and time effects if one is interested in technology adoption and efficiency. Since it is not possible to estimate individual firm effects for each time period due to degree-of-freedom problems, a trade-off is necessary with respect to where one is employing a flexible specification and where one is more restrictive. While most studies choose to account for variation, either in cross-sectional or temporal dimensions, we are in this paper, by clustering firms together in groups, allowing for variation in both cross-sectional and temporal dimensions. By modifying a shadow cost system, we are able to measure group-specific temporal patterns of technical and allocative efficiency and technological change without restricting the patterns to any parametric form.     

Understanding nature-based tourist experiences: an ontological analysis

The purpose of this article is to discuss and elaborate on contemporary research on nature-based tourism experiences. Recent studies on nature-based tourism and experiences are analysed within an ontological framework, with a focus on the view of tourists and their experiences, the nature phenomena, role of the presenter, and consequences of tourist presentations. We argue that four main perspectives can be derived based on the interpretation of recent tourism literature. In these texts, nature-based tourist experiences can be described in terms of the following categories: (1) the genuine, (2) entertainment, (3) state of being, and (4) socio-cultural community. We discuss the features of each view and possible implications for understanding and managing nature-based tourism products and presentations.