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Purpose – This paper aims to examine the link between financing patterns, information asymmetry and legal traditions in 37 countries during the 1990-2004 period. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is based on three theories: the trade-off theory, pecking order hypothesis and market timing hypothesis. The authors test the predictions of these theories/hypotheses using regression analysis. The econometric method used is panel data with firm and country fixed effects. The authors develop a modified pecking order model which controls for short- and long-term debt level changes and simultaneously test the predictions of all theories. Findings – Consistent with studies for US firms, the results show that firms across all countries adjust toward the target leverage, but with significantly different rate. The long-term debt contribution in the rate of adjustment is 64 percent in common law countries and 51 percent in civil law countries. The ability of the model to explain changes in leverage ratios is higher in common law countries. The authors find support for market timing hypothesis but no support for pecking order of financing. These results support their conjecture that stronger investor protection, higher transparency and well-developed financial markets in common law countries reduce the cost of recapitalization. Research limitations/implications – The limitation of this study comes from lack of data availability to measure contract enforcement, transparency, and corporate governance variables. Future research can incorporate these variables to explain the differences in capital structure decisions across countries with different legal systems. Practical implications – The findings show that firms' capital structure decisions are not only a function of their own characteristics but also the result of legal and financial market development in which they operate. Originality/value – This is the first study that sheds light about rate of adjustment to optimal capital structure and pecking order of financing in 37 countries with different legal traditions and financial market developments. The authors are not aware of any other study that uses a modified pecking order model in an international context. © 2011, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Three neighborhoods in Lexington, Kentucky, share a common flood history, including property acquisitions, as a means to mitigate against flooding; yet, the interactions of residents with the buyout landscapes vary significantly among the neighborhoods. Although the same institutions and structural controls implemented flood buyout programs in all three neighborhoods, semi-structured interviews illustrate that differing perspectives, personalities, and neighborhood politics shaped unique identities and land uses for the acquired properties in each neighborhood. Varying levels of resident engagement with the buyout landscape resulted in a range of attitudes towards hazard preparation, management, and mitigation, thus leaving some neighborhoods more resilient to future flooding than others. This study explores key residents, termed magnetic agents, who drove neighborhood civic action and land uses on the open space created through floodplain property acquisition. This research indicates magnetic agents can serve as important partners for local governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in building community-based projects aimed at reducing vulnerability to flood events and instituting high utility land uses on floodplain buyout open space.(C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) is a famous issue in spatial analysis that states the output of a spatial analysis is influenced by the spatial extent of the units used in the analysis. This study demonstrates that the MAUP is accompanied with another intractable spatial issue in spatial modeling; the Modifiable Conceptual Unit Problem (MCUP). The MCUP states that the conceptualization of spatial processes impacts the output of spatial analysis and occurs when a model with one spatial dimension is applied to a spatial model with more than one spatial dimension. This study demonstrates the MCUP by developing three conceptual models of dispersal and showing how they produce different results even when given the same initial dispersal curves and areal units. Three conceptual models of dispersal (sum of curve points model, area of distance range model, and the volume of distance range model) are described and applied to a grid landscape with a single point of dispersal and a grid landscape with multiple points of dispersal. A Geographic Information System (GIS) is used to evaluate how the models differ in their distribution of pollen or seeds across the landscapes. The three models of dispersal are each valid conceptualizations of the dispersal process, but when given the same dispersal curve parameters, they produce different distributions of dispersed items across grid landscapes. The sum of curve points model is the least complicated model because it only uses a few points from the defined dispersal curve. The area of distance range model uses the entire dispersal curve, but is based on a single dimension of space and thus conceptually abstracted from the grid landscape. The volume of distance range model uses the two spatial dimensions present in the grid landscape and thus is the most conceptually sound model of the three. The underlying conceptualization of the dispersal process can impact the results of dispersal models. Applying dispersal curves with one spatial dimension to grids with two spatial dimensions makes inherent assumptions about the conceptualization of dispersal. This study highlights the necessity of researchers to declare their conceptual models of dispersal when applying modeled dispersal curves to grid landscapes. © 2016 The Author.

