The effects of having more than one good reputation on distributor investments in the film industry

Reputations of organizations and its individual members are valuable resources that help new organizations to get access to investment capital. Reputations, however, can have different dimensions. In this paper, we argue that an individual’s reputation along a particular dimension will have a positive effect on the behavior of investors when it is role congruent. In addition, we argue that also scoring favorably on the role-incongruent dimension at the same time—or, in other words, engaging in reputational category spanning—will weaken the positive effect of the role-congruent reputation. Our empirical setting is the film industry where we study the effect of the two main dimensions of reputation in cultural industries, artistic and commercial, of both directors and producers on the size of the investment by distributors. In this study, artistic reputation is based on professional critics’ reviews and commercial reputation on box office performance of the films in which individuals were involved in the past. We find that the commercial reputation of a film producer based on past box office performance has a positive effect on the size of the investment by film distributors. In addition, we find that directors who at the same time combine both a favorable commercial as well as an artistic reputation actually receive a lower investment from film distributors

CXCL13 expression in the gut promotes accumulation of IL-22-producing lymphoid tissue-inducer cells, and formation of isolated lymphoid follicles

The chemokine CXCL13 is overexpressed in the intestine during inflammation. To mimic this condition, we created transgenic mice-expressing CXCL13 in intestinal epithelial cells. CXCL13 expression promoted a marked increase in the number of B cells in the lamina propria and an increase in the size and number of lymphoid follicles in the small intestine. Surprisingly, these changes were associated with a marked increase in the numbers of ROR\u3b3t + NKp46 -CD3 -CD4 + and ROR\u3b3t +NKp46 + cells. The ROR\u3b3t +NKp46 -CD3 -CD4 + cells expressed CXCR5, the receptor for CXCL13, and other markers of lymphoid tissue-inducer cells, such as LT\u3b1, LT\u3b2, and TNF-related activation-induced cytokine (TRANCE). ROR\u3b3t + NKp46 -CD3 -CD4 + gut LTi cells produced IL-22, a cytokine implicated in epithelial repair; and expressed the IL-23 receptor, a key regulator of IL-22 production. These results suggest that overexpression of CXCL13 in the intestine during inflammatory conditions favors mobilization of B cells and of LTi and NK cells with immunomodulatory and reparative functions

Estimating the Degree of Market Integration

Existing tests of spatial market integration are commonly based on statistical criteria without an explicit link to an economic model of price determination. This article proposes new measures of market integration defined directly in terms of a well-known spatial price determination model and develops an econometric methodology for estimating these measures. Due to the intractability of the conditional density function of prices, we use indirect inference to estimate the model parameters and market integration measures. The methodology is illustrated with simulated data and is applied to soybean price data for the United States, Brazil, and the EU. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.