Agricultural Land Prices: The Effect of the Terms of a Sale

Cash sales are often made at a discount. This is as true for farmland as it is for commodities purchased in everyday commerce.
A recent investigation of agricultural land prices in the central part of Wellington County, Ontario, since the mid-1920s confirms the lower price that all-cash can secure, but it finds that price does not increase progressively as the proportion of cash decreases. This seemingly aberrant behavior of farmland price is satisfactorily explained by three separate effects. The first is related to the security potential of loans on different terms; the second, to the market for mortgages; while the third concerns interest rates.     

Feeling the Effects of a Competitor’s Product Recall: Lessons Learned by Quebec SMEs in the Cheese Sector

This article explores learning opportunities and portrays the product recall as a crisis situation from which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) indirectly impacted by the event can and must learn. It describes the raw milk cheese recall in Quebec. A semistructured interview guide was used. The population studied comprises 12 cheese makers specializing in processing partly or totally raw milk and presents the results of interviews with managers of companies that survived the ordeal. Excerpts from interviews show that cheese makers took advantage of this crisis to improve their capacity to manage product recalls. The comments by the producers interviewed indicate that the crisis had a marked influence on knowledge creation related to prevention and preparedness for product recalls.     

Enhanced job satisfaction under tighter technological control: The paradoxical outcomes of digitalisation

Via a multiple case study of work in microfinance institutions in India, this paper reports on the experiences of field officers and branch managers following work digitalisation. It identifies and explains an intriguing post-digitalisation paradox of reported increased job satisfaction and tighter technological control diminishing branch managers' work-life balance. The paradox draws attention to the significance of context in workers' experiences of mobile digital technologies (MDTs) and contradicts previous studies on workers' positive experiences of adopting MDTs: the workers in this study did not experience greater autonomy or flexibility but reported enhanced employment security and status. The paper also adds to literature on employment relations following work digitalisation by revealing powerful enforcement of technological control, with ‘WhatsApp’ identified as a key managerial tool used for surveillance and discipline, and worker resistance at the margins.     

Sampling error and the joint estimation of imputation credit value and cash dividend value

The value of imputation credits can only be estimated jointly with the value of cash dividends. We show that random variation across samples leads to estimates of credit value that move in the opposite direction to estimates of cash value. Derivative prices suggest a value for credits of 0.01 to 0.20 (0.01 to 0.07 if cash is worth 0.94, and 0.13 to 0.20 if cash is worth 0.87). Ex-dividend prices suggest a value for credits of 0.23 to 0.46 (0.23 to 0.36 if cash is worth 0.85, and 0.33 to 0.46 if cash is worth 0.75).     

New perspectives on the contribution of sanitary investments to mortality decline in English cities, 1845–1909

Health improved in English cities in the last third of the nineteenth century, in tandem with substantial increases in public spending on water supplies and sanitation. However, previous efforts to measure the contribution of public expenditures to mortality improvements have been hampered by difficulties in quantifying public health investments and the lack of mortality data for specifically urban populations. We improve upon the existing evidence base by (1) creating measures of the stock of urban district sanitary capital, by type, on the basis of capital expenditure flows, rather than loan stocks; (2) using mortality and capital stock data that relate to the same administrative units (urban districts), and (3) studying the period 1880–1909 as well as the earlier period from 1845. The stock of sewerage capital was robustly related to improvements in all-cause mortality after 1880. The size of this effect varied with the extent of public investment in water supplies, suggesting complementarity between the two assets. For the period 1845–84, investments in water were associated with declines in infant and child mortality but the effect was much smaller and less precisely estimated in later decades. Our results suggest that improvements in water and sewerage targeted different transmission pathways for faecal–oral diseases.