Robert M. Teeter, 1939-2004

Robert M. "Bob" Teeter—political pollster, key strategistin the campaigns of every Republican president from 1968 to1992, co-director with Peter Hart of the Wall Street Journal/NBCPoll, board member and consultant to major corporations—diedof cancer at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 13. Hewas 65. "Teeter’s work with Hart evoked respect on both sidesof the political aisle," said Tim Russert, NBC News’sWashington bureau chief and host of Meet the Press. "You could always take Bob Teeter’s     

声音

“得女性者得天下。” ——《华尔街8报》刊文分析中国电商的成功秘诀，结合一些数据调查得出上述结论，文章认为，相对男性，中国女性网购物更为频繁、支出更多，更能拉动商家利润。     

BRINGING CLIENTS BACK IN:

Using qualitative data from a cohort sample of 76 current or former Wall Street professionals, I argue that the perception that clients prefer homophily with their service providers shapes Wall Street careers and contributes to gender inequality. I also reveal how some women on Wall Street partially insulate themselves from biases against them by deliberately avoiding positions that are most dependent on client relationships. I hypothesize that the strength of client preferences for homophily in service providers in the Wall Street context is related to the high status of this service profession and its clients.     

THE IMPACT OF BAD WRITING IN ECONOMICS

We find significant style differences between articles written by economists for their professional journals and articles by the same economists in the Wall Street Journal. We find no evidence that style influences the professional success of economists, which suggests that the private rewards to improving the quality of writing are low. Indeed, each community of scholars has probably adopted a "professionally correct" writing style, from which its members diverge little. However, scholars do alter their rhetorical style to communicate effectively with audiences other than the professional community. This suggests that intra- and inter-group (written) communication by economists is efficient.     

BOOK REVIEWS

This study examined 5 years of successful Christian music to determine if there had been a significant change in the amount of theological language used in contemporary Christian songs. Christian music is the only genre defined by lyrical content instead of musical style (Price, 1999). In a 1999 Wall Street Journal article, the Christian music industry was accused of watering down its lyrics in an effort to increase profits (Miller, 1999). After coding 100 of the top songs from 1996 to 2002 in the Christian rock and Christian hit radio genres, no systematic or significant decline in total theological words was found. However, when examining the type of theological words used in lyrics, the data demonstrated that words have become significantly less explicitly Christian.     

Because I'm Worth It? Understanding Inequality in a Performance‐Based Pay System*

How do workers understand pay inequality? Every organizational field has a taken‐for‐granted compensation system that shapes understandings of rewards. Using data from 76 Wall Street professionals, I analyze how individuals interpret, understand, and justify inequality in a performance‐based reward system where pay is supposed to be based on merit. A majority of securities workers believed that the performance‐based pay system produced equitable rewards. But a substantial minority challenged the procedural and/or distributive justice of this pay system, producing counterinstitutional accounts. These accounts took three general forms: accounts of arbitrariness, accounts of misinformation, and accounts of discrimination. All of these counterinstitutional accounts pointed to nonmerit influences on bonuses. I argue that these challenges might undermine the legitimacy of the pay system, but most men and women who challenged the system exited their firms or the industry, so that their challenges did little to destabilize Wall Street's pay practices. Wall Street appears to maintain its legitimacy in part through the self‐selection of dissenters out of the system.     

Stale economic news,media and the stock market

I employ a classification of headlines from newspapers and wire services to examine whether stale macroeconomic news affects stock prices. Unlike with individual stocks, the cost of obtaining information about major economic releases is relatively low. Thus, stock prices should adjust to economic news announcements prior to their coverage in newspapers. I find statistically and economically significant relationship between stale news stories on unemployment and next week’s S&P 500 returns. This effect is then completely reversed during the following week. These findings show that investors are affected by salient information and support the hypothesis that investors overreact to stale macroeconomic news reported in newspapers.     

Financial Exploitation of Older Adults in Rural Settings: A Family Perspective

Federal agencies responsible for funding protective services to older adults are increasingly concerned with the growing incidence of financial exploitation in rural areas. The Wall Street Journal recently has reported an increasing trend of unemployed adult children migrating from urban centers to smaller rural towns and countrysides to live with their parents since 2008. This current study explores the attitudes of family caregivers regarding management of financial matters for their elderly care recipients. The major findings of the study include that adult children often (1) overestimate their parents' ability to manage their finances; (2) prefer to manage their parents' finances informally, as opposed to using legal options like power of attorney; and (3) tend to think of their parents' assets as “almost theirs.” The study concludes with recommendations on the critical need for information to help families make important decisions about helping elderly parents with their finances. This information would not only promote the use of safeguards against abuse, but could potentially provide caregivers with greater confidence and protection.     

