Restraining Unions' industrial action: A new consumer right

This paper discusses the revolutionary new right introduced by the Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act 1993 for consumers to seek a court order to halt unlawful industrial action which disrupts the supply of goods or services, regardless of whether they have any enforceable right to the goods or services in question. Even more unusually, public funding is available to conduct these proceedings irrespective of the applicant's means where the industrial action is organised by a trade union. The paper analyses the nature of the right, locates it within the broader framework of remedies for the non-provision or inadequate provision of goods or services, and assesses the wider implications of the right for consumer policy.     

The impact of skewness in the hedging decision

The impact of skewness in the hedger's objective function is tested using a model of hedging derived from a third‐order Taylor Series approximation of expected utility. To determine the effect of price skewness upon hedging and speculation, analytical results are derived using an example of cotton storage. Findings suggest that when forward risk premiums and price skewness in the spot asset have opposite signs, speculation increases relative to the mean‐variance model. When the signs are identical, speculation will decrease, contradicting findings of mean‐variance models. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 26:503–520, 2006     

Modeling ethical attitudes and behaviors under conditions of environmental turbulence: The case of South Africa

This study explores the impact of environmental turbulence on relationships between personal and organizational characteristics, personal values, ethical perceptions, and behavioral intentions. A causal model is tested using data obtained from a national sample of marketing research professionals in South Africa. The findings suggest turbulent conditions lead professionals to report stronger values and ethical norms, but less ethical behavioral intentions. Implications are drawn for organizations confronting growing turbulence in their external environments. A number of suggestions are made for ongoing research. Michael H. Morris became the Fletcher Jones Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA in 1993. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing. He is the author of two books and over forty articles in academic journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Management, and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Dr. Morris' principal research interests include entrepreneurial behavior, industrial marketing strategy, and pricing.Amy Seidel Marks has been a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the GSB UCT since 1989. She holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and has worked in the areas of consumer behavior analysis and social marketing for 20 years. During her time in South Africa she has conducted numerous research projects in areas such as AIDS prevention, tobacco control and iodine deficiency, and has also served as a consultant to national projects in tuberculosis drug compliance, tobacco control and adult education.Jeff Allen received his doctorate from the University of Kentucky. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, Dr. Allen has published in various national and international academic journals on topics of social responsibility, marketing ethics, and health care marketing. Newman S. Perry, Jr. is Professor of Management, School of Business and Public Administration at the University of the Pacific in Stockton California. He has just completed Business, Government, and Society: Managing Competitiveness, Ethics, and Social Issues published by Prentice-Hall and previously coauthored a book on strategic management.     

Justice and the Foundations of Economic Thought

A bstract . Justice in the economy is a subject of renewed interest among contemporary economists. In the growing literature, Joseph A. Spengler's Origins of Economic Thought and Justice may become a standard reference work. Its great merit is the way it handles values and value judgments. Economics as an objective science cannot tell us anything about ends, Spengler holds, but it illuminates Valuation and facilitates isolation of costs and some benefits of realizing ends. Still, economists "need to base their policy-oriented arguments on distributive justice and not on efficiency. "     

Law and finance: why does legal origin matter?

This paper assesses empirically two theories of why legal origin influences financial development. The political channel stresses that legal traditions differ in the priority they give to the rights of individual investors vis-à-vis the state and this has repercussions for financial development. The adaptability channel holds that legal traditions differ in their ability to adjust to changing commercial circumstances and legal systems that adapt quickly will foster financial development more effectively. We use historical comparisons and cross-country regressions to assess the validity of these two channels. We find that legal origin matters for financial development because legal traditions differ in their ability to adapt efficiently to evolving economic conditions. Journal of Comparative Economics 31 (4) (2003) 653–675.     

Tax competition,uniform assessment,and the benefit principle

In previous discussions it has been argued that tax competition between local governments results in a tax burden on business that is less than the cost of public services for business and in suboptimal levels of public expenditures for residents. However, this conclusion has never been substantiated by a full theoretical treatment. Here a theoretical model of tax competition is developed between metropolitan areas, with labor perfectly immobile and two local public goods, one for residents and one for business. For “plausible” parameter values, numerical solutions of the optimality conditions are computed by means of a nonlinear programming algorithm.