COVID-19 and business renewal: Lessons and insights from the global airline industry

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the fortunes of multiple companies around the globe. Accordingly, questions are increasingly being asked about how organizations can revitalize during and after a crisis. Yet, we have limited understanding of how organizations renew themselves during crises over time. We explore this question through the lens and examination of two South-Asian airlines: Pakistan International Airlines and Sri Lankan Airlines. The cases offer important insights into the reasons behind underperformance of state-controlled enterprises and renewal activities. We shed light on strategic renewal (SR) in the wake of increasing liberalization and deregulations in the global airline industry. To this end, we propose a four-stage approach towards renewing such underperforming organizations to respond effectively to black swan events and external shocks.     

Class structure and inequality during the industrial revolution: lessons from England's social tables, 1688–1867

This article measures the size and incomes of six major social classes across the industrial revolution using social tables for England and Wales in 1688, 1759, 1798, 1846, and 1867. Lindert and Williamson famously revised these tables, and this article extends their work in three directions. First, servants are removed from middle‐ and upper‐class households in the tables of King, Massie, and Colquhoun and tallied separately. Second, estimates are made for the same tables of the number and incomes of women and children employed in the various occupations, and, third, incomes are broken down into rents, profits, and employment income. These extensions to the tables allow variables to be computed that can be checked against independent estimates as a validation exercise. The tables are retabulated in a standardized set of six social groups to highlight the changing structure of society across the industrial revolution. Gini coefficients are computed from the social tables to measure inequality. These measures confirm that Britain traversed a ‘Kuznets curve’ in this period. Changes in overall inequality are related to the changing fortunes of the major social classes.     

Ag econ angst crisis revisited

The present paper was inspired by and is a response to the Rola-Rubzen, Hardaker and Dillon paper 'Agricultural economists and world poverty: progress and prospects' (Rola-Rubzen et al. 2001). It is agreed that the position of agricultural economists in foreign aid and poverty programs has declined over recent decades. Such a feeling of guilt and remorse expressed by the above authors does indeed create considerable 'angst'. A major reason for this state of affairs lies in 'the flavour of the month' approach of the development agencies. These include women in development, gender-based farming systems research, household nutrition and food security, people participation, and targeting the poorest of the poor. These fads have driven disciplinary considerations to the wall and the more widely-defined objectives have reduced the drive for economic efficiency. We argue there is still a place for better designed and delivered assistance programs within the wider framework of assistance that has become fashionable. Greater application of institutional principles in both the political processes associated with assistance and the implementation agencies would improve the outcomes of many projects. Particular attention would need to be given to the interface between the development agencies and recipient governments. The present paper picks up on the market failure aspects of agriculture's rather poor contribution to development, and develops a wider perspective in terms of the new institutional economics and a continuing role for the agricultural economist.     

Intertemporal Substitution and Terms-of-Trade Shocks

The paper examines the relationship between transitory terms‐of‐trade shocks and private saving. Using a model allowing for nonseparability between the consumption of tradables and nontradables, the paper estimates the intertemporal elasticity of substitution while accounting for the intratemporal elasticity of substitution between the consumption of tradables and nontradables. Empirical analysis of data for five industrial countries indicates that in response to transitory terms‐of‐trade shocks, intertemporal substitution of consumption and intratemporal substitution of consumption between tradables and nontradables both have large effects on private saving.     

Asset market hangovers and economic growth: the OECD during 1984-93

Asses prices and investment were unusually weak throughout theindustrial world during the early 1990s. This paper highlightsthis stylized fact, and connects it with another: in most ofthe industrial world, asset markets boomed for several yearsbefore collapsing around 1989. The paper suggests that assetmarket bubbles during the late 1980s may have left the industrialworld with an 'asset market hangover' in the early 1990s, inthe form of sluggish asset markets and investment. Empiricalsupport for this hypothesis is provided based on cross-countrydata for equity and real estate markets in most industrial countries.We suggest that financial market developments not justifiedby fundamentals can substantially affect real activity.     

International trade in a differentiated good: Trade elasticities in the world rice market

In many previous rice trade models, the commodity has been regarded as a homogeneous product. However, homogeneity is not an appropriate assumption, given the various types of rice that are traded and consumed. Parameters estimated from these models, therefore, do not reflect the real world market for rice and, hence, may mislead decision makers who use the results for policy evaluation purposes. This study uses an Armington approach to model the world rice trade as a differential good market and to derive trade elasticity parameters.     

Simulating the Evolution of the Implied Distribution

Motivated by the implied stochastic volatility literature (Britten–Jones and Neuberger, forthcoming; Derman and Kani, 1997; Ledoit and Santa–Clara, 1998) this paper proposes a new and general method for constructing smile–consistent stochastic volatility models. The method is developed by recognising that option pricing and hedging can be accomplished via the simulation of the implied risk neutral distribution. We devise an algorithm for the simulation of the implied distribution, when the first two moments change over time. The algorithm can be implemented easily, and it is based on an economic interpretation of the concept of mixture of distributions. It can also be generalised to cases where more complicated forms for the mixture are assumed.