Perceived inflation and expected future prices in different currencies

Five experiments were conducted to investigate whether perceived inflation and expected future prices are influenced by the nominal representation of increases in product prices in different currencies. In contrast to previous research demonstrating overestimates of the perceived inflation of product prices after the transition of the domestic German Mark to Euro [Greitemeyer, T., Schultz-Hardt, S., Traut-Mattausch, E., & Frey, D. (2005). The influence of price trend expectations on price trend perceptions: Why the Euro seems to make life more expensive? Journal of Economic Psychology, 26, 541–548; Traut-Mattausch, E., Schultz-Hardt, S., Greitemeyer, T., & Frey, D. (2004). Expectancy confirmation in spite of disconfirming evidence: The case of price increases due to the introduction of the Euro. European Journal of Social Psychology, 34, 739–760], the price increases were of normal magnitude (5% and 8%) and a larger set of prices was used including small weekly expenses, prices of durables, and rent. All experiments were conducted in Sweden (not member of the European monetary union) employing undergraduates who volunteered to participate in class settings without any financial compensation. The price increases were expressed in the same currency, either actual currencies (Swedish Crowns or Euros) or fictitious currencies with different units. In general inflation was underestimated, to a larger extent when the currency or the product prices were unfamiliar than familiar. It was also shown that product-specific price changes made it difficult to perceive inflationary price increases. Only marginal effects of currency unit were observed.     

The Heterogeneous Effect of the Passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act on Stock Returns

I analyze how stock prices reacted to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970. Previous studies focus on accounting measures or actual OSHA violations, and my work complements the literature by examining how shareholders expected OSHA to affect firm profitability. Returns fell around the OSH bill’s release to the House floor and its eventual passage, and average market value dropped by $1.5 million over the 3 days surrounding House Rules Committee release. Durable manufacturing and mining industries were hardest hit in OSH passage, losing $2.6 million and $5.7 million in average market value, respectively. I also find that larger firms with poorer working conditions sustained more negative returns, and market power, not union density, explains variation in expected profitability. Furthermore, future penalties appear unrelated to shareholder expectations about compliance costs.

Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms,Crises, Organizational Characteristics,and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009

Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy‐engaged, well‐resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS‐related organizations in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.     

The impact of union-sponsored boycotts on the stock prices of target firms

An empirical analysis of the impact of union-sponsored boycotts on the stock prices of target firms strongly suggests that union boycott announcements initially lead to economically and statistically significant losses in the stock prices of the target firms. However, this short-term price decline is almost completely erased by rebounds in stock prices over the ensuing 15 trading days.     

华尔街时代:纽约国际金融中心演变及发展趋势分析

纽约自"新阿姆斯特丹"伊始,就成为美国的重要贸易海港,并逐渐成为国家的经济支柱。除却地理因素,政策因素和人文形态也是其重要的原因。100多年来,纽约的主导产业随着时代变迁,从占尽天时地利而发展的制造业,到如今引领全球的金融业。其中,华尔街在城市的发展中扮演了重要的角色,道琼斯指数揭示了美国政治和经济对金融业发展的影响。如今,华尔街又一次面临着衰退和必然的变革,然而华尔街在世界经济中的影响力仍然不可小觑。     

This Is What Democracy Sounds Like: Protest Performances of the Citizenship Movement in Wisconsin and Beyond

This article is a case study of an ongoing singing protest in Wisconsin, the group that calls itself Solidarity Sing Along (SSA). An offshoot of the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, for the first 15 months of its existence SSA was an important nexus of local activists working to recall Republican state senators and the governor. After the recall's failure the group not only continued to carry on but quite effortlessly reoriented its claim making and centered its protests on the freedom to assemble and petition the government, which had been an important cause from early on. Maintaining its pro-labor orientation, SSA has become part of a broader movement for democratic citizenship rights. Situating the group in musical practices of the Wisconsin protests and social movements more generally, I show that how SSA makes and performs its music makes it a part of the citizenship movement. This case study reveals a novel form of claim making within the repertoire of contention practiced by social movements: SSA is a ‘part-time occupation’ and as such has potential to be more resilient and durable than ‘permanent’ occupations à la Occupy Wall Street.     

Engendering Inequality: Processes of Sex-Segregation on Wall Street

Women's numbers in high-paying, male-dominated occupations have risen in the past three decades, but they disproportionately hold lower-paying jobs within those occupations. A cohort sample of Wall Street securities professionals shows how sex segregation occurs over time, as men's and women's different experiences lead them to change functions, to change firms, or to leave the securities industry. While seemingly similar processes impinge on the careers of everyone in this exceptionally high-paid occupation, family constraints and gender discrimination produce differential results for similarly qualified men and women. Over time men disproportionately gain the very highest paying Wall Street jobs.     

