The Rocky Road to Legacy: Lessons from the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Stadium Program

This article describes how the management and organization of the South African 2010 FIFA World Cup stadium program shaped the current legacy of an oversupply of overdesigned and underutilized stadiums. The article identifies seven key factors that explain the differences between expected benefits and the actual legacy. Identification of these factors contributes to the increasing academic interest in explaining the poor legacy outcomes of mega‐events. In conclusion, we recommend that future host country governments defragment their stadium programs by establishing a World Cup Delivery Authority (WCDA), with responsibility for the leadership and coordination of the stadium program.     

Environmental and economic development issues in the Polish motorway programme: some findings on local authority attitudes

This paper assesses the relative value attached by Polish local authorities to the development of motorways, as opposed to other national roads. It presents the findings of a survey, (the first of its kind) designed to record attitudes to these plans (which have changed with each successive government). The results are analysed in light of the on-going debate about environmental/economic development issues, polarised also along party lines. Previous analysis of media debate is re-visited. The degree of collaboration between gminas and the Ministry of Transport is explored, but found to be limited. The priorities of most local authorities are local economic development, and the quantity and quality of non-motorway roads are seen at least as important as the construction of new motorways.     

Understanding the Shift in Demand for Cash Value Life Insurance

Ownership of cash value life insurance in the United States has fallen in recent decades. Changes in age cohorts, family composition, and tax laws may have contributed to this decline. We identify factors that influence the demand for cash value life insurance and test whether they alone can explain the sharp decline in ownership. Demographic and tax code changes do not explain the decrease in permanent insurance. There is a consistent downward trend in demand from 1992 to 2010—particularly among middle‐age and younger households. The fewer households who own cash value policies are on average wealthier and more financially sophisticated, suggesting that permanent life insurance is increasingly being used as a tax shield rather than as a hedge against a loss in human capital.     

Engineered nanomaterials: risk perception,regulation and insurance

Concerns surrounding the health risk of engineered nanomaterials, effective regulation and the lack of specifically tailored insurance products for the nanotechnology sector are putting the industry’s long-term economic viability at risk. From the perspective of the underwriter, this article speculates on the relationship between risk perception, regulation and insurability. In the nanotechnology sector, regulators are currently failing to keep pace with innovation, and insurers generally lack guiding principles for underwriting occupational risk from nanomaterial exposure. Such vulnerabilities when combined with misguided risk perceptions can lead to the overpricing of risk transfer and ill-conceived regulatory initiatives, thus potentially exhausting resources and stifling innovation in the sector. In the absence of well-developed regulatory protocols, the insurance industry has, and will continue, to occupy a key role as an effective lobby in terms of improved risk management practice. We suggest that the insurance industry will increasingly rely on control banding frameworks and ‘risk mitigation at source’ methods developed in conjunction with their clients to manage severe acute diversifiable risks. Long tail risk will continue to represent a serious challenge to insurers and regulators. In the meantime, insurers will have to bridge their current needs with improvised solutions. As an example of one possible solution, we outline a framework that utilizes financial instruments to hedge an insurer’s exposure to uncertain estimates of these long-term risks.     

Expert relevance and the use of context-driven heuristic processes in risk perception

The effectiveness of a medical treatment should not predict its risk (highly effective treatments can be either safe or risky), however, people’s use of heuristic shortcuts may lead them to judge a link between effectiveness and risk, typically a negative correlation. A particular concern is that experts might use such a strategy and that this is unlikely to provide an accurate judgement. This large-scale field-based experiment compares expert-relevant and non-expert-relevant contexts, for both expert and public judgements of risk and effectiveness in the context of blood transfusion medicine. Postal questionnaires were distributed to anaesthetists (experts, N?=?123) and a general public (non-expert) comparison group (N?=?1153); half of the participants were cued with accompanying general information about genetically-modified (GM) biotechnology and half received specific information about blood product technologies. The blood-focussed information served to emphasise the medical relevance of the questionnaire to the expert group. Regression analyses showed that generally perceived effectiveness predicted perceived risk for both experts and non-experts, which suggests heuristic processing. However, although experts appeared to engage in heuristic processing for risk perceptions in certain circumstances, this processing is strongly affected by context. Experts who received the medically relevant context rated perceptions of effectiveness independently of perceptions of risk, unlike those who received the GM context. This indicates a reduced reliance on a low-effort heuristic for experts given an expertise-relevant context. The results are considered in light of dual-process (rational-associative) accounts of reasoning.     

Accounting and the construction of institutions: The case of a factory

Despite the substantial body of research which assumes that management accounting was a reflex to the emergence of the factory system, little is known of the relationship between the two. Archival materials are presented in this paper which would suggest a far more complex relationship between accounting and the rise of the factory. In particular, we emphasize the way in which periodic reports, rather than ad boc calculations of cost or profit, were interwined with this new organization of work.     

Key influencers and inhibitors on adoption of the Internet for banking

The focus on new technologies in service situations is growing and is of particular importance in financial services contexts. It is argued that there is mutuality of benefit for both bank and customer through the adoption of self-service technologies (SSTs), of which e-banking is but one example. While the economic imperative for banks’ adoption of e-banking solutions is clear, the value proposition for the customer can be less evident. It is proposed that the value proposition on offer through e-banking could be better conveyed to customers were banks to have a greater understanding of the appropriateness of the on-line medium for products as they varied according to complexity level. This paper reports on a study which examined customer-stated propensity to purchase financial products on-line at varying levels of complexity. Findings underline the importance for banks to achieve a customer-oriented balance between face-to-face relationship-managed activity and online enablement and to understand now this balance varies according to customer and complexity of product. Strategic marketing implications for the case bank are discussed.     

Workers in Food Distribution: Global Commodity Chains and Lean Logistics

This paper examines warehouse workers' experiences of the labour process and employment relations in an ambient food distribution depot governed by a labour management system described as lean logistics. Lean logistics is seen by the sector as an aid to, and necessary development of, the globalisation of the sector's supply chain (global commodity chain). The focus is on how the restructuring of work as a result of lean logistics and the consequent imposition of a supermarket Taylorist work culture led to the demise of an industrial workplace culture and a dramatic deterioration in pay and working conditions. The latter included an increase in the scope and intensity of management control of labour.     

How important are human capital, physical capital and total factor productivity for determining state economic growth in the United States, 1840–2000?

This paper introduces new data on state-level physical capital by sector and land in the farm sector for the states of the United States from 1840 to 2000. These data are incorporated into aggregate accounting exercises with the aim of comparing cross-state results to those found in cross-country samples. Our aggregate results agree closely with the cross-country literature: input accumulation accounts for most of output growth, between three-fifths and three-quarters, but variation in the growth of TFP accounts for about three-quarters of the variation in the growth rate of output per worker. In convergence accounting, convergence of log TFP accounts for about seventy percent of the observed convergence in log output per worker.     

Ride-Sharing,Fatal Crashes,and Crime

The advent of smart-phone based, ride-sharing applications has revolutionized the vehicle for hire market. Advocates point to the ease of use, lower prices, and shorter wait times compared to hailing a taxi or prearranging limousine service. Others argue that proper government oversight is necessary to protect ride-share passengers from driver error or vehicle parts failures and violence from unlicensed strangers. Using U.S. county-level data from 2007 through 2015, we investigate whether the introduction of the ride-sharing service Uber is associated with changes in fatal vehicle crashes and crime. We find that Uber's entry lowers the rate of DUIs and fatal accidents. For some specifications, we also find declines in arrests for assault and disorderly conduct. Conversely, we observe an increase in vehicle thefts.