Measuring stress in money markets: A dynamic factor approach

We extract an index of interest rate spreads from various money market segments to assess the level of funding stress in real time. We find that during the 2007–2009 financial crisis, money markets switched between low and high stress regimes except for brief periods of extreme stress. Transitions to lower stress regimes are typically associated with the non-standard policy measures by the Federal Reserve.     

Curriculum assessment through a capstone course: a case study in hospitality and tourism programs

The purpose of this study was to develop a systematic process that other educational institutions and programs could follow to establish a consistent and accurate evaluation method for a capstone course. Hospitality industry professionals and hospitality management faculty were interviewed through focus-group discussions, and a post-focus-group survey was conducted to determine a weighted percentage for each of the nine determined content domains. A test blueprint for a hospitality management capstone course was developed to measure programmatic student learning outcomes based on the weighted domains determined through this study. The results provide a usable instrument for hospitality and tourism management programs to enhance their current assessment methodology.     

Strategic implications of the Soviet‐North Korean alliance

Abstract

Globalization is commonly defined as a strict economic path by most previous works, but it is really a fuzzy concept with unrestrained dimensions. While the ideological location of an incumbent political party is a powerful predictor of its policy position, the role of a political party in the globalization-growth nexus has never been fully empirically investigated. By applying Pedroni's panel cointegration technique instead of a time-series or traditional panel data approach, this paper aims to empirically re-examine the co-movement and the causal relationship among economic growth, the overall globalization index, and its three main dimensions—economic, social, as well as political integrations—by using panel data for 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for 1970 to 2006. Certainly, the political party variable is taken into account as the advanced test is promoted, and we finally discover that all variables move together in the long run. Based on the results of the panel causality test, though the evidence of short-run causality is very weak, it does show long-run unidirectional causality running from the overall index of globalization, economic globalization, and social globalization to growth. Finally, the critical role of the political party is deeply discussed in relation with our results.     

Money,reserves, and the transmission of monetary policy: Does the money multiplier exist?

With the use of non-traditional policy tools, the level of reserve balances has risen in the US from roughly $20 billion before the financial crisis to well past $1 trillion. The effect of reserve balances in macroeconomic models often comes through the money multiplier, affecting the money supply and the bank lending. In this paper, we document that the mechanism does not work through the standard multiplier model or the bank lending channel. If the level of reserve balances is expected to have an impact on the economy, it seems unlikely that a standard multiplier story will explain the effect.     

Art: Futures of the past

This essay makes a demand: it calls for a divorce between art and culture in order to reaffirm a future for art. It asks whether in a scenario in which political culture has surrendered to cultural politics, can art reaffirm and reconfigure itself as a site of exuberance, wonder, vitality, affect, memory and learning, and create a place of ethical and critical resistance?     

The seventh mass extinction: Human-caused events contribute to a fatal consequence

This paper presents a scenario in a written narrative that describes the events that could lead to the extinction of humans as well as other biological entities as living species on the Earth. The scenario is built upon historical evidence and speculations of the causes of past extinctions, but it also describes emerging actions by humans that could contribute to the hypothesized extinction. The scenario takes place from 2010 to approximately 2080 and leads to an extinction that is precipitated by human-caused activities, the global warming of the Earth (leading to famine, flooding, and resource wars), the release of a series of fatal genetically engineered organisms (precipitating from a new world order and heightened terrorism), and finally an impact cataclysm (leading to earthquakes, tsunamis, more famine and flooding, and ultimately bringing on glaciation).     

The role of CEO relative standing in acquisition behavior and CEO pay

In this study, we develop and test a theory of CEO relative pay standing. Specifically, we propose that CEOs with negative relative pay standing status (underpaid relative to comparison CEOs) will engage in acquisition activity, as a self‐interested means of attempting to realign their pay with that of their peers. We further propose that, when CEOs with negative relative pay standing acquire, they will tend to finance those acquisitions more heavily with stock than cash, to mitigate the risk associated with those deals. Finally, we argue that acquisition activity will partially mediate the influence of CEO negative relative pay standing on subsequent CEO compensation increases; however, that pay growth will come primarily in the form of long‐term incentive pay. Our results support our predictions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New technological path creation: evidence from the British and German wind energy industries

The canonical economic literature on path dependence provides only a limited explanation of why and how new technological pathways are created initially. The motivation of this paper is to address this gap in the literature and argue that evolutionary economics theories of path dependence need to be linked with sociological explanations of how new technological pathways are created in the first instance by knowledgeable inventors and innovators. These arguments are developed by the authors in a hybrid socio-economic theory of new path creation. In this paper these theoretical arguments are illustrated empirically by a comparative analysis of the introduction and diffusion of new wind power technologies in Britain and Germany. The empirical analysis focuses on the key research question of why the introduction of these new technologies started earlier and has diffused sooner in Germany than in Britain.