Investigating the cost Performance of UK Credit Unions using Radial and Non-Radial Efficiency Measures

This paper examines the relative efficiency of UK credit unions. Radial and non-radial measures of input cost efficiency plus associated scale efficiency measures are computed for a selection of input output specifications. Both measures highlighted that UK credit unions have considerable scope for efficiency gains. It was mooted that the documented high levels of inefficiency may be indicative of the fact that credit unions, based on clearly defined and non-overlapping common bonds, are not in competition with each other for market share. Credit unions were also highlighted as suffering from a considerable degree of scale inefficiency with the majority of scale inefficient credit unions subject to decreasing returns to scale. The latter aspect highlights that the UK Government's goal of larger credit unions must be accompanied by greater regulatory freedom if inefficiency is to be avoided. One of the advantages of computing non-radial measures is that an insight into potential over- or under-expenditure on specific inputs can be obtained through a comparison of the non-radial measure of efficiency with the associated radial measure. Two interesting findings emerged, the first that UK credit unions over-spend on dividend payments and the second that they under-spend on labour costs.

Power-law behaviour, heterogeneity, and trend chasing

Long-range dependence in volatility is one of the most prominent examples in financial market research involving universal power laws. Its characterization has recently spurred attempts to provide some explanations of the underlying mechanism. This paper contributes to this recent line of research by analyzing a simple market fraction asset pricing model with two types of traders---fundamentalists who trade on the price deviation from estimated fundamental value and trend followers whose conditional mean and variance of the trend are updated through a geometric learning process. Our analysis shows that agent heterogeneity, risk-adjusted trend chasing through the geometric learning process, and the interplay of noisy fundamental and demand processes and the underlying deterministic dynamics can be the source of power-law distributed fluctuations. In particular, the noisy demand plays an important role in the generation of insignificant autocorrelations (ACs) on returns, while the significant decaying AC patterns of the absolute returns and squared returns are more influenced by the noisy fundamental process. A statistical analysis based on Monte Carlo simulations is conducted to characterize the decay rate. Realistic estimates of the power-law decay indices and the (FI)GARCH parameters are presented.

Making the law accessible to non-lawyers: effects of different kinds of expertise on perceived usability of online legal information services

To help design an environment in which professionals without legal training can make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment - for Add-Wijzer, a European e-government project - we evaluated their perceptions of usefulness and usability. In concurrent think-aloud usability tests, lawyers and non-lawyers carried out information retrieval tasks on a range of online legal databases. We found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those with legal training (p = 0.001), that the number of difficulties and the choice of database affected successful completion, and that the non-lawyers had surprisingly few problems understanding legal terminology. Instead, they had more problems understanding the syntactical structure of legal documents and collections. The results support the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) of the effects of expertise on information retrieval, with implications for the design of systems to support the effective understanding and use of information.

De la cooperativa agroalimentaria a la "learning netchain". Hacia un planteamiento teorico interorganizativo e interpersonal

Se propone un planteamiento teórico/conceptual para determinar si las relaciones interorganizativas e interpersonales de la netchain de las cooperativas agroalimentarias evolucionan hacia una learning netchain. Las propuestas del trabajo muestran que el mayor grado de asociacionismo y la mayor cooperación/colaboración vertical a lo largo de la cadena están positivamente relacionados con la posición horizontal de la empresa focal más cercana del consumidor final. Esto requiere una planificación y una resolución de problemas de manera conjunta, lo que está positivamente relacionado con el mayor flujo y diversidad de la información/conocimiento obtenido y diseminado a lo largo de la netchain. Al mismo tiempo se necesita desarrollar un contexto social en el que fluya la información/conocimiento y las nuevas ideas de manera informal y esto se logra con redes personales y, principalmente, profesionales y con redes internas y, principalmente, externas. Todo esto permitirá una mayor satisfacción de los socios de la cooperativa agroalimentaria y de sus distribuidores y una mayor intensidad en I+D, convirtiéndose la netchain de la cooperativa agroalimentaria, así, en una learning netchain.

Many ways to say 'no', different ways to say 'yes': Applying Q-Methodology to understand public acceptance of wind farm proposals

This paper explores the nature of public acceptance of wind farms by investigating the discourses of support and objection to a proposed offshore scheme. It reviews research into opposition to wind farms, noting previous criticisms that this has tended to provide descriptive rather than explanatory insights and as a result, has not effectively informed the policy debate. One explanation is that much of this research has been conceived within an unreflective positivist research frame, which is inadequate in dealing with the subjectivity and value-basis of public acceptance of wind farm development. The paper then takes a case study of an offshore wind farm proposal in Northern Ireland and applies Q-Methodology to identify the dominant discourse of support and objection. It is argued that this provides new insights into the nature of wind farm conflicts, points to a number or recommendations for policy functions of an example of how this methodology can act as a potential bridge between positivist and post-positivist approaches to policy analysis.