Stockmarket comovements revisited

We revisit the issue of comovements of emerging and developed stockmarkets, and provide a simultaneous treatment of data for the eighties and nineties. We show that while emerging markets experience greater instability in the long term than their developed counterparts, there is room for short-term strategies to take advantage of profit opportunities in the emerging markets, especially in India.

Students Versus the Research Paper: What Can We Learn?

If we are to develop library services that meet the expectations of our patrons in this changing technological environment, we must first understand how they currently interact with our information services and systems. This paper presents preliminary results from a qualitative study that elicits perspectives of undergraduates engaged in writing research papers. Because this study has been in progress since the early nineties, results also reflect ways in which technological advances such as the Internet may have altered strategies. Findings highlight some commonly used information gathering strategies, issues which impact motivation and use of time, and sources of help students consult most often in the process. Implications and recommendations for librarians conclude the paper

Performing Cultures: English-Language Theatres in Post-Communist Prague

The presence of English-language theatres (ELTs) in Prague in the nineties coincided with the ongoing transition to a market economy in the Czech Republic, as the English language itself became increasingly the international language of business and culture. Under Communism, Czech theatre had been highly political through veiled protests against the system of power. After 1989, Czech theatre began moving into spheres of commodification and tourism. How the ELTs in Prague negotiated their place in a shifting society reveals a performance of identity. The ELTs tracked the turning points in Czech post-revolutionary history of the 1990s.The history of the ELTs has been constructed through personal and telephone interviews and emails, as well as reviews, articles, manuscripts and production videotapes. Companies analyzed include North American Theatre, Small and Dangerous, Black Box International Theatre (which began its life as Studio Theatre), Exposure, and Misery Loves Company. Structurally, this investigation covers three distinct periods of the Czech transition: the optimistic early nineties; the mid-nineties, when the market economy flourished along with increasing instances of corruption; and the late nineties, when disillusionment affected the Czech Republic and most of the ELTs vanished.ELTs in Prague primarily used four production strategies: 1) representing the Performer's Culture; 2) representing the Host culture in English; 3) bi-cultural and/or bi-lingual productions, including nonverbal work, collaboration with Host culture theatre companies, and multicultural casting, and 4) presenting plays about culture clash. Theoretical underpinnings for this study include intercultural performance theory, reception and semiotic theory, historiography, and theories of globalization and cultural tourism.The achievements and disappointments of the ELTs reveal underlying principles of production and reception applicable not only to Eastern Europe but to any region with a growing English-speaking subculture. Findings include the observation that production strategy and mission are less significant than the cultural and economic contextualizing of the production company. Curiosity about the English language dwindles as its usage grows. ELTs that were most successful worked structurally with strategy number three in terms of performance venue, schedule and style, contributing to the cultural life of the city rather than self-consciously using theatre to cross borders

Fiscal Adjustments and the Short-Term Trade-Off between economic growth and equality

This article examines the short-term economic impact of alternative fiscal adjustment strategies, with an especial focus on their effect on economic growth and income distribution Based on a sample of 53 adjustment episodes occurred in the fifteen EU Member States between 1960-2000, this article shows that different strategies of fiscal adjustment bring about different economic consequences. Expenditure-based adjustments that are preceded by bad economic and fiscal initial conditions, that are accompanied by a devaluation, and that succeed in cutting the least productive expenditures of the budget, are likely to have anti-Keynesian effects and to be expansionary. Nevertheless, they do so at the expense of increasing income inequality. The opposite is true for revenue-based consolidations. The nineties epitomize the story of expansionary fiscal consolidations via strong wealth and credibility effects, but also the rebirth of the trade-off between growth and equality, mediated by fiscal policy.Fiscal adjustment, economic growth, equality, budget composition.

Policy, Economic Federalism & Product Market Entry: The Indian Experience

Productivity growth has long been associated with, among others, contestability of markets which, in turn, is dependent on the ease with which potential competitors to the incumbent firms can enter the product market. There is a growing consensus that in emerging markets regulatory and institutional factors may have a greater influence on a firm’s ability to enter a product market than strategic positions adopted by the incumbent firms. We examine this proposition in the context of India where the industrial policies of the eighties and the nineties are widely believed to be pro-incumbent and procompetition, respectively, thereby providing the setting for a natural experiment with 1991 as the watershed year. In our analysis, we also take into consideration the possibility that the greater economic federalism associated with the reforms of the nineties may have affected the distribution of industrial units across states after 1991. Our paper, which uses the experiences of the textiles and electrical machinery sectors during the two decades as the basis for the analysis, finds broad support for both these hypotheses.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57223/1/wp843 .pd