Purpose - The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides guidelines for the management of open space created through property acquisition (buyouts); however, land use decisions are primarily left to local governments manifesting in a variety of uses. The purpose of this paper is to provide a land use assessment of buyout sites, to describe the changes in those uses that have occurred during a ten-year period from 1990 to 2000, and to offer an assessment of management approaches employed across these sites. Design/methodology/approach - Using a mixed-methods approach consisting of a land use classification survey and a semi-structured questionnaire of floodplain managers, this study explores the land use trends at buyout sites, diverse approaches local governments take in managing the open spaces created through floodplain buyout programs, and the successes and challenges communities face in open space management. Findings - Results indicate strong support from floodplain managers for property acquisition and several cases emerged where communities put their newly acquired public land to creative uses. However, the opportunity to leverage these properties for greater public values is largely being missed, primarily because of limited funding. Practical implications - The analysis indicates strong support among floodplain managers for the buyout approach; however, additional resource-sharing and funding opportunities are needed to increase the utility of buyout properties. Originality/value - By evaluating the long-term management strategies floodplain managers utilize on buyout sites, this study adds to an underrepresented area of scholarship and is of value to practitioners, government officials, and academics.

Human societies are known for their resilience and ability to adapt to short- and long-term environmental change. Despite their pragmatism and adaptability, humans could be forced to move and/or seek better conditions for survival, especially when climate change and water availability are at issue. This chapter provides case studies on easy-to-adopt rainwater harvesting applications as effective climate change adaptation strategies in rural and urban settings to increase human resiliency.

Two new Jaltomata species (Solanaceae) of Peru that produce red floral nectar are described. Jaltomata neei of Department Cajamarca has 1–4 flowers per inflorescence, the campanulate corolla is green and then changes to blue, corolla lobes (5) and lobules (5) are equally prominent, a corona is lacking, five radial staminal-corolla thickenings create nectar troughs between, and the stigma is capitate. Jaltomata quipuscoae of Department Arequipa has solitary flowers, a purple, broadly crateriform, 5-lobed corolla, a corona on which nectar pools, a punctiform stigma, lacks corolla thickenings, and the mature fruit is whitish. Photographs, illustrations and tables are included that allow comparison with closely related species. © 2014, The New York Botanical Garden.

Long Island Sound (LIS) is a relatively shallow estuary with a mean depth of 20 m (maximum depth 49 m) and a unique hydrology and history of pollutant loading. These factors have contributed to a wide variety of contamination problems in its muddy sediments, aquatic life, and water column. The LIS sediments are contaminated with toxic compounds and elements related to past and present wastewater discharges and runoff. These include nonpoint and stormwater runoff and groundwater discharges, whose character has changed over the years along with the evolution of its watershed and industrial history. Major impacts have resulted from the copious amounts of nutrients discharged into LIS through atmospheric deposition, domestic and industrial waste water flows, fertilizer releases, and urban runoff. All these sources and their effects are in essence the result of human presence and activities in the watershed, and the severity of pollutant loading and their impacts generally scales with total population in the watersheds surrounding LIS. Environmental legislation passed since the mid-to-late 1900s (e.g., Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act) has had a beneficial effect, however, and contaminant loadings for many toxic organic and inorganic chemicals and nutrients have diminished over the last few decades (O’Shea and Brosnan 2000; Trench et al. 2012; O’Connor and Lauenstein 2006; USEPA 2007). Major strides have been made in reducing the inflow of nutrients into LIS, but cultural eutrophication is still an ongoing problem and nutrient control efforts will need to continue. Nonetheless, LIS is still a heavily human impacted estuary (an “Urban Estuary,” as described for San Francisco Bay by Conomos 1979), and severe changes in water quality and sediment toxicity as well as ecosystem shifts have occurred since the European colonization in the early 1600s (Koppelman et al., 1976). The Sound has seen the most severe environmental changes over the last 400 years during its 10,000 year history (Lewis, this volume), suggesting that human impacts have overwhelmed the natural forces at play.

An analysis of the association of forest cover, treated as an environmental good, and income at the county scale in the Northeastern United States was conducted for 2006. Global analysis using a spatial error regression model indicates an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) type of relationship, with total forest cover, percent forest cover, and forest cover per capita is better associated with per capita income and is better specified as a polynomial rather than in linear terms. Local analysis, using geographically weighted regression, indicates that sub-regional effects are pronounced, and that conformity to an EKC varies spatially and by forest cover measure. The findings should be interpreted strictly within their context of a cross-sectional analysis and within certain statistical limitations, primarily engendered by multicollinearity of the explanatory variables in the regression models. Copyright © 2013, IGI Global.

