Bursting the bubble or opening the door? Appraising the impact of austerity on playwork and playwork practitioners in the UK

Introductory essay for special issue on 'Playwork in Times of Austerity

For geographies of children, young people and popular culture

This paper calls for more direct, careful, sustained research on geographies of children, young people and popular culture. I present three sets of empirical and conceptual resources for researchers developing work in this area. Part 1 signposts classic work from cultural/media studies, marketing and sociology, which has been centrally concerned with meanings of popular culture designed for children and young people (e.g. via critiques of the gendered content of iconic popular cultural phenomena). Part 2 foregrounds nascent conceptualisations of social-material geographies of childhood and youth. I argue that these conceptualisations can extend and unsettle classic work on popular culture, by questioning how popular cultural texts, objects and phenomena matter. Halfway through the paper is a ‘commercial break’. Here, I present some personal reflections on working at the intersection between the ideas discussed in Parts 1 and 2. With reference to a specific popular cultural artefact (the Toys ‘Я’ Us Christmas toy catalogue), I argue that both meanings and matterings are crucial for geographers engaging with children and young people’s popular cultures. In conclusion, I argue that more geographers should engage with the literature and issues outlined in Part 1, but also that the geographical concepts discussed in Part 2 demand new modes of research, thinking and writing in relation to popular cultural texts, objects and phenomena

Measuring the Cost of Capital in Australia

The cost of capital is the minimum rate of return that an investment project must earn in order to cover its funding costs and any tax liabilities. Australian studies on this subject have produced a wide range of estimates. This paper demonstrates that a wide range of outcomes can result from often arbitrary assumptions used in constructing measures of the cost of funds. The paper suggests that any conclusions drawn about intertemporal trends or international comparisons of the cost of capital should be treated with care. For managers, it serves as a reminder that the use of simple invariant rules-of-thumb for investment decisions may be inappropriate. In particular, changes of tax regime and inflation should be taken into account in setting ‘hurdle rates’ for investment proposals.

A Price Theory of Silicon Valley

I develop a model of the Silicon Valley engineer labor and venture capital (VC) markets. Software engineers choose between joining an established software company or founding a venture-backed startup. In equilibrium, they are indifferent between entrepreneurship and employment. The model predicts equilibrium market wages, the terms of VC investments (i.e., the fraction of equity retained by the entrepreneur) and the minimum ``quality\u27\u27 of the ideas pursued by startups, as represented by the VC funding ``standard.\u27\u27 This funding standard is inversely related to the number of new startups per period. Predictions about how the equilibrium is affected by the costs of startups, the cost of capital, the supply of ideas and the supply of engineers are presented

Session B-1: Messing with the “Rise of the West”

This session will present strategies and lesson plans for World History teachers who want their students to learn how to interrogate the idea that modern European hegemony began in 1492. Was the Renaissance the Renaissance? Does modernity or early modernity have origins in Song China, Abbasid Baghdad, and Mongolian Asia? Does the era of western hegemony begin with the Opium Wars and the repression of the Sepoy Rebellion? We will examine these and other questions in a session that will question some of the basic assumptions about we teach world or global history courses

The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market

Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments, as they provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool and allow researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials. We argue that online experiments can be just as valid---both internally and externally---as laboratory and field experiments, while requiring far less money and time to design and to conduct. In this paper, we first describe the benefits of conducting experiments in online labor markets; we then use one such market to replicate three classic experiments and confirm their results. We confirm that subjects (1) reverse decisions in response to how a decision-problem is framed, (2) have pro-social preferences (value payoffs to others positively), and (3) respond to priming by altering their choices. We also conduct a labor supply field experiment in which we confirm that workers have upward sloping labor supply curves. In addition to reporting these results, we discuss the unique threats to validity in an online setting and propose methods for coping with these threats. We also discuss the external validity of results from online domains and explain why online results can have external validity equal to or even better than that of traditional methods, depending on the research question. We conclude with our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices