Workplace Injury and the Failing Academic Body: A Testimony of Pain

Journal of Business Ethics - In its three decades of development, many constructs of cause-related marketing have been tested from different perspectives and in varied contexts. However, there has...     

The Effect of Media Coverage on the Pricing of Seasoned Equity Offerings

This paper examines the role of media coverage and investor attention on the outcomes of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). I use an archive of Thomson Reuters news articles to proxy for firm visibility and investor attention. I find that the volumes of news articles prior to the offerings are positively associated with the offer price discounts of SEOs. Furthermore, the volumes of news articles are negatively associated with the cumulative abnormal returns three days around the SEOs. I conclude that the costs of equity increase with media coverage prior to SEOs. Overall, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that media coverage affects investors' information processing in SEOs. Copyright © 2018 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changes in food provision in Russian households experiencing perestroika

The purpose of this article is to describe how households in Novgorod the Great, Russia, deal with food provision in everyday life. The study focuses on changes experienced in food provision and consumption in Russian society, in order to illustrate how households respond to the transformation towards a market economy. The study reflects women's perspective on food provision. Students from Novgorod the Great visited 105 households and asked the women in the household to answer a questionnaire. Results from the study show that in order to cope with changes in society related to economic reforms, Russian households had changed both their food consumption and food production patterns. There was no big difference between urban and rural households. Nearly all of the households were self‐sufficient in the provision of vegetables and potatoes. Many households had a ‘dacha’ (plot), where they produced most of what they needed. Among the changes experienced during recent years (i.e. during the end of the 1990s), a decade after perestroika was initiated, households mentioned the rise in food prices and the decrease of income. Households reported that they consumed less fruit and/or meat. Some households also mentioned that the quality of nourishment had decreased, thereby indicating lower general quality, lower nutrition value, or less healthy foodstuffs.     

Manipulating uncertainty

Uncertainty about the distributional incidence of policy reforms may, if it impinges selectively on particular subsets of voters, alter the direction of the majority vote. This possibility should be a matter of special concern when subject to potential manipulation by a purposeful agent such as a Leviathan-like bureaucracy. This paper discusses a constitutional defense against such prospect. This paper was prepared for a conference on “Constitutional Status Quo and Prospects for Change” held at George Mason University in April, 1994. I am grateful to participants in that conference and to my colleagues at Nova, especially to Mário Páscoa, for their comments and criticisms. I also benefited from comments of an anonymous referee. Responsibility for errors remains with me.     

Daylight saving effect

Kamstra et al. [Kamstra, M.J., Kramer, L.A., Levi, M.D., 2000. Losing sleep at the market: the daylight saving anomaly. The American Economic Review 90, 1005–1011] argue that the mean weekend return following the changes in daylight saving time is less than the mean weekend return throughout the rest of the year. Opposing studies, such as Pinegar [Pinegar, J.M., 2002. Losing sleep at the market: comment. The American Economic Review 92, 1251–1256), reason that the observed results depend upon methodology. We extend the ongoing discussions by providing further evidence for equity markets and bond markets in Germany and across Europe. We further demonstrate that the daylight saving effect does not serve as a potential rationale for the weekend effect.     

Approaches to child labour in the supply chain

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an 'engagement' strategy for dealing with child labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas-Salomon and its attempts to implement their 'standards of engagement' in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the 'involvement' approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights.     

The risk-return trade-off in human capital investment

In this paper, we analyze investments in human capital in a way which is standard for financial assets, but not (yet) for human capital assets. We study mean-variance plots of human capital assets. We compare the properties of human capital returns using a performance measure and by using tests for mean-variance spanning. Fields differ strongly not only in common rates of return, but also in return per unit of risk. We identify a range of educations that are efficient in terms of investment goods, and a range of educations that may be chosen for consumption purposes.     

A welfare analysis of social security in a dynastic framework*

In this article, we study the welfare effects of unfunded social security in a general equilibrium model populated with overlapping generations of altruistic individuals that differ in lifetime expectancy and earnings ability. Contrary to previous research, our results indicate that steady‐state welfare increases with social security for most households, although by very different amounts. This result is mainly due to two factors. First, the presence of two‐sided altruism significantly mitigates the crowding out effect of unfunded social security. Second, ability shocks and uncertain lifetimes generate significant heterogeneity among households to yield different induced preferences for social security.     

MONETARY–FISCAL INTERACTIONS WITH A CONSERVATIVE CENTRAL BANK

We study macroeconomic stabilization when monetary and fiscal policies interact via their effects on output and inflation and the monetary authority is more conservative than the fiscal. We find that monetary–fiscal interactions result in poor macroeconomic stabilization. With both policies discretionary, the Nash equilibrium is suboptimal with higher output and lower inflation than optimal; the Nash equilibrium may be extreme with output higher and inflation lower than either authority want. Leadership equilibria are not second best. Monetary commitment is completely negated by fiscal discretion and yields the same outcome as discretionary monetary leadership for all realizations of shocks. But fiscal commitment is not similarly negated by monetary discretion. Optimal macroeconomic stabilization requires either commitment of both monetary and fiscal policies, or identical targets for both authorities – output socially optimal and inflation appropriately conservative – or complete separation of tasks.