Assessing South Africa Learners’ Attitudes Towards Technology by Using the PATT (Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology) Questionnaire

The PATT (Pupils’ Attitude Towards Technology) questionnaire, as validated for the USA, was used to assess and analyse South African learners’ attitudes towards technology. The responses of 500 girls and 510 boys, from the Gauteng Province in South Africa, were analysed using a principal component and a principal factor analysis. The explained variance was rather low and indicated that the questionnaire needed adaptation for the South African context. The outcomes of the research were positive in that there were no significant differences regarding the gender attitudes that ‘technology should be for all’ and that ‘technology makes contributions to society’. The fact that girls have a stronger gender discrimination view related to themselves regarding technology needs to be addressed in future curriculum development issues. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Dealing with drainage: state regulation of drainage projects in the Dutch Republic,France, and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

In the early modern period the viability of large‐scale drainage projects implemented by courtiers, officials, or merchants could be endangered by litigation or violent conflicts with landlords, commoners, cities, or water boards whose interests were harmed by the implementation of such projects. A comparison between the Dutch Republic, England, and France shows that the Dutch had developed institutions to deal with this efficiently. State patents for drainage granted compensation to all parties involved and precluded long drawn‐out lawsuits. When large‐scale drainage began in England and France from c. 1600 onwards, these states had no experience with drainage regulation. They had to find their way by trial and error. In England this led to lawsuits and riots by commoners that ruined several drainage schemes. The decentralized nature of the Dutch state turned out to be an advantage. Dutch politicians and entrepreneurs were used to compromises, and solutions could be adapted to local circumstances. In more centralized England and France this was more difficult to achieve. The Dutch also profited from the fact that territorial lords had already abolished common rights of usage in the coastal provinces in the late middle ages, thus removing an important source of conflict.     

The Impact of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Nias Earthquake on the Spatial Distribution of Population in Northern Sumatra

After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Northern Sumatra experienced three shocks: a negative shock from the tsunami itself and the Nias earthquake that followed in 2005; a positive shock from the massive allocation of recovery funds; and another positive shock from the peace deal between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement, also in 2005. We analyse the consequences of these shocks on the spatial distribution of the population in Northern Sumatra, building on the approach developed by Davis and Weinstein (2002). We conclude that there have been no significant changes in the relative position of regions in Aceh and North Sumatra, considering their population size. Our model of estimated population growth suggests that the twin disasters had only a temporary impact, which supports the locational fundamentals theory. Our results also reveal that the peace deal is important in explaining the dynamics of population growth in the region.     

Executive Compensation in UK Property Companies

We study the drivers of executive compensation in the listed UK property sector. The UK provides an excellent opportunity to analyze executive compensation due to high transparency in the different components of executive compensation. We show that company size is the most important variable in explaining the level of executive compensation. We find that absolute and relative share performance significantly explains long-term compensation, that management style has a distinct influence on the level of executive compensation, and that using alternative monitoring mechanisms (institutional shareholders, debtholders, and outside directors) leads to higher levels of long-term incentives. We find only weak evidence of pay-performance sensitivity for both cash and long-term compensation. Executive shareholdings provide a much stronger link between pay and performance than does executive compensation.

Boorstin's consumption community concept: A tale of two countries

The concept of consumption community, first proposed by historian Daniel Boorstin, claims that in the modern era of high mobility, people look not only to neighborhood as a basis for feelings of community but also to communality of consumption behavior (e.g., drinking the same brand of beer). The idea was tested cross-nationally by administering a newly devised psychological sense of community (PSC) scale to more than 100 adult respondents in Belgium and a like number in the U.S. The findings support Boorstin in that for both national samples, PSC values for consumption items were generally positive and consistent with social science theoretical expectations. Implications of the study findings are discussed for theory and social policy.

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Zusammenfassung Das Konzept der Konsumgemeinschaft von Boorstin: Eine Geschichte von zwei Ländern. Das Konzept der Konsumgemeinschaft, erstmals durch den Historiker Daniel Boorstin vorgestellt, behauptet, da\ im heutigen Zeitalter hoher Mobilität der Einzelne sein Gemeinschaftsgefühl nicht nur durch seine Beziehung aus der direkten Nachbarschaft bezieht, sondern auch aus der Gemeinsamkeit bestimmter Konsumverhaltensweisen (z. B. das Trinken derselben Biermarke). Diese Idee wurde empirisch geprüft durch eine ländervergleichende Untersuchung, in der eine neu entwickelte psychologische Skala für den Gemeinschaftssinn bei jeweils einer Stichprobe von mehr als 100 erwachsenen Personen in Belgien und in den USA angewendet wurde. Die Ergebnisse stützen Boorstin insofern, als beide Länderstichproben zu Skalenwerten führen, die mit den theoretischen sozialwirtschaftlichen Erwartungen übereinstimmen.

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Koen De Vos is a Research Assistant at the same institution.     

Property shares, appraisals and the stock market: An international perspective

A severe problem facing both real estate researchers and investors is the lack of reliable real estate returns data. Property shares, the shares of companies which invest in property and manage a portfolio of real estate, have been proposed as indicators of real estate performance. Property shares exist in many countries, are publicly traded, and their returns are not inherently biased. For three countries, we investigate the relationships with common stock and appraisal-based returns which property share returns exhibit. Our results indicate that property shares are closely related to the stock markets on which they trade, thereby confirming previous findings for the United States. However, property share returns also predict appraisal-based indices.     

Corporate Diversification and the Cost of Debt

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - This paper investigates whether corporate diversification by property type and by geography reduces the costs of debt capital. It employs...     

Why makers make what they make: motivations to contribute to open source hardware development

Open source software (OSS) and hardware (OSH) are two expressions of one broader concept and its related movement. One of the most fundamental questions relating to these phenomena is why developers contribute their private resources to these public goods. While this question has been discussed, theorized, and empirically investigated in the context of OSS, there has been no research so far in the context of OSH. Can we really assume the motivations behind the development of the OSH to be the same as those behind OSS? Based on the self-determination theory (SDT), we provide original insights into the motivations behind contributions to OSH development. We collected data from the most common and active 3D printing communities, which are the main loci of OSH development. We thus have a unique cross-sectional data set with participants from over 30 different countries using all kinds of different OSH platforms. Our analysis reveals several important findings: firstly, the motivations are in some aspects very similar to those in open source software notwithstanding different possibilities, hurdles, and incentives regarding the OSS and OSH. Above all, enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation is a major factor affecting contribution levels. Secondly, among internalized extrinsic motivations, expected private benefits through improving own skills stands out. Thirdly, different factors of internalized extrinsic motivations can have different moderating effects on the effect of enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation. Given the imminent changes in business models throughout manufacturing industries in order to adapt to the challenge that OSH will increasingly pose, our findings have important implications not only for OSH communities and 3D development platforms, but also for businesses that want and probably soon have to engage in open innovation.     

Second-Best Congestion Pricing: The Case of an Untolled Alternative

This paper deals with second-best one-route congestion pricing in case of an untolled alternative. Using a two-link network simulation model, the effects of various demand and cost parameters on the relative efficiency of one-route tolling are analyzed. It is investigated whether the existence of costs of congestion charging may be a reason for one-route tolling to be more “overall efficient” than two-route tolling. Finally, the efficiency of revenue-maximizing one-route and two-route tolling is discussed.