movers and shakers chaos makers in tourism development abstract like most of their counterparts in other social sciences tourism researchers have traditionally focused on aspects of tourism phenomena that exhibit order linearity and equilibrium while eschewing situations where disorder non linearity and disequilibrium are more apparent although constructs such as the destination life cycle model demonstrate the heuristic value of this approach it results in aspects of tourism development that are intrinsically chaotic being overlooked thus for instance the fundamental role of entrepreneurs in destination development has received scant attention largely because their behaviour is not readily understood in terms of the conventional analytical framework this paper argues that the chaos complexity perspective provides a potentially useful alternative framework for providing insights into the underlying dynamics of tourism development and a case study involving the examination of entrepreneurial activity on the gold coast in australia is used for illustrative purposes in this context chaos is presented as essentially a creative process and entrepreneurs play a primary role both as chaos makers and as initiators of adaptive responses to chaos induced by external events

energy security and renewable electricity trade will desertec make europe vulnerable to the energy weapon abstract solar power imports to europe from the deserts of north africa as foreseen in the desertec concept is one possible way to help decarbonising the european power sector by 2050 however this approach raises questions of threats to european energy security in such an import scenario particularly in the light of increasing import dependency and russia s use of the energy weapon in recent years in this paper we investigate the threat of north african countries using the desertec electricity exports as an energy weapon we develop and use a new model to assess the interdependence the bargaining power symmetry operationalised as costs of a disruption in a future renewable electricity trade between north africa and europe if europe maintains current capacity buffers some demand response capability and does not import much more than what is described in the desertec scenario it is susceptible to extortion and political pressure only if all five exporter countries unite in using the energy weapon europe is not vulnerable to extortion by an export cut from only one country as the european capacity buffers are sufficient to restore the power supply no single exporter country would have sustained bargaining power over europe

perception of risks in renewable energy projects the case of concentrated solar power in north africa the world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent climate change while meeting the energy needs of developed and developing economies recent studies suggest that generation of electricity from concentrated solar power in north african countries and its transmission to europe could provide european and north african partners with low carbon electricity the private capital will be likely required to achieve the scale of new investment and yet the north african region experience difficulties with sustaining high levels of foreign direct investment from the private sector the literature identifies a number of risks as barriers to investment and we examine these in the particular context of renewable energy development we conducted three stages of interviews with stakeholders to learn their perceptions of the risks most likely to affect renewable energy projects three class of risks regulatory political and force majeure which includes terrorism stand out as being of high concern of these regulatory risks are perceived as being the most consequential and the most likely to occur this suggests that attention to building the capacities of north african countries to develop implement and enforce sound regulations in a transparent manner could be an important step in promoting renewable energy cooperation with europe

commodity liquidity measurement and transaction costs we examine the performance of liquidity proxies in commodities the amihud measure has the largest correlation with liquidity benchmarks amivest and effective tick measures also perform well these proxies are useful for studies of commodity liquidity over a long time period and those that lack access to high frequency data we use various aspects of transaction costs such as spread depth immediacy and resiliency to give insight into the costs of different execution approaches transaction costs increase with volatility and exhibit mean reversion splitting trades over one hour can reduce trading costs by two thirds compared to an immediate execution the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

the resource curse analysis of the applicability to the large scale export of electricity from renewable resources abstract the resource curse has been analyzed extensively in the context of non renewable resources such as oil and gas more recently commentators have expressed concerns that also renewable electricity exports can have adverse economic impacts on exporting countries my paper analyzes to what extent the resource curse applies in the case of large scale renewable electricity exports i develop a comprehensive model that integrates previous works and provides a consolidated view of how non renewable resource abundance impacts economic growth deploying this model i analyze through case studies on laos mongolia and the mena region to what extent exporters of renewable electricity run into the danger of the resource curse i find that renewable electricity exports avoid some disadvantages of non renewable resource exports including i shocks after resource depletion ii macroeconomic fluctuations and iii competition for a fixed amount of resources nevertheless renewable electricity exports bear some of the same risks as conventional resource exports including i crowding out of the manufacturing sector ii incentives for corruption and iii reduced government accountability i conclude with recommendations for managing such risks

