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We examine the two-level nested constant elasticity of substitution production function where both capital and labor are disaggregated in two classes. We propose a normalized system estimation method to retrieve estimates of the inter- and intra-class elasticities of substitution and factor-augmenting technical progress coefficients. The system is estimated for US data for the 1963–2006 period. Our findings reveal that skilled and unskilled labor classes are gross substitutes, capital structures and equipment are gross complements, and aggregate capital and aggregate labor are gross complements with an elasticity of substitution close to 0.5. We discuss the implications of our findings and methodology for the analysis of the causes of the increase in the skill premium and, by implication, inequality in a growing economy.

This article assessed the effects of airfares and foreign exchange rates on Global Tourism demand. It identified three categories from the assessment – The Market Segment Effect; The Substitution Effect; and The Facilitation Effect. The tourism literature is rich with vast studies on the effects of various components of tourism prices on international tourism, but lacking in comprehensive categorization of the identified effects. Such assessment would enable tourism destination planners and service providers to be able to focus on identified specific issues and finding their pertinent solutions. It has been determined that while there might be identified profound effects, their solutions are not applicable to all tourism destinations or services.

The growing incidence of precarious employment across many sectors is a serious challenge for a developing country like India. Neo-liberal arguments justify precarity as essential for the development of the free market economy and advocate realigning human resource practices with an ever-changing business environment and labor cost conditions. This chapter seeks to identify the determinants and dynamics surrounding precarity of workers engaged in temporary employment in India. It uses the unique Employment and Unemployment Survey data set published by the National Sample Survey Organisation of Government of India for two time periods 2009–2010 (66th Round) and 2011–2012 (68th Round) to bring out the dimensions of precarity and identify the determinants (both micro- and macro-levels) of participation in temporary employment. We find that precarious employment is most likely to affect the young, women, non-union members, those belonging to minority and socially deprived communities with low land holding and low educational status. Precarious employment is also most pronounced in states where labor-intensive industries are exposed to global import competition and where labor laws are rigid. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for the economic and social policies that Indian governments have adopted in recent years.

To summarize and evaluate John Levi Marin’s recent book, The Explanation of Social Action (2011), the central thesis of which is that the actions of other people cannot be explained without first understanding those actions from the point of view of the actors themselves. Martin thus endeavors to reorient social science toward concrete experience and away from purportedly useless abstractions.

This review chapter employs close scrutiny of and applies immanent critique to Martin’s argumentative claims, warrants, and the polemical style in which these arguments are presented.

This chapter arrives at the following conclusions: (1) Martin unnecessarily truncates the scope of sociological investigation; (2) he fails to define the key concepts within his argument, including “explanation,” “social action,” and “understanding,” among others; (3) he overemphasizes the external or “environmental” causes of action; (4) rather than inducing actions, the so-called “action-fields” induce experiences, and are therefore incapable of explaining actions; (5) Martin rejects counterfactual definitions of causality while defining his own notion of causality in terms of counterfactuals; (6) most of his critiques of other philosophical accounts of causality are really critiques of their potential misapplication; (7) the separation of experience and language (i.e., propositions about experience) in order to secure the validity of the former does not secure the validity of sociological inquiry, since experiences are invariably reported in language; and, finally, (8) Martin’s argument that people are neurologically incapable of providing accurate, retrospective accounts of the motivations behind their own actions is based on the kind of third-person social science he elsewhere repudiates; that he acknowledges the veracity of these studies demonstrates the potential utility of the “third-person” perspectives and the implausibility of any social science that abandons them.

To date Martin’s book has received much praise but little critical attention. This review chapter seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature in order to better elucidate Martin’s central arguments and the conclusions that can be reasonably inferred from the logical and empirical evidence presented.

This chapter examines factors that cause violations of regularity conditions and biases in estimates of substitution. In the context of the Fourier demand system, failing to impose curvature restrictions but correcting for serial correlation results in few violations of the curvature conditions. In contrast, imposing curvature restrictions without correcting for serial correlation biases substitution estimates and can cause violations of monotonicity. For serially correlated data, results suggest that correcting for serial correlation may be more important than imposing curvature. Furthermore, the artificially break-adjusted data that are inconsistent with consumer optimization can severely bias estimates. Results from the Bank of England's (BOE) preferred non-break-adjusted data establish that money and goods are substitutes in demand.

The purpose of this original research is to explore whether firms redeploy the resources that were withdrawn from existing businesses and use them to enter an emerging product market. We studied 244 firms that have exited from at least one business and analyzed whether the firms entered the emerging product market as a new business. The inducements of resource redeployment vary with information cues in media rhetoric about emerging and shifting threats of substitution between the firm’s existing businesses and the new one. Through our hazard rate analysis of entries of firms that exited existing businesses, we examined the hypotheses that resource redeployment through exit and entry may be driven by an interaction of the volume of substitution rhetoric with the resource commitments that the firm had made in the domain of the new business as well as the market relatedness between the firm’s existing businesses and the new one. Our study makes conceptual and methodological contributions to the research on inducements, by theorizing how performance advantages of new over existing businesses vary with product evolution and by characterizing emerging and shifting threats of substitution with content analysis of media rhetoric. Our study suggests that prior work investigating corporate diversification provides an incomplete picture of the contribution of resource relatedness to firm value and firm decision-making.