Crisis? What Crisis? The Normality of the Current Food Crisis

The 2005–8 food crisis was a shock to political elites, but in some respects the situation was normal. Food policies are failing to respond adequately to the squeeze on land, people, health and environment. Strong evidence of systems failure and stress, termed here New Fundamentals, ought to reframe twenty‐first century food politics and effort. Yet so far, international discourse is too often narrow and technical. The paper suggests that 2005–8 reinforced how the dominant twentieth century productionist policy paradigm is running out of steam. This assumed that producing more food would resolve social problems. Yet distortions in markets, access and culture remain. At national and international levels of governance, despite realization of the enormity of the challenge ahead, there is still a belief in slow incremental change.     

No more dancing for gods: constructing Taiwanese/Chinese identity through the Ilisin

Increasingly there is a desire amongst political and administrative authorities concerned with the management of English professional football to extend the ‘sense’ of transformation witnessed in the popularity and cultures of support surrounding the domestic game to the national team. However, there is a widely held perception that both the social formations constituted around the England team and media representations of them have proven resistant to the cultural shift (imagined or otherwise) associated with domestic club football. Concern within the UK Home Office, the English Football Association (FA) and some supporters' groups has led to a high profile attempt to overcome this ‘resistance’ and ‘re‐market’ the image of England supporters in order to create a more socially inclusive supporter base. Drawing on ethnographic and textual data collected in the build up to, and during, the 2002 men's football World Cup finals, this paper considers the frameworks of knowledge associated with this intervention and their impact on the cultural forms of support for the England team during the World Cup, in specific locations both at ‘home’ and ‘away’. This consideration then gives way to an interpretation of the extent to which ‘Englishness’ continues to be performed in culturally exclusive ways that emphasize the contingency of new and emergent social formations.     

Trading Patterns and Prices in the Interbank Foreign Exchange Market

The behavior of quote arrivals and bid-ask spreads is examined for continuously recorded deutsche mark-dollar exchange rate data over time, across locations, and by market participants. A pattern in the intraday spread and intensity of market activity over time is uncovered and related to theories of trading patterns. Models for the conditional mean and variance of returns and bid-ask spreads indicate volatility clustering at high frequencies. The proposition that trading intensity has an independent effect on returns volatility is rejected, but holds for spread volatility. Conditional returns volatility is increasing in the size of the spread.     

The Determinants of Leveraged Buyout Activity: Free Cash Flow vs. Financial Distress Costs

This paper investigates the determinants of leveraged buyout (LBO) activity by comparing firms that have implemented LBOs to those that have not. Consistent with the free cash flow theory, we find that firms that initiate LBOs can be characterized as having a combination of unfavorable investment opportunities (low Tobin's q) and relatively high cash flow. LBO firms also tend to be more diversified than firms which do not undertake LBOs. In addition, firms with high expected costs of financial distress (e.g., those with high research and development expenditures) are less likely to do LBOs.     

ROLE OF VOLUNTARY PROGRAMS IN AGRICULTURAL NONPOINT POLLUTION POLICY

Voluntary programs' effectiveness in reducing agricultural pollution is under debate in the professional literature, within government regulatory agencies, and among legislators. In general, non-farm business owners bear little or none of the costs of environmental degradation that their business activities cause. However, farmers who reside on the farm may bear some of the costs associated with using chemicals. As a result, voluntary programs encouraging adoption of management practices that simultaneously improve on farm and off-farm environmental quality may not require subsidizing farmers for their full loss in profits. However, farmers likely will not adopt regulatory agencies' recommended management practices that do not positively affect on farm environmental quality unless subsidies exceed full adoption costs .     

HAS NEW ZEALAND'S EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS ACT INCREASED EMPLOYMENT AND REDUCED WAGES?*

The Employment Contracts Act 1991 substantively altered the structure of the industrial relations system in New Zealand. This study estimates the effects of this legislation on employment levels and average hourly earnings in this country using disaggregate industry level data from 1986(1) to 1996(2). In the five years following the enactment of the ECA, nonagricultural union membership declined from 49.5 to 27.2 per cent of the work force. This is an important consideration because our regression analysis suggests that this decrease in unionisation is solely responsible for any effects of the ECA on the labour market. Full-time equivalent employment grew by 14.2 per cent between 1991(2) and 1996(2). At least 2.3 percentage points of this employment growth can be attributed to this legislation. If the ECA was partly responsible for the recent economic recovery, then more of this employment growth could be credited to this act. There are two basic reasons why the ECA might have increased employment over the past five years. It could have lowered hourly earnings, or increased effective labour demand. Estimates of a reduced-form wage equation and a structural labour demand function both point to the latter explanation. Since there is no statistical evidence that ECA reduced hourly earnings, falling unionisation must have increased effective labour demand.     

Heterogeneous Information Arrivals and Return Volatility Dynamics: Uncovering the Long-Run in High Frequency Returns

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the interdaily volatility clustering for most speculative returns are best characterized by a slowly mean-reverting fractionally integrated process. Meanwhile, much shorter lived volatility dynamics are typically observed with high frequency intradaily returns. The present article demonstrates, that by interpreting the volatility as a mixture of numerous heterogeneous short-run information arrivals, the observed volatility process may exhibit long-run dependence. As such, the long-memory characteristics constitute an intrinsic feature of the return generating process, rather than the manifestation of occasional structural shifts. These ideas are confirmed by our analysis of a one-year time series of five-minute Deutschemark-U.S. Dollar exchange rates.     

Corporate Risk Management and the Incentive Effects of Debt

This paper demonstrates how the incentive of manager-equityholders to substitute toward riskier assets, commonly referred to as the “asset substitution problem,” is related to the level of observable risk in the firm. When observable and unobservable risks are sufficiently positively correlated, increases (decreases) in observable risk generate the incentive for manager-equityholders to increase (decrease) unobservable risk. Thus, credible commitments to hedge observable risk can benefit the firm's manager-equityholders by reducing the incentive to shift risk and the associated agency cost of debt. This provides a positive rationale for hedging diversifiable risk at the firm level.