vulnerability to terrorist attacks in european electricity decarbonisation scenarios comparing renewable electricity imports to gas imports the decarbonised future european electricity system must remain secure reliable electricity supply is a prerequisite for the functioning of modern society scenarios like desertec which partially rely on solar power imports from the middle east and north africa may be attractive for decarbonisation but raise concerns about terrorists interrupting supply by attacking the long unprotected transmission lines in the sahara in this paper i develop new methods and assess the european vulnerability to terrorist attacks in the desertec scenario i compare this to the vulnerability of today s system and a decarbonisation scenario in which europe relies on gas imports for electricity generation i show that the vulnerability of both gas and electricity imports is low but electricity imports are more vulnerable than gas imports due to their technical characteristics gas outages and potentially resulting blackouts are the very unlikely consequence even of very high number attacks against the gas import system whereas short blackouts are the potential consequence of a few attacks against the import electricity lines as the impacts of all except extreme attacks are limited terrorists cannot attack energy infrastructure and cause spectacular fear creating outages both gas and electricity import infrastructure are thus unattractive and unlikely terrorist targets

synergy and congestion in the tourist destination life cycle abstract discussion of agglomeration and clustering in the tourist area life cycle talc literature has not led to a corresponding change of the principal equation used to formalize the model this paper proposes a modification that accounts for the synergies between the accommodation entertainment and other components of a tourist destination the modified model is contrasted with the original talc and estimated for a cross section of caribbean and other island destinations estimations based on visitor expenditures and experts evaluations of destination authenticity are compared the results illustrate how parameters representing synergy and congestion vary across tourism styles and time the implications for destination growth are illustrated by comparing the solution to the proposed model with the talc the model exposes a core dilemma that while destinations should realize positive synergies to achieve self sustaining growth with this threshold achieved the resulting pace of investment may drive destinations to overshoot and uneven growth

financial statement anomalies in the bond market we investigate the association between bond returns and 32 financial statement variables our findings show that 17 of the 32 financial statement measures we examined are significantly related to f

an institutional assessment of three local government level tourism destinations at different stages of the transformation process transformation theory attempts to understand the long run process of structural shifts that occur in an industry and economy as a result of institutional change while transformation theory is being advanced and tools have emerged to measure institutions these innovations are yet to be applied to consider institutional change across the development spectrum this is critical for developing institutional theory to underpin the tourism transformation process consequently this paper aims to 1 assess the institutions of the tourism industry in three regions at different stages of transformation and 2 compare tourism to other industries within the regions the results indicate that as the tourism industry matures it becomes smarter more adaptable and takes its own trajectory by departing from the institutional norms of non tourism organizations in the region the tourism management implications are that learning research capabilities adaptability and collaborative marketing plans should be fostered in the early stages of transformation

the geopolitics of cross border electricity grids the israeli arab case abstract countries often attempt to establish regional electricity grids however whereas research on natural resources frequently seeks to understand policy outcome through a geopolitical prism when it comes to electricity studies the prism is always economic or technical hence this study is a first attempt to identify the geopolitical dimension of cross border electricity grids the study argues that success in establishing electricity grids requires identifying how the geopolitical dimension interplays with the physical dimension to examine the role of these geopolitical bottlenecks the study examines negotiation protocols spanning over 15 years on establishing ten grid connections between israel and its arab neighbors it finds that electricity geopolitics has been used both as a platform for deeper international cooperation and as a stick against neighboring states when policies are driven by a peace dividend proposals for grid connection appear to evolve and overcome the dependency and the security economy bottlenecks when relations deteriorate proposals for grid connections appear to undergo reconsideration and to be held hostage by higher politics if when and how electricity grids materialize is a function of the nature of the electricity network as a twofold package and of the ability of the planning process to accommodate geopolitical uncertainty

measuring liquidity in bond markets in the literature there is no consensus on a common approach to measure bond liquidity this paper is the first to comprehensively compare all commonly employed liquidity measures based on intraday and daily data for the u s corporate bond market we find that high frequency measures based on intraday data are very strongly correlated implying that previous results should be robust regarding the chosen measure most low frequency proxies based on daily data generally also measure transaction costs well however three proxies clearly take the lead corwin and schultz s 2012 high low spread estimator roll s 1984 measure and hasbrouck s 2009 gibbs measure

institutions in european and asian energy markets a methodological overview abstract this article introduces a methodological framework to study institutions in european and asian energy markets with a comparative case study on the eu and east asia a distinction is made between informal and three types of formal institutions and their transaction cost reducing order creating and ecological climatic functions the operation of energy markets is explained through the structure of institutions their types and functions it is found that order creating institutions guarantee enough stability mutual trust and solidarity among eu member states to support the competitive markets institution and supranational formal institutions as the underpinnings of trade in the internal energy market which nevertheless retains some corporatist features in the east asian markets the nature of order creating institutions sovereignty energy diplomacy and great power management prevents the emergence of supranational formal institutions and a shared idea of trade the prevailing structure has a large number of sub regional organisations with overlapping tasks and few powers in both markets the functions of institutions signify more than their number transaction cost reducing institutions are dependent on order creating institutions while both of these functions are better realised on the regional level than ecological climatic functions ultimately informal institutions are most influential

