Funeral Price Disclosure in an Urban Market

During telephone interviews in which funeral directors were asked to provide the least expensive option for a fixed list of services, substantial price dispersion among providers was found. Prospective customers were quoted higher prices than were quoted to consumer researchers. The cost of cremation was one-fifth that of earth burial, and cemetery charges amounted to more than one-half of earth burial costs. A memorial society member was quoted lower prices than were available to private customers of the same firm, and lower prices in relation to other funeral providers. These surveys were supported in an examination of actual funeral bills for memorial society members.     

Deracializing Exploitation? ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ in the South African Wine Industry

This paper considers the discourse and practice of 'Black Economic Empowerment' (BEE) in the South African wine industry. It argues that far from representing a decisive break with an inequitable past, BEE allows the South African wine industry to avoid potentially more uncomfortable options to redress current and past race-based imbalances – such as land redistribution, import boycotts and better working conditions for grape pickers. An essentialist racial discourse, pivoting on ahistorical and dislocated notions of 'blackness', has been used to displace the transformation agenda away from addressing the conditions faced by workers, and to an ameliorism that allows a small cohort of black entrepreneurs to become the preferred beneficiaries of 'transformation' in the wine industry. The new terrain is characterized by branding, advertising and image building on the one side: and by codes of conduct, a sectoral BEE charter, scorecards and auditing on the other. These allow the standardization, legitimation and ostensible deracialization of exploitative labour and social relations in the South African wine industry.     

An Empirical Examination of the Market Returns and Financial Performance of Entities Engaged in Sustainability Reporting

The importance of sustainability reporting to external stakeholders is reflected in the advent of various reporting guidelines and government inquiries. However, evidence of the inadequacy of such reporting, coupled with limited evidence of its use by market participants (such as investors and creditors) for resource-allocation decisions, raises questions about the overall value-relevance of sustainability reporting. This study seeks to identify, in the Australian context, whether the level of sustainable reporting is associated with a range of financial and market performance attributes of the firm.     

Satisfaction with household production: the effect of time spent in household production by husbands and wives

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the extent of household production and satisfaction with household production. Data were obtained from 400 married couples who responded to a postal questionnaire. The dependent variable was an index of satisfaction incorporating two aspects of household production, quality and quantity. Regression analysis indicated that of the three variables representing the extent of household production in the model — hours spent by each spouse in household production and an activity index to measure the number of household production activities — only husband's hours spent in household production demonstrated a significant, independent effect. Other significant variables included husband's hours of market work, household net worth, age of respondent and gender of respondent. Two significant interactions indicated that (i) the relationship between wife's hours of household production and satisfaction with household production differed according to the gender of the respondent, and (ii) the relationship of husband's hours of market work and satisfaction differed according to the age of the respondent.     

Macroeconomic Factors and Microlevel Bank Behavior

We analyze the link between banks and the macroeconomy using a model that extends a macroeconomic VAR for the U.S. with a set of factors summarizing conditions in about 1,500 commercial banks. We investigate how macroeconomic shocks are transmitted to individual banks and obtain the following main findings. Backward‐looking risk of a representative bank declines, and bank lending increases following expansionary shocks. Forward‐looking risk increases following an expansionary monetary policy shock. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks, which is due to bank size, capitalization, liquidity, risk, and the exposure to real estate and consumer loans.     

Domestic fuel expenditure and payment of fuel allowances

The allocation of additional requirements for heating to households on supplementary benefit (SB) has been challenged recently. Some households receiving an addition spend less on fuel than others which do not. The fuel expenditure of any household on SB is likely to be constrained by income and may reflect ability to pay rather than need. A group of households with zero or close to zero income elasticity for fuel expenditure is identified. The expenditure on fuel of these households can be considered not to be constrained by income and to reflect the real costs of maintaining a warm home in given circumstances. Their expenditure is then used to indicate how fuel allowances might be better targeted.     

The Changing International Transmission of Financial Shocks: Evidence from a Classical Time‐Varying FAVAR

We study the changing international transmission of financial shocks over the period 1971–2012. Global financial shocks are measured as unexpected changes of a U.S. financial conditions index (FCI), developed by Hatzius et al. (2010). We model the FCI jointly with a large international data set through a time‐varying parameter factor‐augmented VAR and find that financial shocks have a considerable impact on growth in the nine countries considered. Moreover, financial shocks during the global financial crisis are found to be large by historical standards. They explain approximately 20% of GDP growth variation on average over 2008–9, compared to an average of 5% prior to the crisis.     

Plantations,Resistance and the Greening of the Agrarian Question in Coastal Ecuador

Worldwide, industrial tree plantations are at the origin of a growing number of conflicts between local populations and commercial planters. Such conflicts – which often turn out to be ‘environmental’– have largely remained understudied. By focusing on the establishment of an industrial eucalypt monoculture in a coastal Ecuadorian canton, this paper investigates the effects of the penetration of capital into the rural sphere, emphasizing the resulting resistance campaign of a local NGO originating from a peasant organization. We analyse the evolution of land conflicts in the region – historically as well as operationally during the latest eucalypt campaign. We find that displacement of local peasants is a recurrent theme, while environmental issues have recently been incorporated into the resistance to landowners. We thus argue that the agrarian question also includes – now perhaps more than ever – an environmental dimension, thereby providing space for a fruitful dialogue between political ecologists and students of agrarian conflicts.