In the wake of the increasing popularity of tattoos, the present study explored whether tattoos have an adverse impact on employees. Specifically, this research examined the relationship between visible tattoos and unwanted sexual attention, along with perceived sexual harassment climate and perceived inclusion climate as potential moderators of this relationship. With a sample of 417 restaurant and retail employees, the results from logistic regression analyses demonstrated that possessing a visible tattoo was associated with increased odds of experiencing unwanted sexual attention. Perceived inclusion climate attenuated this relationship, whereby individuals with visible tattoos were less likely to experience unwanted sexual attention in a more favorable climate. Although perceived sexual harassment climate was directly related to unwanted sexual attention, it did not moderate the visible tattoo-unwanted sexual attention relationship.

In 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized its rear visibility regulation, which requires cameras in all new vehicles, with the goal of allowing drivers to see what is behind them and thus reducing backover accidents. In 2018, the Trump administration embraced the regulation. The rear visibility rule raises numerous puzzles. First, Congress’ grant of authority was essentially standardless – perhaps the most open-ended in all of federal regulatory law. Second, it is not easy to identify a market failure to justify the regulation. Third, the monetized costs of the regulation greatly exceeded the monetized benefits, and yet on welfare grounds, the regulation can plausibly be counted as a significant success. Rearview cameras produce a set of benefits that are hard to quantify, including increased ease of driving, and those benefits might have been made a part of “breakeven analysis,” accompanying standard cost-benefit analysis. In addition, rearview cameras significantly improve the experience of driving, and it is plausible to think that in deciding whether to demand them, many vehicle purchasers did not sufficiently anticipate that improvement. This is a problem of limited foresight; rearview cameras are “experience goods.” A survey conducted in 2019 strongly supports this proposition, finding that about 56 % of consumers would demand at least $300 to buy a car without a rearview camera, and that fewer than 6 % would demand $50 or less. Almost all of that 6 % consists of people who do not own a car with a rearview camera. (The per-person cost is usually under $50.) These conclusions have general implications for other domains in which regulation has the potential to improve social welfare, even if it fails standard cost-benefit analysis; the defining category involves situations in which people lack experience with a good whose provision might have highly beneficial welfare effects.

To explore the emerging and contested issue of business and human rights in the area of climate change, this article provides a critical discussion from the viewpoint of moral philosophy. A novel typology of businesses’ human rights duties (‘duty’ is considered synonymous with ‘responsibility’ here) is proposed. It claims that duties are both forward- and backward-looking. Cases of human rights litigation seeking remedy for climate-related harms are backward-looking, and duties should be determined on the basis of proportion of historical emissions, culpable knowledge and counter-acts to abate climate harms. Businesses’ forward-looking duties, however, depend on their power, privilege, interest and collective abilities. The typology is then assessed against the background of recent legal principles and instruments. It is concluded that moral duties of business reach beyond mere respect for human rights and national jurisdictions in the context of climate change.

Households in the USA spend about $70 billion annually on pets. Dogs, the most common pet, can be found in nearly half of American households. An important shadow price in the analysis of policies affecting human mortality is the value of statistical life (VSL), which is imputed from how people make decisions involving tradeoffs between small mortality risks and other goods. The value of statistical dog life (VSDL) is also an important, but until now unavailable, shadow price for use in regulation of such goods as pet foods and environmental toxins. Additionally, an estimate of the VSDL would have uses outside the regulatory process in valuing programs involving zooeyia, in setting tort awards for wrongful dog death, and in property divisions in divorce settlements where joint custody of dogs is not feasible. In order to estimate the VSDL, we conducted a contingent valuation of a national sample of dog owners that elicited willingness-to-pay for changes in mortality risk for pet dogs. Specifically, respondents were asked about willingness-to-pay for a vaccine that would reduce the risk of canine influenza. The design included both quantity (different magnitudes of risk reduction from the offered vaccine) and quality (differences in nature of death from the influenza) treatments as scope tests. It also included treatments involving spillover effects to other dogs and a priming question about disposable income. Based on the analysis and consideration of its assumptions, we recommend $10,000 as the VSDL.

Various methods have been applied to evaluating the economic viability of public investments in tourism. In this article, we capitalize on the strengths of computable general equilibrium and cost-benefit analytical techniques and develop an integrated approach to evaluating public investments in tourism. We apply the approach to the evaluation of a US$6.25 million investment in tourism in Uruguay from the perspective of a multilateral development bank and a beneficiary government. These perspectives differ in a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) due to the timing of the costs incurred. The integrated approach is powerful in that it captures first and subsequent rounds of investment impacts of benefits and costs; resource diversion and constraints are accounted for, and the estimation of benefits is consistent with the welfare economics underpinnings of CBA.

This paper evaluates how the relation between firms’ cash holdings and their acquisition decisions changes over macroeconomic cycles using a sample of 47,615 acquisitions from 36 countries between 1997 and 2014. Higher cash holdings and stronger macroeconomic conditions each increase the likelihood that a firm will make an acquisition. However, larger cash holdings decrease the sensitivity of acquisitions to macroeconomic factors, suggesting that cash holdings lower financing constraints during times when the cost of external finance is high. Announcement day abnormal returns for acquirers follow a consistent pattern: They decrease with acquirer cash holdings and with better macroeconomic conditions.

We examine impediments to liquidity provision by mutual funds to insurance companies during corporate bond fire sales. We find that financial regulation and limited capital capacity significantly affect liquidity provision. Mutual funds reduced their purchase of fire-sale bonds following regulatory changes after the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Funds facing more capital constraints (proxied by smaller cash and Treasury holdings, less liquid corporate bond investments, higher redemption risk, and less active investment styles) provide less liquidity. Mutual funds actively investing in fire-sale bonds earn significant returns from liquidity provision and demonstrate superior overall skills in corporate bond investments.

In this article, we conduct a number of benefit–cost analyses to clarify whether the establishment of ragweed in Denmark should be prevented (pure prevention) or if the damage from this invasive species should be mitigated (pure mitigation). The main impact of the establishment of ragweed in Denmark would be a substantial increase in the number of allergy cases, which we use as a measure of the physical damage from this species. As valuation methods, we use both the cost-of-illness and benefit transfer methods to quantify the total gross benefits of these two policy actions. Based on the idea of an invasion function, we identify the total and average net benefits under both prevention and mitigation and find that all are significantly positive regardless of the valuation method. Therefore, both prevention and mitigation are beneficial policy actions, but the total and average net benefits under mitigation are larger than those under prevention in all the scenarios we consider. This finding implies that the former policy action is more beneficial. Despite this result, we propose that prevention, not mitigation, may be the proper policy because of information externalities, altruistic preferences, possible catastrophic events, and ethical considerations.

We examine forward prices in a market where nonstorable inventory exacerbates the influence of seasonal and hourly variation in supply and demand, expected and unexpected, on the level and volatility of spot prices. We find strong evidence, unusual for a commodity, that the difference between contemporaneous forward and spot prices has power to forecast both the spot price change and the risk premium realized at delivery. Our evidence of a time-varying risk premium is consistent with expected hourly and seasonal variation in the needs of producers and retailers of electricity to hedge against extreme spot price decreases and increases, respectively.