thinking big politics progress and security in the management of asian and european energy megaprojects this article examines four energy megaprojects two in europe and two in asia for each region a large natural gas pipeline project and an international project involving solar power from the desert is studied the natural gas projects are the nabucco project in europe and the trans asean gas pipeline network in asia the solar power from the desert projects are desertec in europe and gobitec in asia the article probes explanations of megaproject failure along social technical economic political and psychological dimensions we find that these projects though they are very different in nature and pertain to different regions all suffer from a similar set of problems too many stakeholders and stakeholder fragmentation cost overruns and the risk of accidents and attacks massive externalization of costs to third party stakeholders concentration of wealth and corruption and inflated expectations and biased projections we conclude by reflecting on lessons for not only the involved institutions and investors but energy analysts and the public at large

solar power investment in north africa reducing perceived risks abstract climate protection targets for mid century imply a need to scale up european renewable power production to a level that may exceed the available land area within europe s borders one attractive solution from a cost and feasibility perspective is the development of large scale concentrating solar power plants in north africa and the middle east however these developments are seen by many people as risky in terms of both european energy security and in terms of the risks faced by project developers in this paper we focus on the latter of theses issues first we examine the risks that project developers are most concerned about and identify these as being associated not with terrorism and rogue state behavior but rather with corruption and inefficient and unpredictable bureaucracies second we identify a range of policy approaches that can reduce these risks either by mitigating their consequences or by seeking to eliminate their underlying causes third we investigate the financial benefits of taking such steps to reduce or eliminate investment risks we find the potential savings to european electricity consumers to exceed 200 billion

an agency theory perspective on the owner manager relationship in tourism based condominiums abstract this paper draws on field study data to provide an examination of the condominium owner manager relationship in the australian tourism context although there has been considerable growth in tourism accommodation owned through strata title no research examining the somewhat idiosyncratic relationship between unit owners and resident managers has been found in the literature the peculiar nature of the relationship underlines its significance as a context in which to apply the agency theoretical model as australian condominium resident unit managers provide letting and caretaker services for condominium unit owners it appears that the relationship can be justifiably viewed as a principal agent exchange mills p k j business res 20 1990 31 the study specifically focuses on strata title condominiums located in major tourism regions this sub sector of the condominium management industry was chosen for study because it exhibits several key attributes distinguishing it from the non tourist based condominium sector for example two different parties represent the principal resident owners and investor owners also a significant proportion of a resident manager s work relates to the management of short term holiday unit letting in light of the particular agency relationship dynamics arising in large tourist based condominium governance several suggestions concerning the legal environment of the industry are provided

a review of innovation research in tourism abstract over the past two decades there has been increasing focus on the topic of innovation in tourism this article reviews the research contributions various categories of innovation product process managerial marketing and institutional are addressed important determinants of innovation are acknowledged including the role of entrepreneurship technology push and the existence of territorial industry clusters representation of knowledge is also identified as a critical factor for both the occurrence and nature of innovations the review reveals that there is still only limited systematic and comparable empirical evidence of the level of innovative activities and their impacts and wider implications for destinations and national economies an agenda for future research is emerging suggesting that there is quest for both formal quantification and for qualitative studies of the foundations processes implications and policies of innovation in tourism

do liquidity measures measure liquidity abstract given the key role of liquidity in finance research identifying high quality proxies based on daily as opposed to intraday data would permit liquidity to be studied over relatively long timeframes and across many countries using new measures and widely employed measures in the literature we run horseraces of annual and monthly estimates of each measure against liquidity benchmarks our benchmarks are effective spread realized spread and price impact based on both trade and quote taq and rule 605 data we find that the new effective realized spread measures win the majority of horseraces while the amihud 2002 illiquidity and stock returns cross section and time series effects journal of financial markets 5 31 56 measure does well measuring price impact

secondary trading costs in the municipal bond market using new econometric methods we separately estimate average transaction costs for over 167 000 bonds from a 1 year sample of all u s municipal bond trades municipal bond transaction costs decrease with trade size and do not depend significantly on trade frequency also municipal bond trades are substantially more expensive than similar sized equity trades we attribute these results to the lack of bond market price transparency additional cross sectional analyses show that bond trading costs increase with credit risk instrument complexity time to maturity and time since issuance investors and perhaps ultimately issuers might benefit if issuers issued simpler bonds