This article examines bulk sales of municipal property tax liens in the formerly industrial city of Waterbury, Connecticut, USA, in the 1990s, in order to explore the limits and contradictions of neoliberal local governance strategies. In the USA, cities and states create property tax liens by reducing delinquent real estate taxes to a judgment that creates a legal claim against the property at issue. We argue that Waterbury's efforts to resolve its fiscal stress by enhancing short-term revenues ultimately further constrained its revenue base, the tax lien sales reflected a spatial selectivity that created barriers to revitalization when neither the city nor tax lien purchasers had incentives to foreclose on distressed properties in struggling neighborhoods, and the tax lien sales' failure to resolve the city's budget crisis set in motion new efforts at tax base enhancement through real estate-led development in the central business district that also were unsuccessful. © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.

Aguadas, either natural or human-made ponds, were significant sources of water for the ancient Maya. Aguadas are common features in the Maya Lowlands and make valuable locations for collecting archaeological and paleoenvironmental data. This article discusses research conducted at four aguadas around two adjacent Maya sites, San Bartolo and Xultun in Peten, Guatemala. Both San Bartolo and Xultun were established during the Preclassic period. However, the fates of the two sites differed, as Xultun continued to prosper while the city of San Bartolo was abandoned near the close of the Late Preclassic period. We argue that aguadas provide important clues for understanding the fate of these two ancient communities and many others in the Maya Lowlands. Copyright © 2012 Cambridge University Press.

In March of 2010, the only full-service supermarket centrally located in New Haven, Connecticut closed, stranding many of the city's residents in a food desert. A food desert is an urban or rural area with significantly limited access to retail sources of healthy and affordable food, due to a combination of socioeconomic disadvantages and physical distance. This article considers the pivotal and causative role of the business model of supermarkets in the creation of new or exacerbation of current urban food deserts, as well as in the impact the loss of one market has on the resilience of the community's food system. Using the events of New Haven as a case study, the form and severity of the food desert in New Haven is analyzed by mapping 1/4 mile, 1/2 mile, and 1 mile road network service areas of the major supermarkets and grocery stores of the area. These are compared against Census block group data of the New Haven population's median household income, poverty level, and access to a personal vehicle. The results show certain parts of the city with low income, high poverty, and low vehicle access to exist in hardship outside the service areas of nearby stores. GIS methodology aids in illustrating the conclusion that the loss of just one supermarket has had significantly detrimental effects on the geographical food access of the city's residents. The ongoing lack of a full-service supermarket in the city not only raises concerns about the value of a new supermarket coming in, but also creates possibilities for seeking alternative food system solutions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Astana, Kazakhstan’s new capital city is being built to fit the future vision of the country’s leaders. Unique architectural styles, combined with creative morphological patterns give the city a distinctive look. It is being constructed to impress. It also represents a break from the past. As such, Astana embodies the meaning of a ‘Forward city.’ Forward cities are created for a variety of reasons; political, geopolitical, religious, economic or a combination of these. By relocating a capital city elsewhere, a country seeks to construct a fresh urban site that reflects a change from the traditional center of governmental activities to a new location that reveals a new direction for the country and its people. This chapter provides a brief background of the political context and conditions existing in the region, followed by an overview of the city’s geographic base, and scrutinize the unique methods of finance used to construct Astana. Also, the planning and design of the city will be examined, paying special attention to the ways in which architecture has been utilized to construct a futuristic vision of a public project for domestic and international consumption.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, southern New England's Connecticut Valley had become a center of shade tobacco production and a destination for seasonal farmworkers drawn from sources inside and outside of New England. This paper explores the history of three groups of seasonal workers-children from area cities and towns; white southern high school students: and young African American men from southern high schools and black colleges-with an eye to assessing the impact of their presence on the form and meaning of the Connecticut Valley. My first goal is to add depth to the historiography of twentieth-century New England farming by drawing attention to the largely overlooked story of non-rural and extra-regional seasonal farmworkers. My second goal is to frame the case of Connecticut tobacco labor according to the study of mobility and its relationship to landscape. The mobility of workers into and within the region, I suggest, made possible the success of the shade tobacco economy while at the same time posing challenges to popularized cultural conventions about regional identity. For this reason, I argue, the history of Connecticut's shade tobacco landscape was informed by the efforts of shade tobacco growers to direct and control a confluence of environmental conditions, group and place-based identities, and the mechanics and meanings of mobility among seasonal workers. By hiring non-local, seasonal workers and by attempting to control their mobility, large-scale, corporate growers and their spokespeople ultimately sought to maintain control over the development and identity of the valley's rural landscape. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Here the volume continues its reflections on Hawthorne’s career but turns to his place in the literature of ‘homes and haunts’, taking up the question of how literary geography and its localization of authors helped construct an authorial presence for Americans and a tangible transatlantic literary canon. (It turns out that having a home on the literary itinerary was crucial to nineteenth-century reception.) Baraw demonstrates that the poetics of literary tourism provided Hawthorne with both a means of self-canonization as a tourist attraction and a tool for cultivating the ideal ‘English’ reader for his books. This essay begins a strand of chapters related to literary tourism and the construction of international heritage landscapes.

