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Fair value pricing is a critical issue for mutual funds with international market exposure because trading in the underlying foreign securities is not synchronous with US market trading. Using a sample of Japanese open‐end mutual funds that trade in the USA, this paper explores the potential for exploitation of common mutual fund pricing practices and identifies much larger pricing errors than previously reported. A simple, objective solution to the fair value pricing quandary is proposed. The solution, based on foreign exchange‐traded funds and the S&P 500, provides a timely, objective pricing alternative that is less exploitable than current mutual fund pricing practices.

Prosociality may in part determine sustainability behavior. Prior research indicates that pro-environmental behavior correlates with prosocial attitudes, and separately, that prosociality correlates with social support in homes and communities. Therefore, prosociality may constitute a keystone variable linking human well-being with pro-environmental behavior. The purpose of the paper is to test this conjecture.

Data from a multi-year student survey at the University of Maine on environmental behavior, prosociality and experienced social support are used. A two-stage least-squares regression is applied to explore the relationships between these variables, and sub-scale analysis of the pro-environmental responses is performed. Additionally, spatial statistics for the student population across the state are computed.

The data corroborate previous findings and indicates that social support within a community may bolster the prosociality of its members, which in turn may increase pro-environmental behaviors and intentions.

Cross-sectional data do not permit the imputation of causality. Self-reported measures of behavior may also be biased. However, student prosociality surveys may provide an effective and low-cost sustainability metric for large populations.

The results of this study corroborate prior research to suggest that pro-environmental and prosocial behaviors may both be enhanced by bolstering social support efforts at the community level.

It is suggested that prosociality could become a keystone sustainability indicator. The study’s results extend the understanding of the connections between prosociality, social support and pro-environmental behavior. The results of this study suggest that efforts to simultaneously improve the well-being and environmental status might focus on building prosociality and social support systems at the community level.

Current news on environmental problems frequently emphasizes the totally unprecedented nature of the ecological crises that beset us in this nation and the Western world as a whole. We are told, for example, that the summer of 1988 constituted “the hottest summer on record” in North America. Similarly we hear mat Boston Harbor has never in its history been so polluted, and in European waters seal populations died of an epidemic in 1988 on a scale never before witnessed by man. By stressing this “never before” aspect of events, it is sometimes argued mat the experience of the past is largely irrelevant for policy planners. Since our circumstances are new, so the argument runs, past experience leaves us with little or no instruction for the formulation of a practical public policy for the environment.

EVEN if library work with the young is the most written, and over‐written, subject in librarianship as is sometimes alleged, it still is the foundation of all library activity and must therefore come under continuous review. To some the subject is as dull as the essay questions set in the Entrance Examinations were alleged to be by a writer in The Library Assistant. To which we reply that all things have a certain dullness to those without sufficient imagination to look at them in other than the most conventional darkness. A Chesterton discourses entrancingly on a piece of chalk and brown paper, an empty train, a piece of string. So with our subject. We therefore make no other apology than this for a number of THE LIBRARY WORLD in which it is our main interest. Our children's libraries are, as yet, far from perfect; they issue too many drivelling books written by authors whose first essays in writing are children's books because they think them to be the easiest to write. The difference between a Ransome and—well, a thousand slush children's books—is as great as the difference between The Vicar of Wakefield and worst railway bookstall novelette. There is a great field being examined here by the more progressive children's librarians. There are many other questions, administrative and personal that have been and are under discussion. The writer of Letters on Our Affairs this month deals with some of these although, we may at once say, his views are not wholly those of THE LIBRARY WORLD.

Focuses on the approach to interpreting earnings equality found in the writings of a variety of economists and in particular, technological change and its effects on the demand skill resulting in earning inequality. Argues that the evidence in favour of the technological effect is weak and presents some alternatives for further consideration.

The paper outlines and examines a social‐institutional conception of income inequality or economic distribution. The fundamental proposition of this conception is that income inequality/distribution is far from being the outcome of the operation of strictly market laws or economic forces but rather one of institutional arrangements or social structures. Of the latter particularly important have shown to be the institutional structure of the economy, particularly labour markets, as well as the degree of democracy of political systems. The results suggest transcending single‐factor economic explanations and predictions of income inequality, as implied in the Kuznets curve and its ramifications, in favour of an alternative multilevel sociological approach.

THE Reference Department of Paisley Central Library today occupies the room which was the original Public Library built in 1870 and opened to the public in April 1871. Since that date two extensions to the building have taken place. The first, in 1882, provided a separate room for both Reference and Lending libraries; the second, opened in 1938, provided a new Children's Department. Together with the original cost of the building, these extensions were entirely financed by Sir Peter Coats, James Coats of Auchendrane and Daniel Coats respectively. The people of Paisley indeed owe much to this one family, whose generosity was great. They not only provided the capital required but continued to donate many useful and often extremely valuable works of reference over the many years that followed. In 1975 Paisley Library was incorporated in the new Renfrew District library service.

Suggests that an understanding of the difference between friendliness and courtesy can help providers to meet customer expectations and improve perceptions of service quality in a variety of service situations. Focuses on the issue of first‐name usage as a gesture of friendliness which is open to misinterpretation. Notes that this aspect of friendliness has been much debated in the popular press and has been identified as part of consumer service by some service organizations. Concludes that consumers express strong preferences for the level of friendliness they want from any type of service encounter, and that expectations will vary from one service to another and also from one customer to another.

This paper aims to consider few cognitive and conceptual obstacles to engagement with global catastrophic risks (GCRs).

The paper starts by considering cognitive biases that affect general thinking about GCRs, before questioning whether existential risks really are dramatically more pressing than other GCRs. It then sets out a novel typology of GCRs – sexy vs unsexy risks – before considering a particularly unsexy risk, overpopulation.

It is proposed that many risks commonly regarded as existential are “sexy” risks, while certain other GCRs are comparatively “unsexy.” In addition, it is suggested that a combination of complexity, cognitive biases and a hubris-laden failure of imagination leads us to neglect the most unsexy and pervasive of all GCRs: human overpopulation. The paper concludes with a tentative conceptualisation of overpopulation as a pattern of risking.

The paper proposes and conceptualises two new concepts, sexy and unsexy catastrophic risks, as well as a new conceptualisation of overpopulation as a pattern of risking.

To develop an understanding of communication among agribusiness journals and to examine patterns of citations that allow the measurement and description of the structure of communication flows among those journals in a network.

The data for this study were gathered from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) published by Thomson Scientific (Philadelphia). The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis, based on an international trade analogy to explain the network of agribusiness journals and how these journals communicate with business and economics journals.

Business and economics journals and, particularly the traditionally major ones, surprisingly were scarcely every used. However, the British Food Journal stood out with 50 citations to marketing and strategic management journals.

There are predominantly four such limitations: only 33 journals were studied, only one 5-year time period was involved, that time period is a few years old and the journal characteristics were derived using data from the “Scopes” and “Information for Authors” text on the website of each journal.

Exchanges of agribusiness knowledge and information among diverse stakeholders (consumers, suppliers and public agencies) in a complex environment require a better understanding of the network of agribusiness journals and their relation to traditional business and economics journals.

Networks of journals facilitate cooperation and interactions to improve developments in the field.

Examining citations from and to the field of agribusiness is interesting and important because knowledge is transferred through networks comprise those who contribute to journals, read them and learn from them, i.e. by “talking” to each other as well as by practitioners who also read and learn from those journals.