Evaluation of cumulative externality: environmental economics, oligopoly and the private provision of public goods

This paper evaluates environmental externality when the structure of the externality is cumulative. The evaluation exercise is based on the assumption that the agents in question form conjectural variations. A number of environments are encompassed within this classification and have received due attention in the literature. Each of these heterogeneous environments, however, possesses considerable analytical homogeneity and permit subscription to a general model treatment. These environments include environmental externality, oligopoly and the analysis of the private provision of public goods. We highlight the general analytical approach by focusing on this latter context, in which debate centers around four issues: the existence of free-riding, the extent to which contributions are matched equally across individuals, the nature of conjectures consistent with equilibrium, and the allocative inefficiency of alternative regimes. This paper resolves each of these issues, with the following conclusions: A consistent-conjectures equilibrium exists in the private provision of public goods. It is the monopolistic-conjectures equilibrium. Agents act identically, contributing positive amounts of the public good in an efficient allocation of resources. There is complete matching of contributions among agents, no free-riding, and the allocation is independent of the number of members within the community. Thus the Olson conjecture—that inefficiency is exacerbated by community size—has no foundation in a consistent-conjectures, cumulative-externality, context (212 words).

Where are Yorkshire’s terps? Wetland exploitation in the early medieval period

Where are the terps in Yorkshire, or for that matter where is any other evidence of exploitation of the wetlands in the early medieval period? Archaeological evidence remains largely elusive for the period between the early fifth and the late ninth century. Among the very few sites in wetland landscapes dated to this period are the settlement of York and the middle Anglo-Saxon bridge at Skerne in the Hull valley. Sites from the free-draining soils adjacent to wetlands are more frequent, and include a monastery (Beverley), settlements (e.g. Nafferton and North Frodingham), cemeteries (e.g. Hornsea, Burton Pidsea, Hessle, North Frodingham, Swine and Stamford Bridge) and various isolated finds (recently summarised in Van de Noort and Davies 1993).

Negotiating the British landscape

According to many accounts, a key paradigm for understanding art in Post WWII Britain is one of Englishness versus internationalism or abstraction versus realism . These terms have a rich inflection of meanings that have been subject to interrogation over the last few decades. Anwar Shemza came to Britain and practiced his art at a time when these competing claims were at their height. In a postcolonial reading entitled “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-War Britain” Stuart Hall recently used David Scott’s framework of a ‘problem space’, that is discursively defined through questions, tensions and conjunctures, that couched the entry of what he describes as first waive British commonwealth artists into critical visibility in Britain. This can be characterized in part by the reviews of WG Archer and GM Butcher, both supporters of Shemza and prominent critics of the period. Hall includes Shemza in this framework that defines the work and his aspirations as constituted through the tensions of what was perceived to be anti-colonialist aims of modernism through universalism and the ‘nativist’ current in anti-colonial nationalism . This text will focus particularly on the problematic of Landscape as a ‘problem space’ of vernacular and modernism, over here and over there. The aim is not to define Shemza within the tradition of English landscape nor to exclude him but to position him within a discursive field of landscape and modernism in mid twentieth Century art.

Institutional investors: arbitrageurs or rational trend chasers?

This paper studies the relationship between institutional investor holdings and stock misvaluation in the U.S. between 1980 and 2010. I find that institutional investors overweigh overvalued and underweigh undervalued stocks in their portfolio, taking the market portfolio as a benchmark. Cross-sectionally, institutional investors hold more overvalued stocks than undervalued stocks. The time-series studies also show that institutional ownership of overvalued portfolios increases as the portfolios' degree of overvaluation. As an investment strategy, institutional investors' ride of stock misvaluation is neither driven by the fund flows from individual investors into institutions, nor industry-specific. Consistent with the agency problem explanation, investment companies and independent investment advisors have a higher tendency to ride stock misvaluation than other institutions. There is weak evidence that institutional investors make positive profit by riding stock misvaluation. My findings challenge the models that view individual investors as noise traders and disregard the role of institutional investors in stock market misvaluation.