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Franchising has been present in the residential real estate brokerage market for many years. Today, nearly one of every five firms in this sector is organized as a franchise and one of every three agents works for an affiliated organization. Despite this high incidence of franchising, no current study has addressed how the decision to franchise impacts productive efficiency levels for these firms. The current paper measures the productive efficiency levels of real estate brokerage firms by employing data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA was used to estimate overall, allocative, technical, pure technical, and scale efficiency levels for a set of franchised and non‐franchised firms gathered by the National Association of Realtors. The results suggest that firms in general are productively inefficient. Franchised firms were found to be more efficient in allocating resources, while non‐franchised firms were shown to be more scale and technically efficient.

Country‐specific information on risk management is increasingly important, not only for investors and decision makers in international markets but also, for those in national and regional markets. This study reports the results of a cross‐sectional survey of risk management practice and derivatives use by a sample of Australian firms. Overall, the results suggest that firm‐specific factors appear to have some influence on risk management practice with the industry of the respondent being the most important, while the degree of international exposure has the least. Larger and more internationally exposed firms are likely to have more frequent reporting of derivatives use, and are more likely to use swaps and options to manage risks than other types of firms. Issues and implications for international firms are discussed.

This paper explored the new features of emerging stock markets, in order to point out the most associated indicators of increasing stock return volatility, which may lead to instability of emerging markets. The study covers a sample of five geographical areas of emerging economies, including Mexico, Korea, South Africa, Turkey, and Malaysia. It used the backward multiple‐regression technique to examine the relationship between monthly changes of stock price indices as dependent variable and the associated predicting local as well as international variables, which represent possible causes of increasing price volatility and initiating crises in emerging stock markets. The study covered monthly data for a period of forty‐eight months from January 1997 to December 2000. The study revealed that stock trading volume and currency exchange rate respectively represent the highest positive correlation to the emerging stock price changes; thus represent the most predicting variables of increasing price volatility. International stock price index, deposit interest rate, and bond trading volume were moderate predicting variables for emerging stock price volatility. While changes in inflation rate showed the least positive correlation to stock price volatility, thus represents the least predicting variable.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selective review of literature and presents a conceptual framework in journal and institution rankings. Several streams of ranking literature are analyzed.

The authors provide a conceptual framework to analyze the literature of journal and school ranking. Thus, several streams of ranking literature are analyzed to support the conceptual framework.

Through the lens of a context-driven framework, the authors point to originality, utility, and timeliness as aspects that contribute to the recent increase of the ranking literature. Finally, the authors discuss other issues that arise within ranking due to subjective biases, institutional preferences and difficulties establishing weighting measurements, as well as the future direction of ranking.

The authors propose a context-based ranking framework to analyze rankings as factors that influence the environment may ultimately affect the usefulness of these rankings. It also implies that ranking of a journal or institution is a relative measure, as the context in which rankings are derived may change over time. Ultimately, the relative benchmarks used in the ranking will change as newer, more relevant metrics are developed.

The conceptual framework is new and provides a useful benchmark to understand ranking of journals and school.

Although many recognize China’s vast market potential, the challenges of doing business in an economy that was largely closed to market forces for a half century must be recognized. This paper examines the role of venture capital in China’s economic development. The potential impact of a healthy venture capital market is immense, but this healthy market is far from the reality in China. The major obstacles that must be addressed include the state control of vital institutions and regulation of economic activity, including restrictions on the flow of capital and currency.

This paper seeks to argue that racially discriminatory zoning in Colonial Hong Kong could have been a form of protectionism driven by economic considerations.

This paper was based on a review of the relevant ordinances, literature, and public information, notably data obtained from the Land Registry and telephone directories.

This paper reveals that many writings on racial matters in Hong Kong were not a correct interpretation or presentation of facts. It shows that after the repeal of the discriminatory laws in 1946, an increasing number of people, both Chinese and European, were living in the Peak district. Besides, Chinese were found to be acquiring land even under the discriminatory law for Barker Road during the mid‐1920s and became, after 1946, the majority landlords by the mid‐1970s. This testifies to the argument that the Chinese could compete economically with Europeans for prime residential premises in Hong Kong.

This paper lends further support to the Lawrence‐Marco proposition raised in Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design by Lai and Yu, which regards segregation zoning as a means to reduce the effective demand of an economically resourceful social group.

This paper shows how title documents for land and telephone directories can be used to measure the degree of racial segregation.

This paper is the first attempt to systematically re‐interpret English literature on racially discriminatory zoning in Hong Kong's Peak area using reliable public information from Crown Leases and telephone directories.

The United States Air Force often provides effective airlift for cargo distribution, but is at times inefficient. This paper aims to address the under-utilization of military airlift cargo compartments that plagues the airlift system.

The authors examine seven techniques designed to increase cargo compartment utilization and increase airlift utilization rates. The techniques were applied through load planning software to 30 real-world movements consisting of 159 sorties. They then ran each post-technique movement through a modeled flight environment to obtain cycle movement data. The metrics gained from both the load planning software and the modeled environment were regressed to provide statistical understanding regarding how well each technique influenced cost savings.

The results showed a 24 per cent elimination of aircraft required and a savings of $14.5m. Extrapolation of the authors’ findings to four years of airlift mission data revealed an estimated annual savings of $1.6bn.

This research effort provides multiple options to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of military airlift.

This article reviews the quantitative marketing literature on artificial intelligence (AI) through an economics lens. We apply the framework in Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence to systematically categorize 96 research papers on AI in marketing academia into five levels of impact, which are prediction, decision, tool, strategy, and society. For each paper, we further identify each individual component of a task, the research question, the AI model used, and the broad decision type. Overall, we find there are fewer marketing papers focusing on strategy and society, and accordingly, we discuss future research opportunities in those areas.