The Transformation of Social Relationships in a Community as a Result of Land Reform: A Case Study of a Former Large Sugar Cane Estate in Réunion*

À partir des années 60 jusqu'au début des années 80, un programme de réforme foncière a été mis en ceuvre á l'île de la Réunion, ancienne colonie française devenue département français d'outre-mer. Ce programme s'inscrit dans une mutation plus globale de société. L'étude du cas de La Renaissance démontre que, à l'échelle locale, l'activité agricole demeure un facteur essentiel de la vie sociale. Les habitants se sont intégrés à de nouvelles structures sociales, entraînant une plus grande autonomie locale comme résultat de la responsabilisation des nouveaux agriculteurs et de la création locale d'associations sociales et culturelles.
From the 1960s to the early 1980s, a land reform program was implemented on the island of Réunion, a former French colony that had become an overseas department. This was part of a much greater societal change. The case study of La Renaissance shows that, at the local level, farming activity remains a pivotal feature of social life. The inhabitants have become integrated into new social structures, leading to greater local autonomy as a result of the people becoming newly responsible for their farms and creating social and cultural associations.     

Endogeneity: How Failure to Correct for it can Cause Wrong Inferences and Some Remedies

Although researchers in business and management are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of endogeneity affecting regression analysis, they frequently do not have the right methodological toolkit to adjust for this issue. In this paper we discuss such a toolkit. There are also areas in business and management research which to date seem to be mostly oblivious about the endogeneity issue. We highlight such an area, which studies the question of whether firms that are cross‐listed on a foreign stock exchange are charged premium fees by their auditors. When the same methodology (pooled ordinary least squares) as in the existing literature is used, the existence of an audit fee premium for cross‐listed firms seems to be confirmed. However, once methodologies are used which adjust for the various types of endogeneity (i.e. omitted variable bias, simultaneous and dynamic endogeneity) there is no longer support for the existence of such a generalized premium. Hence, not only do we illustrate that failure to adjust for endogeneity has severe consequences such as drawing the wrong inferences, but we also review various ways to control for the different types of endogeneity.     

The Symmetry Rule: A Seven‐Year Study of Symptoms and Explanatory Labels Among Gulf War Veterans

Noticing medical symptoms can cause one to search for explanatory labels such as “ate bad food” or even “exposed to anthrax,” and perhaps these labels may cause new symptom reports. The present study examined whether there is empirical support for this symptom‐label “symmetry rule.” We interviewed veterans (N= 362) from the Gulf War Registry in 1995 and 2002 about their medical symptoms and about their exposure to war‐related hazards and stressors. Health symptom reports were strongly correlated between the two time periods and showed relatively stable mean levels, whereas recall of war‐related exposures was notably unstable. Veterans starting with fewer medical symptoms recalled fewer war‐related exposures seven years later. Initial recollection of chemical and biological warfare exposure (but not other exposures) longitudinally predicted novel medical symptoms. The findings generally support the symmetry rule hypotheses, although the evidence for the label to symptom link was less strong. The findings account for some variability in symptoms and exposure recall over time, but they do not, on their own, account for the Gulf War veterans' elevated number of unexplained medical symptoms.     

The effect of incentive regulation on productive efficiency in telecommunications

Incentive regulation is now an important regulatory tool in the telecommunications industry in the United States. The issue explored here is whether incentive regulation has resulted in an increase in productive efficiency. After providing an overview of the nature of incentive regulation, one methodology for measuring the effects of incentive regulation on productive efficiency is reviewed. This methodology is data envelopment analysis (DEA) and allows for the measurement of both scale efficiency and technical efficiency of individual local exchange carriers (LECs). The results indicate that most LECs were technically efficient over the 1988–1998 period. Four LECs, however, consistently demonstrate scale inefficiency. In the aggregate, however, based on the DEA results there was no identifiable improvement in aggregate LECs' technical efficiency between 1988 and 1998. Subsequently, an alternative methodology, a stochastic frontier production function approach, is considered. The results from this methodology confirm that there was no change in technical efficiency over the period of study, something that incentive regulation was specifically designed to enhance.     

The Moment-Generating Function and Negative Integer Moments

It does not appear to be widely known that the moment-generating function M_x (t) contains information about negative as well as positive integer moments. Proofs of this are provided, extensions are indicated, and earlier literature deriving and using this type of result is briefly noted. Some examples are given.     

Student supervision

In October 1967 Sydney was the venue for the Annual Conference of The Australian Group for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency, the theme being “Preparing the Mentally Retarded for Adult Life”. A small group of students under the supervision of Mary McLelland¹ of Sydney University undertook a pilot study of the problems of the adolescent retarded, and the results of this were reported by her at a session of the conference. The subject was chosen because of direct and indirect pleas for help from parents of adolescent retarded people, mainly through the organization known as Aid Retarded Persons. Discussions and talks had taken place over a couple of years, and it is of this pre-conference thinking I am now writing. Parts of the material were given in talks to the parents and to a special group of the A.M.A.