1,721,166 research outputs found
Blueprints for rural economy: Philip Lowe\u27s work in rural and environmental social science
Get PDFPhilip Lowe died in February 2020, and so an academic career spanning five decades in environmental and rural social science and the sociology of knowledge came to an end. A pioneer of the social science of environmentalism since the early 1990s, Philip Lowe had been closely associated with the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University in the UK and had been the intellectual force behind establishing rural economy as both a subject and mode of social science analysis. This article reflects on a career and the evolving concept of ‘rural economy’ as an economic form, a policy realm and a knowledge practice. Through this history, it presents an account of the contribution of Philip Lowe\u27s research and writing that, as a result of his death, now stands as a bounded and complete body of work for the benefit of future generations of scholars
Agency Costs, Balance Sheets and the Business Cycle
Get PDFThe 1980s witnessed large increases in corporate debt and sustained asset price inflation. More recently, asset prices, particularly commercial property prices, have fallen significantly. The effect of these changes on balance sheets, and their implications for the business cycle, have generated considerable interest among academics and policy makers. In this paper, we review recent theoretical models that link the evolution of the business cycle to changes in firm equity. This link arises out of the asymmetry of information between borrowers and lenders and between managers and owners. These asymmetries lead to distortions in decision making which affect both the supply of and demand for credit, and ultimately investment and output. Deteriorations in the net worth of corporations and financial institutions are likely to lead to a reduction in both credit demand and supply and to an amplification of the business cycle. We develop a simple model in which the information problems between risk-averse management and the firm’s owners lead to investment decisions that depend upon the financial condition of the firm. We also review the Australian evidence of the importance of balance sheet strength on the availability of finance. Empirical results suggest that asset price inflation or increases in corporate equity, even after controlling for general business conditions, lead to finance becoming easier to obtain. This suggests that a collapse of asset prices, or an aggregate demand shock that reduces firms’ equity, will result in decreased supply of external finance.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Inflation Targeting: The British Experience
Get PDFThis lecture describes the United Kingdom's experience with inflation targeting. It provides a historical perspective to the introduction of inflation targeting, discusses the concept of inflation targets, and compares an inflation targeting regime with money supply and exchange rate targeting regimes. It is noteworthy that inflation targeting is based on the assumption that low inflation is the proper objective of monetary policy. A significant portion of the lecture covers the issue of the measurement of inflation. It discusses whether asset prices should be taken into account in the inflation measure and looks in particular at the experience of Japan in the late 1980s. It also considers sources of imperfection in traditional measures. It concludes that monetary policy will have to be conducted by reference to estimated price indexes that fall short of the conceptual ideal but does not regard this as seriously undermining an inflation targeting regime. The lecture goes on to discuss the issues of (1) having a target band for inflation or not, (2) the difficulty in forecasting inflation, and (3) the time horizon over which monetary policy should aim. The lecture highlights the important role that openness and transparency play in achieving credibility in monetary policy. It highlights the five devices that are now in use in the United Kingdom, and notes some of the benefits emerging from the open and transparent nature of the United Kingdom approach. It concludes by warning that inflation targeting does not promise to make monetary policy easy but does have the positive virtue of directing attention to many technical issues that need to be resolved in conducting monetary policy.Inflation, Targeting, British
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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