Scarry's (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, New York, 1985) broke crucial ground in examining the antagonisms between pain, embodiment and language, and the isolating effects of pain as experience. This paper submits Scarry's claim that extreme pain destroys language, evades mediation, and isolates the subject to critical scrutiny, arguing instead that pain is a semiosomatic force, a form of feeling generated by imperative information about embodiment (real or imaginary) that works to disarticulate and move the subject and the social environment. Pain is not predominantly antagonistic to language; rather, pain insists on signifying, with language being only one of its performative media. What pain resists is representation, not the informational force exerted through language and other semiotic forms. Rather than unmaking language, pain disarticulates and rearticulates subjectivity, refashioning interrelations between the body, subjectivity, others, and culture in ongoing processes of largely aversive impingement, embroiling subjectivity with the imperative directives of embodied vulnerability. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

The American Library Association is committed to recruiting persons of color and those with disabilities to the profession, yet these groups are underrepresented among librarians. While intentional discrimination was the impetus for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, empirical studies in the workplace have exposed continued discrimination through unconscious bias. Extending such research to the library profession raises the question: How do librarians perceive the underrepresented as potential fellow library staff? In my recently conducted study of public library staff and future librarians, participants agreed that library staff should represent the diversity of the communities served; there was little support, however, for actively attempting to advance proportional representation through education or hiring. © , Published with license by Taylor & Francis.

The nomothetic thrust of personality research has been the subject of some significant recent criticism. One major problem is the failure in much personality research to sufficiently scrutinize its methods and its background beliefs. This produces conceptual schematizations of personality that do not sufficiently take into account the disunity and plasticity that affects what is construed as personality; it also underplays the necessity of more fully theorizing the network of infrapsychic and transpersonal systems, processes, structures, templates, interfaces, flows of stimuli, qualities of embodiment and contingencies that dynamically manifest as personality. It is through unfolding the complexity inherent in this network that personality theorization can move forward in new ways. This paper provides a provisional, beginning taxonomy of this network in order to start a research dialogue about personality that doesn't begin with the operative background beliefs of nomothetic methodology, that doesn't tacitly or overtly construe the individual to be a self-regulating, homeostatic system, and that resists presupposing personality as a cohesive, stable quality of personhood.

Personality theories, as Giordano (2014) argues, often treat Western versions of the self as having universal import. Eastern notions of self, however, offer a dramatically different basis for thinking about what personality might be. This paper, nonetheless, seeks to offer a general framework for theorizing about the epiphenomenon of personality in any culture, asserting that it is an effect of specific histories of ideological practices, semiotic networks and systems, and affect, which engage each other in dialogic and dialectical ways. The interactions of these factors, guided by ideology, regularize behavior and affective dynamics, largely in non-personal ways. Subjects are produced and reproduced from these complex interactions, which are situationally specific and simultaneously transpersonal. The subjects formed through these interactions are the basis for the folk psychology of personality, which treats the transient, varying effects of these interactions as more or less reified qualities that form a basis for the construction of selfhood, however conceived.