VALUING REDUCED RISKS TO CHILDREN: THE CASE OF BICYCLE SAFETY HELMETS

The protection of children's health has recently become a mandated priority for federal policy makers. To assess many of the regulations that affect children's health, policy makers need estimates of the monetary value of reducing mortality risks to children. Although the economics literature has provided many estimates of the value of statistical life (VSL) for adult populations, it has provided none for school age children. This article studies the market for bicycle safety helmets and estimates for the first time a separate but comparable VSL for children and adults. We derive three estimates of VSL for each of three age categories (5 to 9, 10 to 14, and 20 to 59) that range from $1.1 to $4.0 million. In all cases, estimates for adults are highest, followed by estimates for the youngest children.     

Mature vs. youth travelers: The Korean market

An important consideration in understanding and predicting tourist behavior concerns the underlying motivation governing the choice of tourist destinations, and the tourists” evaluation and level of satisfaction with the actual experiences (Pearce, 1991). Motivation is a fundamental element in helping to explain tourist behavior. Unfortunately, the research on motivation has only received moderate attention, both conceptually and empirically. A new theoretical framework employed in sociology and social psychology has recently been proposed by Pearce to explain tourism motivation. It is known as the “Travel Career Ladder” (TCL). This paper attempts to reveal comprehensive information on the travel motivations of Korean tourists with regards to overseas trips by employing the concepts predicated in the TCL model. The implications of this research are discussed in terms of the potential of the TCL model, and to what end it can be used to predict tourist behavior and improve the level of cross‐cultural understanding of international tourists.     

LACK OF RIGOUR IN DEFENDING FAIRTRADE: SOME IMPORTANT CLARIFICATIONS OF A DISTORTING ACCOUNT – A REPLY TO PETER GRIFFITHS

Peter Griffiths claims to have undermined defensive accounts of Fairtrade by highlighting a lack of rigour in their methodology and textual construction. However, inter alia he has significantly distorted the meaning and relevance of a variety of contributions, not least that literature which he accuses others of failing to acknowledge.     

Subsistence and semi‐subsistence farming in selected EU new member states

Factor analysis and cluster analysis are used to analyze the attitudes and perceptions of agricultural households toward farming, commercialization, and barriers to and drivers for increased integration in agricultural markets. Data come from farms in five EU New Member States. The contribution of unsold output to total household income is valued. Stepwise linear regression is employed to detect variables useful in explaining the degree of agricultural market integration of farm households. The analysis indicates that subsistence farming is of utmost importance for the rural poor, particularly in Bulgaria and Romania. The proportion of consumption from own production, manual cultivation techniques, and distance to an urban center are negatively correlated with output sales. Rural development policies targeted at rural physical and market infrastructure might relieve some of these constraints.     

Fair Trade,Diversification and Structural Change: Towards a Broader Theoretical Framework of Analysis

This paper responds to the argument that while Fair Trade governance might increase short-term welfare, it reduces long-term development prospects by discouraging diversification and structural change. Even though it is agreed that lower-value sectors, such as commodity agriculture, are unlikely to offer a long-term solution to global income inequalities, the importance of their short- and medium-term contributions cannot be ignored. Furthermore, critics have evaluated Fair Trade governance against the benchmark of perfect market organization. However, given the realities of the developing world, dismantling Fair Trade abandons poor producers not to theoretical free markets and successful diversification, but to market failures, capability constraints, and risk management issues—all of which present serious obstacles to beneficial change. In light of this, analysis of the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International is used to argue that, far from being detrimental, Fair Trade might actively contribute to diversification by alleviating some of the real-world obstacles that otherwise retard development.     

Sign reversal in the relationship between income smoothing and cost of debt

Despite the fact that income smoothing by managers is a pervasive phenomenon that has been widely researched, extant literature provides incomplete evidence on how smoothing is associated with cost of debt in general, and in the private loan market in particular. The institutional factors associated with private loan contracts, combined with the theoretical motivations for smoothing, make it unclear whether smoothing will be positively, negatively, or not associated with loan spread. Using both cross‐country and within‐country analyses on an international sample of private loans, we predict and provide evidence that income smoothing is associated with lower cost of debt when the threat of private benefits consumption by managers is low, but is associated with higher cost of debt when the threat of private benefits consumption by managers is high. We provide the first evidence in the literature that the garbling effect of smoothing can predictably dominate the signaling view of smoothing in debt contract design, and we identify private benefits consumption threat as the feature of the contracting environment that empirically reveals a sign reversal in the relationship between smoothing and cost of debt.     

Senior citizens and their dining-out traits: Implications for restaurants

Continuing and rapid growth of the mature population in Taiwan has forced the restaurant industry to prepare for substantial social and demographic changes. This study used a telephone survey to elicit attributes important to the restaurant patronage behaviors of consumers aged 65 and older who lived independently. The variables examined include a battery of demographic and health-related variables, a series of motivation attributes, restaurant selection criteria, and measures of consumer's restaurant patronage behaviors. Two distinctive segments were identified; frequent and convenience restaurant patrons, and occasional and family restaurant patrons. The results of this study of mature consumer's restaurant patronage behavior have several implications for this increasingly important and prominent segment of the restaurant consumer marketplace.