bond returns liquidity and missing data this paper examines holding period returns to constant duration portfolios of u s govern ment notes and bonds and measures the return premium generated by liquidity differences in bonds the approach compares constant duration portfolios constructed in two distinct ways one using only bonds issued in the most recent treasury auction one using all other bonds comparisons of the resulting series are made meaningful by choosing narrow du ration ranges in the portfolio formation procedure this in turn induces a missing data problem in the created time series parameters of return distributions are therefore estimated employing a maximum likelihood framework that explicitly accounts for the missing data it is estimated that recently issued bonds are priced to return a premium of around 55 basis points per annum over otherwise equivalent instruments

the term structure of bond liquidity we analyze the impact of market frictions on the trading volume and liquidity premia of finite maturity assets when investors differ in their trading needs our equilibrium model generates a clientele effect frequently trading investors hold only short term assets and predicts i a hump shaped relation between trading volume and maturity ii lower trading volumes of older compared with younger assets iii an increasing liquidity term structure from ask prices iv a decreasing or u shaped liquidity term structure from bid prices and v spillovers of liquidity from short term to long term maturities empirical tests for u s corporate bonds support our theoretical predictions

market in financial instruments directive mifid stock price informativeness and liquidity abstract the paper examines the impact of mifid on stock price informativeness and liquidity in 28 eu countries we find that post mifid the stock prices reflect greater firm specific information and the market becomes more liquid consistent with the catch up hypothesis our evidence shows that the impact of mifid in terms of price informativeness is greater for countries that have weaker quality of regulation we find that regulation with enforcement improves market efficiency our results are robust with respect to the choice of price informativeness and liquidity proxies as well as the control sample

energy market integration and regional institutions in east asia abstract this article assesses the case made for energy market integration in east asia by comparing the role of institutions in south east asia and north east asia the types and functions of institutions and their overall structure are examined in light of global energy market trends in south east asia the shift attempted by asean towards more competitive markets is hampered by the remaining statist variants of the trade institution and bilateral energy diplomacy which as regards transaction cost functions are sub optimal as for institutions with order creating functions the unresolved status of sovereignty within asean hampers regulatory harmonisation the great power management institution has since asean s establishment reduced conflicts without providing decisive leadership conducive to integration north east asia s dependence on global energy markets overshadows the regional integration potential of the diverse liberalisation efforts and interconnection projects bilateral energy diplomacies new trilateral institutions combined with track two institutions and remaining great power competition co exist in both regions the institutional structure allows for step wise technical infrastructure integration the environmental stewardship institution co exists with statist energy security and development objectives while it supports cooperation on green energy the overall structure of informal institutions constrains deeper energy market integration in several ways

condominium developments in maturing destinations potentials and problems of long term sustainability since the emergence of mass tourism destinations are constantly faced with the challenge of providing an adequate supply of suitable accommodation the introduction of condominium style accommodation seemed to be the answer to the problem of meeting the increasing tourism demand at some popular destinations although in some destinations investment in property development has increasingly become a supply driven activity however the resulting complexities brought about by the many stakeholders involved in managing the condominiums including strata title legislation investment incentives and long term maintenance of condominium developments have introduced previously unforeseen problems to destinations reaching maturity this study investigates the impacts of the growth of condominium developments and their potential for inhibiting destination rejuvenation the study was conducted on australia s gold coast a classic example of a mass tourism resort where ironically the growth of condominium style accommodation was a major factor in attracting large numbers of tourists but may in fact prevent successful rejuvenation in the future

energy policy and cooperation in southeast asia the history challenges and implications of the trans asean gas pipeline tagp network this article explores the proposed multibillion dollar trans asean gas pipeline tagp network in southeast asia focusing on the interests that have promoted the tagp and why based on extensive field research textual analysis of government reports and more than 100 research interviews at government institutions multilateral development banks universities consulting firms energy companies and nongovernmental organizations this article assesses the challenges facing the tagp in terms of promotion implementation and operation it explores the genesis of the tagp project and the drivers pushing southeast asian investment in natural gas with a special emphasis on the development needs of the region it also investigates the numerous technical economic legal political social and environmental impediments to the tagp project the article concludes that the rhetoric of regional energy cooperation touted by the association of southeast asian nations asean does not match its actual practice and that in many cases discussions of regionalism and energy security are intended to obscure opportunistic thinking within individual countries

corporate bond market transaction costs and transparency using a complete record of u s over the counter otc secondary trades in corporate bonds we estimate average transaction costs as a function of trade size for each bond that traded more than nine times between january 2003 and january 2005 we find that transaction costs decrease significantly with trade size highly rated bonds recently issued bonds and bonds close to maturity have lower transaction costs than do other bonds costs are lower for bonds with transparent trade prices and they drop when the trace system starts to publicly disseminate their prices the results suggest that public traders benefit significantly from price transparency