Laundry practices: line-drying and load characteristics

The authors conducted an exploratory study on laundry practices including: contents and number of laundry loads, use of line-drying, laundry items that are line-dried, and availability of equipment for line-drying. The participants dried fewer loads than previously reported in the literature and laundered different items. Subjects used line-drying for selected textiles, viewed line-drying as time consuming and indicated they lacked equipment for line-drying. The respondents did not thoroughly comprehend the meaning of ‘line dry’. From the results, the authors concluded that additional research is needed to identify a standard or typical laundry load. Research is necessary to up-date the body of knowledge, and educators need to inform consumers of the benefits and concerns of line-drying.     

Effect of Comparable Worth Policies on Earnings

The initial impact of comparable worth legislation on male and female earnings is estimated using five public sector comparable worth studies. We find that women would earn an average 17 per cent more if a comparable worth policy were implemented and men would earn an average 1 per cent more. In addition, about half of the earnings gap between women and men in the sample jurisdictions would be eliminated. We also discuss the limitations of previous analyses by examining Aldrich and Buchele's recent empirical work.     

THE DYNAMICS OF THE LIABILITY OF FOREIGNNESS: A GLOBAL STUDY OF SURVIVAL IN FINANCIAL SERVICES

We study the impact of ‘foreignness’ on survival in interbank currency trading worldwide over the period 1974–93. In particular, we develop hypotheses on the behavior of the liability of foreignness over time, and on the consequences of evolving sources of firm-level competitive advantage on this liability. We test these hypotheses on the population of 2667 market-making trading rooms located in 47 countries worldwide that either existed in 1974 or entered the industry between 1974 and 1993. The results show that there is a liability of foreignness, and that it changes over time. Further, strategic and organizational factors such as the adoption of technology by these firms and their mode of internal control significantly influenced survival, as did location-related factors such as the intensity of local and foreign competition. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Private Equity and Long‐Run Investment: The Case of Innovation

A long‐standing controversy is whether leveraged buyouts (LBOs) relieve managers from short‐term pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves sacrifice long‐term growth to boost short‐term performance. We examine one form of long‐run activity, namely, investments in innovation as measured by patenting activity. Based on 472 LBO transactions, we find no evidence that LBOs sacrifice long‐term investments. LBO firm patents are more cited (a proxy for economic importance), show no shifts in the fundamental nature of the research, and become more concentrated in important areas of companies' innovative portfolios.     

SKEWNESS AND KURTOSIS PROPERTIES OF INCOME DISTRIBUTION MODELS

This paper explores the ability of some popular income distributions to model observed skewness and kurtosis. We present the generalized beta type 1 (GB1) and type 2 (GB2) distributions' skewness–kurtosis spaces and clarify and expand on previously known results on other distributions' skewness–kurtosis spaces. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study are used to estimate sample moments and explore the ability of the generalized gamma, Dagum, Singh–Maddala, beta of the first kind, beta of the second kind, GB1, and GB2 distributions to accommodate the skewness and kurtosis values. The GB2 has the flexibility to accurately describe the observed skewness and kurtosis.     

BESTSELLER LISTS AND PRODUCT VARIETY*

This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of the New York Times bestseller list on sales and product variety. In order to circumvent the obvious problem of simultaneity of sales and bestseller status, the analysis exploits time lags and accidental omissions in the construction of the list. The empirical results indicate that appearing on the list leads to a modest increase in sales for the average book, and that the effect is more dramatic for bestsellers by debut authors. The paper discusses how the additional concentration of demand on top‐selling books could lead to a reduction in the privately optimal number of books to publish. However, the data suggest the opposite is true: the market expansion effect of bestseller lists appears to dominate any business stealing from non‐bestselling titles.     

Line-drying versus machine-drying: energy consumption comparison

The purpose of this study was to determine the physical energy utilized in machine-drying and the human energy utilized in line-drying with a standard test laundry load in order to demonstrate the benefits of making a trade-off between mechanized energy and human energy utilized in drying laundry. Comparatively, only a small amount of metabolic energy was utilized in line-drying. Line-drying laundry over an extended period of time, along with similar trade-offs with other household tasks to use more human energy and less mechanized energy, would save energy resources and would contribute to physical health by increasing exercise levels. All data collection occurred at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.     

Scrip as private money,monetary monopoly,and the rent‐seeking state in Britain

Scrip—promissory notes payable in goods at company stores—was issued by employers to pay workers, and was an important component of British money during the industrial revolution. As late as the third quarter of the nineteenth century, scrip issued by coal firms, which represented the foregone demand for official currency, was at least 9 to 24 per cent of the value of English country or Scottish banknote issues. In some areas, scrip was 38 per cent of the total wages paid. The state's suppression of this private currency to defend its seigniorage rents was in part the motivation behind the prohibition of the truck system in 1831.