The business of blogging: Effective approaches of women food bloggers

Consumer trust and loyalty to bloggers presents opportunities for businesses to reach consumers in inconspicuous and effective ways. The study explores successful business practices used by popular female food bloggers to market food products and services. Content analysis of these food blogs shows that female bloggers construct personas on their blogs that emphasize specific meanings and motivations of food in very intentional ways. Female bloggers use a variety of business tactics to ensure that these personas are credible, professional, trustworthy, and fully intermingled in the lifestyles and beliefs of their target consumers.     

The British corporate network, 1904–1976: Revisiting the finance–industry relationship

The relationship between finance and industry in Britain has received substantial attention, largely focusing on the role played by clearing banks as lenders to industry. This article, through the use of a unique dataset detailing the composition of the British corporate network, aims to investigate the corporate connectivity of industry to banks but also, importantly, highlight the increasing presence of financial institutions other than banks in British business. Additionally, the position of these financial institutions within the network reflects the changes in patterns of ownership of British business through this period as institutional investors’ share of British companies increased. This changing position is further articulated by an analysis of network density over the period, providing critical insights into wider patterns in British business between 1904 and 1976.     

Changes in the stock of on-the-job training,race, and wage growth

This article analyzes the rate of return to on-the-job-training (OJT) investment and in particular, the different rates of return faced by whites and nonwhites. Using data from thePanel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) on tenure on a particular job and on the amount of time necessary for the average person to become fully trained on that job, I estimate the amount of training (in months) acquired by each individual on each job held. Log wage growth is then regressed on changes in the stock of training the individual held with the current firm. In one specification, changes in the stock of training are interacted with race dummies. The results suggest that the rate of return to an additional month of training is actually higher for nonwhites than for whites.     

Economic progress of black women

While black women are much closer to earnings parity with white women than is true for black relative to white men, such a comparison is misleading since it ignores maximization of utility (including leisure) by households (not individuals) and sex discrimination.     

Audits of Complex Estimates as Verification of Management Numbers: How Institutional Pressures Shape Practice

Auditors and regulators have invested heavily in improving audits of estimates in recent years, but problems in this area persist. We examine the causes of these problems and why they persist. To do so, we interview 24 very experienced auditors about how they audit complex accounting estimates such as fair values and impairments and what problems they experience in the process. We find that auditors overwhelmingly choose to audit the details of management's estimate rather than use other allowable approaches. The steps auditors describe and the language they use to describe those steps indicate that they follow a process of verifying individual elements of management's assertions on a piecemeal basis, resulting in overreliance on management's process, rather than engaging in a critical analysis of the overall estimate. The problems that auditors identify are consistent with this view, and include failures to notice inconsistencies among the estimate and other internal data or external conditions and overreliance on specialists to identify, evaluate, and challenge critical assumptions. We interpret these processes and problems using institutional theory and identify two root causes: standards' and firm policies' emphasis on verifying management's model, and audit firms' division of knowledge between auditors and specialists. Institutional theory proposes these conventions arise from firms extending use of procedures that are legitimate in one area (i.e., auditing accounts without significant uncertainty) to a new area (i.e., auditing complex estimates), even though they are likely less effective in the new area. These conventions are reinforced by regulators' method of inspection and by firms' reluctance to change methods without a prompt to change to a clearly better method. We argue that these institutionalized conventions thwart auditors' good‐faith attempts to engage in skeptical analysis of estimates. Thus, audit quality problems are likely to persist.     

Married couple work participation and earnings elasticities: evidence from tax data

This paper uses administrative tax panel data to estimate work participation and earnings elasticities of married couples by exploiting variation in tax policy. Not only may individuals alter labor supply by working more or less in response to changes in tax policy, they may also alter reported earnings or shift income between taxable and tax-deferred compensation. As a result, in addition to estimating the standard extensive and intensive labor supply elasticities, we also examine elasticities by type of income (wage earnings vs. self-employment earnings) and compensation (taxable vs. tax-deferred). We find that wives have more elastic work participation and earnings than husbands. Furthermore, self-employment income is more responsive to net-of-tax price changes than wage earnings for both husbands and wives, suggesting that it is easier for the self-employed to alter their work hours, work intensity, and/or reported income than wage earners. Finally, we find that wives respond to changes in the net-of-tax price of earnings by altering the amount of earnings subject to current-year taxes through adjustments of tax-deferred contributions to employer-provided retirement accounts.     

The Out-bound and In-bound Travelling Market

As the Spring Festival of China with a long vocation of seven days nationally is approaching, more and more attention is paid to the out-bound and inn-bound traveling market. Will people hold their pockets firmly in the ＂cold winter＂ of world-wide financial crisis, or will they grab the great discount of traveling and take a good relax？     

International Financial Centers Delta in China

It has called a lot of attention tnat China should build a pattern of International Financial Centers Delta:Make Beijing the centre of International Finance Management and Cooperation,working as the management and cooperation base and headquarter for China's participation in the iriternational Financial competition;Make Shanghai the centre of International Finance Market.working as the main battlefield of China's participation in international financial competition;Make Hong Kong the centre of Intemational Finance Open and Innovation,working as the frontier of China's participation in international financial competition.     

Sex Work,Sensory Urbanism and Visual Criminology: Exploring the Role of the Senses in Shaping Residential Perceptions of Brothels in Blackpool

Urban studies and criminology have much to offer each other, but the links between the two have so far been underexplored. This article is an illustration of how aspects of both can, and should, be brought into conversation: namely the literatures on sensory urbanism (in urban studies) and visual criminology. The benefits of doing so are evidenced by a case study exploring the ways in which the senses shape residents’ perceptions of brothels in Blackpool. Three key findings emerge from the case study. First, the residents interviewed tended to focus on the visual aspects of brothels rather than other sensory aspects. Nevertheless, touch and smell (and their interaction with the visual) also played small but important roles in shaping residential perceptions. Second, residential perceptions of sex work and brothels are linked to, and encompass, a plurality of emotional responses. Third, while the residents could see or hear little of what was happening inside the brothels, they often sought out sensory clues from outside, typically drawn from the architectural features of the brothels. Such insights, we argue, are made possible by, and highlight the possibilities of, the bringing together of urban studies and criminology.     

Loss Given Default,Loan Seasoning and Financial Fragility: Evidence from Commercial Real Estate Loans at Failed Banks

Commercial real estate (CRE) loan losses are a recurring contributor to bank failures and financial instability, yet they are not well understood. We examine a unique and proprietary data set of CRE loan defaults at banks that failed and were resolved by the FDIC after the 2008 financial crisis. We build upon an existing literature relating stochastic collateral values to loss given default (LGD). Consistent with model predictions, we show that CRE loans defaulting sooner after origination are more sensitive to declining economic conditions and exhibit LGDs that are more severe. These results are robust to a number of factors, including the declining balance of the loan over time. Our findings point to an inherent fragility associated with high CRE loan growth, even without necessarily a deterioration in lending standards, due to the changing composition of CRE loan seasoning in the industry. This reflects an unexplored risk in the literature concerning rapid and cyclical expansions in CRE credit.