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Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses.  Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods.  In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil.   Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Featuring prominently in the romance imagination as terrifying obstacles in the hero’s path, shipwrecks are nevertheless often presented from the salvager’s perspective. Romances abound with knights, clerks, and merchants who obsessively observe nearby beaches and cautiously (yet excitedly) examine the contents of wrecked vessels. Washed ashore, such fruits of maritime disaster delineate medieval English conceptions of seashores as dangerous yet profitable spaces, wherein seaside harvests of (un)natural resources help to stimulate local economic networks. Designations of these shipwrecks as “magical” or “fortuitous” cannot, however, completely elide the source of such wealth in others’ suffering—an unavoidable implication that interrogates contemporary means of attaining investment capital. As such, this paper examines how the littoral space of the seashore is cast as a source of perilous and problematic material bounty in many Middle English romances.

Proceedings of the 2013 biennial meeting of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology in Santiago, Chile, 2013.

We live in a world at risk. Dire predictions about our future or the demise of planet earth persist. Even fictional representations depict narratives of decay and the end of a commonly shared social reality. Along with recurring Hollywood blockbusters that imagine the end of the world, there has been a new wave of zombie features as well as independent films that offer various visions of the future. The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters, and Other Visions about the End of the World offers an overview of Armageddon in film from the silent era to the present. This collection of essays discusses how such films reflect social anxieties—ones that are linked to economic, ecological, and cultural factors. Featuring a broad spectrum of international scholars specializing in different historical genres and methodologies, these essays look at a number of films, including the silent classic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the Mayan calendar disaster epic, 2012, and in particular, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, the focus of several essays.As some filmmakers translate the anxiety about a changing global climate and geo-political relations into visions of the apocalypse, others articulate worries about the planet’s future by depicting chemical warfare, environmental disasters, or human made destruction. This book analyzes the emergence of apocalyptic and dystopic narratives and explores the political and social situations on which these films are based. Contributing to the dialogue on dystopic culture in war and peace, The Apocalypse in Film will be of interest to scholars in film and media studies, border studies, gender studies, sociology, and political science.

This chapter presents a complex, real-life, accessible case study in expecting the best to provoke and stimulate conversation around practical problems and alternative solutions that confront educational leaders today. These cases cover a wide range of topics, including: teacher evaluations, educational reforms, school safety, cultural differences, undocumented students, and social media. Each case study has three alternative responses written by experienced educational administrators and academics. The respondents were asked to identify the primary problem, along with secondary problems to provide a strategy that will address the problems identified. The chapter starts with an observation that, over time, any supervisor who moves up the chain of responsibility experiences much, and usually begins to formulate empirically derived rules. The organization and unique approach of Educational Leadership in Action allows for flexible use in courses for aspiring leaders to supplement core readings, reinforce central concepts, exemplify theory, and provide grounded examples to encourage learning.

This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedag...

This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedag...

This book identifies core knowledge that educational leaders need to learn in pre-service preparation and throughout in-service professional development. The contributors discuss established pedag...

Parental Education Matters for Adolescent Health: The Importance of Parental Education in the US

This paper analyzes the effect of TV advertising and in-store displays on the sales of chocolates. I examine which method is more effective in gaining customers and in increasing total sales. Also, I look at the evidence to see whether the lack of advertising by a firm will hurt the industry as a whole. In this paper, I use a nested logit model on scanner data obtained by the Zwick Center for Food and Resource Policy at the University of Connecticut to examine the effect of TV advertising on chocolate sales. The results show that in-store displays and advertising both help increase the demand for chocolate.

EconStor is a publication server for scholarly economic literature, provided as a non-commercial public service by the ZBW.

Purpose The purpose of this is paper is to pay a closer look at the 2008-2009 financial crisis (and its aftermath) and analyzes stock returns of nine major US oil companies as well as the oil and gas sector under daily data from January 1992 to April 2012. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopt the arbitrage pricing theory model to examine the relationship between stock returns and their influences including oil price return, yield spreads, and US dollar index return. The authors also provide a test for structural changes in each regression model of return series to capture for multiple breaks. To examine the asymmetric effect of oil price returns on stock returns, the authors separate oil price returns series into two series: positive changes in oil price and negative changes in oil price. Findings The authors find stock returns of oil companies as well as the oil and gas sector are positively affected by oil prices and have stronger effects in the downward direction. Interestingly, The authors find the effects of oil price movements on stock returns increase over time. The authors examine the possibility that investors wishing to hedge against a weakening USD invest in US oil companies and find that more than half of these companies benefit from a weaker USD against the JPY, while all strongly benefit from a weaker USD against major currencies. Originality/value The authors employ daily data for two-decade period including the last global financial crisis. Due to the long-term period covered in this study, sequential Bai-Perron tests are used to detect structural breaks of stock return series. In addition, the data-dependent procedures result in good specifications throughout with white-noise processes in almost all cases.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify three (maturity, agency, and information) effects that help explain the change in idiosyncratic volatility after a firm initiates a dividend. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a cross-sectional analysis where the standard errors are adjusted for heteroskedasticity. As for robustness check, the authors perform two-stage analysis to control for potential self-selection bias. The authors also control for 2003 Dividend Tax Cut effect, matching-firm volatility, and confounding events. Findings Using a sample of 688 dividend-initiating firms for a period of 1977 to 2010, the authors find evidence consistent with the hypotheses based on the maturity, agency, and information effects. The volatility changes upon the dividend initiation can be reliably explained by the changes in profit volatility and free cash flow per total assets, and whether the firm consummated a stock split prior to the dividend initiation. The information effect is also found to be economically significant. Originality/value By studying a firm’s decision to initiate a dividend and its impact on the change in its volatility, the research helps contribute to the payout policy and volatility literatures.

Wallace Huffman continued the tradition of research on Midwest rural labor markets at Iowa State University that was begun in the 1930s by his advisers T.W. Schultz and D. Gale Johnson. We review the lessons learned from this research about the wisdom of policies aimed at retaining population in rural areas in the face of market forces and technological changes that create incentives to migrate to urban areas. Professor Huffman's teaching and lessons learned from the Iowa State Human Resources Workshop continues to shape recent research on the roles of agglomeration economies, information technologies, and returns to human capital on the strength of rural labor markets and policies regarding rural economic development.

The often observed empirical divergence between WTA and WTP measures of welfare change continues to be a topic of interest to both theoretical and applied economists. The divergence has particularly important implications for environmental policy. In this article, we review behavioral and other explanations of the disparity, with a focus on their connections to neoclassical welfare theory, and evaluate the empirical evidence of these explanations through the same lens. Some explanations of the disparity are consistent with neoclassical models, and some are not. Likewise, some imply that the divergences are attributed to underlying preferences (neoclassical or not), whereas others suggest that the divergences are due to elicitation methods, cognitive limitations, or other non-preference-related reasons. We argue that the source of the divergence can inform the choice of which measure, WTP or WTA, to use in a given empirical application.