Searching for the “Sleeping Giant”: Racialized News Coverage of Latinos Pre-2020 Elections

Latinos are often thought as potential game changers in the political world in the United States. As the media discusses and analyzes the 2016 election and the path to the 2020 elections, narratives on the role of Latinos leading up to the 2020 election have started to emerge. In this article, I seek to examine how U.S. daily newspapers frame the role of Latinos in the 2016 election and leading up to the 2020 elections. Previous literature has focused on the racialized media coverage of African American politicians and the effects of racial priming; however, extant literature has not explored how Latinos are framed in U.S. media when it comes to electoral politics. Using a sample of newspaper articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, I found that newspapers largely focus on the demographic changes while operating under various assumptions about those changes. First, newspapers frame Latinos as more likely to vote for a politician if they are Latino. Second, they construct Latinos as a monolithic ethnoracial group that has simplistic interests in immigration. Third, Latino voters and African American voters are often lumped into the same category when discussing mobilization. These narratives continue a tradition of framing Latinos in monolithic ways, while also showing slight departures from previous narratives.     

Disunity within the house of labor: Change to win or to stay the course?

In September 2005, six unions representing 5.4 million workers held their founding convention as a new federation independent of the AFL-CIO. Infelicitously named “Change to Win Federation” (CTWF), the new alliance has called for a rededication of union resources and energies towards organizing the unorganized. Although CTWF has occasioned considerable interest and speculation among labor supporters and observers, it is difficult to determine why the break occurred, other than, perhaps, the personal agenda of some of its leaders. An unstated, significant reason may be a desire on the rebels’ part to operate relatively free of “noraiding” strictures of the AFL-CIO, even though the group disclaims any interest in challenging existing bargaining relationships and has penned “solidarity pacts” with some of its principal AFL-CIO competitors and with state and local units of the federation. Competitive forces are missing in the market for workplace representation services. The new group may reignite the rival unionism that spurred organized labor’s marked growth from 1935–1954, but early returns suggest an emphasis on militant posturing and on trendy, implausible themes such as “global unionism” and “subcontracting out strikes.”     

Show Me Your Papers! Obama’s Birth and the Whiteness of Belonging

In the wake of Barack Obama's 2009 ascension to the White House, stories questioning his citizenship slowly trickled into the mainstream. By 2011, ??Birtherism????the belief that Obama is constitutionally disqualified from holding Presidential office??was a principle aspect of public discourse. Through an analysis of online comments in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I analyze how dominant understandings of citizenship, race, class, and civil rights structure public navigation of ??Birther?? claims. I find the presence of several ??narratives of belonging????shared stories that people socially construct to account for who they are, how the world works, and where different people belong. These narratives reveal the sustained conflation of citizenship with an ideal or ??hegemonic?? form of white racial identity.     

Stock Market and Aggregate Investment Behavior in Malaysia: An Empirical Analysis

The present paper analyzes the role of stock market, more specifically real stock prices and stock market uncertainty/volatility, on aggregate investment behavior for an emerging market, Malaysia. Employing the autoregressive distributed lags approach to cointegration test, the paper establishes a long run equilibrium that ties the aggregate investment to its determinants—real income, real stock prices, real lending rate and stock market volatility. In the long run, we document a positive relation between aggregate investment and real stock prices and a negative relation between aggregate investment and stock market volatility. These results are further supported by our analyses of their dynamic interactions based on Granger causality and impulse-response functions. Based on the results, the real stock market prices, which has yet reached the level recorded prior to the crisis, may have explained the low investment in Malaysia after the Asian crisis. Moreover, the stock market volatility can also post a threat to the investment performance.     

‘Systemic thinking’, ‘regenerative culture’, and new forms of prefigurative politics: challenges for the global left

ABSTRACT

One of the aspects of the current crisis of the Left is an ‘epistemological blindness’ that prevents it from identifying opportunities for its own renewal. That includes the dismissal of the contribution of prefigurative forms of collective action which do not fit its institutionalized orthodoxies. Their most significant expression is a range of grassroots initiatives based on ‘systemic thinking’ and aimed at promoting a ‘regenerative culture’. It includes non-capitalist economic initiatives, such as those of the transition movement, social and solidarity economy and the Global Ecovillage Network, as well as of the temporary communities created by Occupy Wall Street movement and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. They regard social polarization, patriarchy, and the crisis of democracy as interconnected dimensions of a civilizational dysfunction that asks for whole-systems solutions. Such approach, if adopted by the Left, may contribute to its renewal and political strengthening.