INTRODUCTION To choose 1958 as the year terminating a study of the development of public library facilities in Argyll may seem somewhat arbitrary. The year is chosen as marking…
Abstract
INTRODUCTION To choose 1958 as the year terminating a study of the development of public library facilities in Argyll may seem somewhat arbitrary. The year is chosen as marking the completion of the County Library system as conceived at its commencement in 1946. It was only then that the last of the Burgh Libraries became integrated into the service and it could be said to cover the whole county. Further developments took place within the context of this service but the concern of this paper is to examine the history which led up to its establishment. This is done mainly through the study of original material such as correspondence and reports. Since much of the available material related to the protracted period of negotiation between the County Authorities and the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust it seemed possible to concentrate on the activity of the Trust in the general development of rural library services in Scotland. During the years spent in considering their own position the Argyll authorities collected much information concerning other areas. Argyll's efforts, or the lack of them, might have been placed in comparison with activity elsewhere. However, it became obvious that services in other areas developed on individual lines which made comparisons possible only in the broadest of terms. Similarly, the Trust operated a policy within broad and negotiable guidelines involving detailed regulation on only a minimum of issues which were considered to be vital.
SYLVIE BOURIAUX and WILLIAM L. SCOTT
The US insurance industry has long faced the spectrum of large unexpected losses from natural catastrophes such as hurricanes and earthquakes. However, the September 11, 2001…
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The US insurance industry has long faced the spectrum of large unexpected losses from natural catastrophes such as hurricanes and earthquakes. However, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack clearly demonstrated a new form of catastrophic risk of man‐made origin. The damages in property and life are now well known as estimates of insured losses deriving from this event range from $40 to $54 billion. The 9/11 terrorist attacks renewed the capacity problem faced the insurance industry in the underwriting of large catastrophic risk. In that regard, this paper explores the feasibility of capital market alternatives to the conventional insurance mechanism, and analyses whether the capital market could provide extra capacity to absorb terrorism risk.
Iqbal Mansur and Elyas Elyasiani
This study attempts to determine whether the level and volatility of interest rates affect the equity returns of commercial banks. Short‐term, intermediate‐term, and long‐term…
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This study attempts to determine whether the level and volatility of interest rates affect the equity returns of commercial banks. Short‐term, intermediate‐term, and long‐term interest rates are used. Volatility is defined as the conditional variance of respective interest rates and is generated by using the ARCH estimation procedure. Two sets of models are estimated. The basic models attempt to determine the effect of contemporaneous and lagged interest rate volatility on bank equity returns, while the extended models incorporate additional contemporaneous macroeconomic variables. Contemporaneous interest rate volatility has little explanatory power, while lagged volatilities do possess some explanatory power, with the lag length varying depending on the interest rate series used and the time period examined. The results from the extended model suggest that the long‐term interest rate affects bank equity returns more adversely than the short‐term or the intermediate‐term interest rates. The findings establish the relevance of incorporating macroeconomic variables and their volatilities in models determining bank equity returns.
Elyas Elyasiani and Iqbal Mansur
This study employs a multivariate GARCH model to investigate the relative sensitivities of the first and the second moment of bank stock return distribution to the short‐term and…
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This study employs a multivariate GARCH model to investigate the relative sensitivities of the first and the second moment of bank stock return distribution to the short‐term and long‐term interest rates and their respective volatilities. Three portfolios are formed representing the money center banks, large banks, and small banks, respectively. Estimation and testing of hypotheses are carried out for each of the three portfolios separately. The sample includes daily data over the 1988‐2000 period. Several hypotheses are tested within the multivariate GARCH specification. These include the hypotheses of: (i) insensitivity of bank stock return to the changes in the short‐term and long‐term interest rates, (ii) insensitivity of bank stock returns to the changes in the volatilities of short‐term and long‐term interest rates, and (iii) insensitivity of bank stock return volatility to the changes in the short‐term and long‐term interest rate volatilities. The findings indicate that short‐term and long‐term interest rates and their volatilities do exert significant and differential impacts on the return generation process of the three bank portfolios. The magnitudes and the direction of the effect are model‐specific namely that they depend on whether the short‐term or the long‐term interest rate level is included in the mean return equation. These findings have implications on bank hedging strategies against the interest rate risk, regulatory decisions concerning risk‐based capital requirement, and investor’s choice of a portfolio mix.
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HOW good do costs and workloads in library X look when set against those of comparable libraries?
Alexandra L. Ferrentino, Meghan L. Maliga, Richard A. Bernardi and Susan M. Bosco
This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in…
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This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.
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William Amasa Scott was in his time well-known as a monetary economist as well as a popularizer of economic ideas, whose opinions were widely regarded by the public. A proponent…
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William Amasa Scott was in his time well-known as a monetary economist as well as a popularizer of economic ideas, whose opinions were widely regarded by the public. A proponent of Austrian economics and defender of classical economic theory, he soon found a home at the School of Economics, Political Science and History (later the School of Economics) at the University of Wisconsin which, while initially a mainstream department, would evolve into the citadel of Institutional Economics. Notwithstanding his status as an authority on monetary economics and his place as a public intellectual, he remained at the University something of an outsider throughout his career and today is largely forgotten.
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Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are…
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Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.
The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and…
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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.