Market Discipline, Information Processing, and Corporate Governance

The paper reviews and assesses our understanding of the notion of “market discipline” in corporate governance. It questions the wholesale appeal to this notion in policy discussion, which fails to provide an account of the underlying mechanisms in terms of theory and empirical analysis. Discipline that is provided by the “market” must be compared to discipline that is provided by other institutions, e.g., intermediaries acting as “delegated monitors”. The comparative assessment depends on (i) the information technology, (ii) the role of strategic interactions, and (iii) the disciplinary mechanism itself. Concerning (i), the question is whether the benefits of multiple sources of information exceed the costs. Concerning (ii), strategic interactions concern the free-rider problem in acquiring information that benefits all financiers, as well as distributive externalities involved in exploiting an information advantage to the detriment of other financiers. Concerning (iii), the question is whether investors have explicit intervention rights or whether “discipline” results from managerial acquiescence. As for the acquisition and aggregation of information in organized markets, positive welfare effects arise only if the information is put to productive use, either through improvements in real investment and managerial incentives, or through changes in corporate control. Necessary conditions for such benefits to arise are fairly restrictive, especially if the changes that occur are based on managerial acquiescence rather than the legal intervention rights of investors. The expansion of market-based managerial incentives in the nineties had little to do with these theoretical accounts. The experience of moral hazard that has accompanied this expansion, on the side of gate-keeping institutions as well as corporate management, confirms the predictions of theory about the potential for shortfalls in market discipline and the agency costs of equity finance through the open market

Clubbing masculinities: Gender shifts in gay men's dance floor choreographies

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journal of Homosexuality, 58(5), 608-625, 2011 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00918369.2011.563660This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the intersections of gender, sexuality, and dance. It examines the expressions of sexuality among gay males through culturally popular forms of club dancing. Drawing on political and musical history, I outline an account of how gay men's gendered choreographies changed throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Through a notion of “technologies of the body,” I situate these developments in relation to cultural levels of homophobia, exploring how masculine expressions are entangled with and regulated by musical structures. My driving hypothesis is that as perceptions of cultural homophobia decrease, popular choreographies of gay men's dance have become more feminine in expression. Exploring this idea in the context of the first decade of the new millennium, I present a case study of TigerHeat, one of the largest weekly gay dance club events in the United States

Pricing to Market at firm level

This paper tries to contribute to the renewed literature about price differences across countries (the so-called border effect). Specifically, it analyzes the reasons underlying changes in relative prices across export/domestic markets for an open economy. The theoretical benchmark, based on the existence of Pricing to Market strategies, also takes into account some hypotheses about the effects of demand variations and market power on prices. The empirical analysis, using firm panel data for the nineties, points out the positive (though small) impact of the exchange rate on the evolution of price ratio. Additionally, the results also suggest a procyclical behavior of prices in both markets, which is positively affected by the degree of competition. Though data do not allow an in-depth analysis, some hypothesis in terms of foreseeable effects of the European Monetary Union on relative prices are provided.

Crisis in the European Automobile Industry: An “Organizational Adaptation” Perspective

The paper explores the determinants of corporate crisis through an «organizational adaptation» perspective. In this regard, a research framework recently developed by scholars is at first shown. It is then tested in the European automobile industry through the analysis of the huge Fiat group’s economic and financial crisis in the nineties. Empirical findings are drawn from public archival sources. The discussion of the main results and of the implications for further research on the crisis of firms follow. Among the different methodological and theoretical perspectives on the determinants of firms’ crisis developed by literature, the paper can help to enforce the scientific conciliation wished by scholars.Adaptation, automobile, crisis, decline, failure, Fiat, niche, population ecology, top management team, turnaround

Organic Agriculture in Cuba: Managing with Limited Resources

The typical Cuban farming units are large-scale cooperatives, in which farming families are more or less loosely organized. In the low lands, these cooperatives normally specialize in a few products for the market and a higher diversity of self-sufficiency crops. In the mountain areas, these cooperatives produce in diverse agroforestry systems. This is especially the case for the eastern provinces Guantanamo and Santiago. Large-scale plantations were developed by the Spanish and US colonialists, and further developed by the socialist government. After Cuban Revolution in 1959, land was distributed to more than 200’000 small farmer families through the Agrarian Reforms of 1959 and 1963, while 70 percent of the latifundio lands passed over to state control. Since the collapse of the former socialist economic community in the early 1990s, Cuba’s agriculture faces multiple challenges; there is a shortage of agricultural inputs and Cuba’s farmers must learn to be self-sufficient and to manage with their own resources. This results in difficulties to meet Cuba’s production goals. Domestic food markets are periodically under supplied, and export volumes are decreasing. Cuba has the challenging task to increase the output and efficiency of the complete food chain, based as much as possible on locally available resources