Can highway investment policies influence regional growth?

If a highway investment policy instrument is to alter growth in the manner desired, two criteria must be satisfied: (1) the policy instrument must be implemented, and (2) the implementation must achieve the desired policy goal. A look at three decades of highway policy goals (slowing net population growth, reducing arterial congestion, and fostering city-specific population increases) and policy instruments (zoning and sewer restrictions, gridded networks, and highway facility construction or non-construction) provided insights regarding the extent to which Virginia's growth-oriented highway investment decisions satisfied these two criteria.Crucial to the first criterion is that a policy instrument will not be implemented if it lacks a supporting mechanism. For example, the policy instrument of gridded networks in this study lacked any ordinance, financial incentive, or training to facilitate its implementation. Crucial to the second criterion is that highway investments are not effective for achieving a growth-related policy goal. Development will continue in a region despite efforts to slow it by deleting new roads from master plans or will occur elsewhere despite efforts to target it in a specific area.     

Working musicians: exploring the rhetorical ties between musical labour and leisure

This essay explores the implications of a common but rarely examined trope about music, leisure and labour. The idea that music should appear effortless – that its execution should not require work – has shaped critical and consumer interpretation in a wide variety of historical settings. The trope of effortless music suggests that music is an outgrowth of one’s individual genius, heritage or social identity rather than a product of one’s labour. Close attention to the work involved in learning and performing music can expand our understanding of the multiple ways in which music creates value, and the historical ways in which the dialectic between conception and execution in modern capitalism have paralleled the distinctions between composition and performance in the Western music scholarship. Two historical case studies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth‐century US provide the evidence for my argument. I examine the overlapping discourses of musical effort and work in the world of female parlour pianists in the middle‐class home and among academic folksong collectors and some of the southern musicians whom they courted as informants. I conclude by suggesting what music history might look like if we chose to place the work of learning and performing music at the centre of the story.     

Sustainability through food and conversation: the role of an entrepreneurial restaurateur in fostering engagement with sustainable development issues

Food justice, food cultures and people's engagement with healthy food production and consumption are key contemporary concerns, with a growing sustainable hospitality and tourism literature. Efforts range from narrowly focused initiatives, such as promoting organic produce and fair trade, to more holistic challenges to current systems through initiatives like the slow food and locavore movements, which may represent systemic alternatives. However, little analysis is available on how cafés and restaurants might become sites for experimentation in profitable and just sustainable hospitality, and places for sustainability engagement and education. Focusing on the evolution of a sustainable café in Adelaide, South Australia, this article explores how one entrepreneurial restaurateur uses his café to engage customers and community in a collaborative conversation about sustainable development, food, hospitality and tourism, helping transform our food culture and even lifeways. Our findings indicate the value of deep local embedding as a pathway to meaningful sustainability. The study offers insights into how hospitality and tourism can contribute to dialogues on alternative consumption which may offer visionary pathways to alternative futures. It also explores the role of pioneers in sustainable business and hospitality, their drivers and their views. A forthcoming global research initiative is discussed.     

Accelerated radical innovation: Theory and application

Radical innovation has been responsible for some of society's greatest advances over the past hundred years in fields as diverse as transportation, power, information technology, and medicine. But as scholars have found, it is such a long-term, chaotic, meandering, unpredictable process that promising radical innovation concepts are often never undertaken, to society's detriment. Does it need to be this way? Or can radical innovation be accelerated so that it is manageable within modern society's economic and political time horizon? This question prompted the organization of the Accelerated Radical Innovation (ARI) project five years ago. In this paper we summarize the ARI methodology as it currently stands and then report the results of an empirical verification with a radical medical innovation project that is currently under way — monochromatic X-rays for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Several conclusions were drawn. First, by and large, the ARI model tracked closely with the reality of this innovation, offering confirmation of its grounding in the real world of innovation. Second, the model offered a rationale and framework for this innovation process that could be more widely adopted. Third, the ARI model exposed critical issues whose early resolution could have accelerating the innovation cycle. Fourth, the application of a core principle of ARI, Systematic Competitive Intelligence, could have provided early warning on a competing technology that emerged suddenly. Last, the use of another core ARI concept, accelerated innovation prototyping, might help the innovator overcome the key barrier facing the innovation — the necessity of a long, expensive, high-risk clinical trial. Overall, the verification study confirms the potential of the ARI model to put the radical innovation process on a faster, lower-cost, better-managed track.     

Changes over time in the return to education in urban China: Conventional and ORU estimates

Studies of the return to education in urban China have reported that this has increased over time, and that females typically have a higher return than males. In this paper we adopt a framework provided by the over education/required education/under education literature, and the decomposition developed by Chiswick and Miller (2008), to investigate the reasons for these findings. The finding by Chen and Hamori (2009), from analysis of data for 2004 and 2006, of the return to schooling for males exceeding that for females, is also examined using this decomposition.     

Implications of Components of Income Excluded from Pro Forma Earnings for Future Profitability and Equity Valuation

Abstract:  This study addresses three research questions relating to total exclusions, special items, and other exclusions. Are each of these pro forma exclusion components forecasting irrelevant? Are each of the exclusion components value irrelevant? Are the valuation multiples on the exclusion components justified by their ability to forecast future profitability as predicted by the Ohlson (1999) model? Findings are generally consistent with the market-inefficiency results presented in Doyle et al. (2003) . Total exclusions are valued negatively by the market despite the prediction that total exclusions will be valued positively. Valuation results also suggest that stocks with positive other exclusions are overpriced.     

The underpricing of initial public offerings: A theoretical and empirical reconsideration of the adverse selection hypothesis

In this paper we generalize Rock's theory regarding the underpricing of IPOs. In Rock's model, informed investors have a firm-specific informational advantage pertaining to a firm's cash flow. We derive the new results that the level of beta and the size of the market risk premium positively affect underpricing. These implications extend the adverse selection theory and further distinguish this theory from the current state of signalling theories of underpricing. The results put the “hot and cold” issue markets phenomenon in a theoretical context. Empirical results are consistent with the theoretical propositions and provide support for Rock's theory of underpricing.