Lynda de la Viña

Logistic Regression Analysis of Cruise Vacation Market Potential: Demographic and Trip Attribute Perception Factors

This article describes the demographic and trip attribute factors of potential cruise passengers based on a nationwide sample of persons who previously requested travel information for tourist destinations in South Texas from regional convention and visitors bureaus. The analysis used logistic regression modeling. The key factors in determining the propensity to choose a cruise vacation are marital status, income, previous cruise vacation experience, cost, the duration of the cruise, visiting new destinations, and the availability of a precruise or postcruise package. Factors that were not found to be statistically significant included the typical number of pleasure trips per year, the itinerary, direct air flights to the departure city, accessibility from the airport to the ship, gender, age, educational attainment, and number of children in the household.

What's Distinctive about Growth-Oriented Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries?

Entrepreneurship in emerging markets is distinctive from that practiced in more developed countries. Better understanding these distinctions is critical to private sector development in developing countries. Of particular interest are new and growth-oriented enterprises, which have a greater capacity to create sustainable economic growth than microenterprises or long-established SMEs with limited growth prospects. The distinctions between growth-oriented entrepreneurs in developing and developed markets are rooted in the inefficiency of markets in many developing countries, but the response of entrepreneurs to these inefficiencies is often surprising and counterintuitive. These findings call into question the policy approaches to entrepreneurship development often advocated. While noting the possible lack of correlation between business environment and levels of growth-oriented entrepreneurship, we focus on three key distinctions: opportunity, financial resources, and apprenticeship and human resources. These distinctions suggest a rich research and policy reform agenda.

The impact of gambling on personal bankruptcy rates

Both access to casino gambling and the personal bankruptcy rate have risen substantially in recent years. A reported correlation between greater access to gambling facilities and state and county bankruptcy rates suggests the increased availability of gambling might be an important factor explaining the increased national bankruptcy rate. A correlation between convenient access to gambling and high bankruptcy rates might also occur if distressed communities are more receptive to the introduction of casinos than prosperous communities. This paper utilizes panel data to investigate the impact of the

Technological Progress with Segmented Labor Markets

It is argued here that with segmented labor markets, all types of technological progress in the fixed wage organized sector always hurts the unorganized or informal workers. However, such technical progress in the informal sector always helps the informal workers. This result is independent of the factor intensity ranking between the sectors.

US Equity Crowdfunding: A Review of Current Legislation and A Conceptual Model of the Implications for Equity Funding

Recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) guidelines provide a regulatory framework for Title II of the Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups (JOBS) Act of 2012, that legalised interstate equity crowdfunding (ECF) in the USA. Concurrently, 18 states have passed legislation or regulations to allow intrastate ECF. Yet, the literature has not fully addressed what this nascent funding mechanism will offer to investors and those seeking funding for entrepreneurial projects in the USA. This article reviews current US legislation and the federal and state laws as they pertain to ECF. It also discusses the anticipated implications of ECF, provides a conceptual model that demonstrates how crowdfunding can change the traditional equity-financing continuum and discusses externalities that may emanate from implementation of this relatively new means of raising capital.

On information value and mean-preserving transformations

The methods of defining and evaluating evolution of information in economic systems are often based on abstract measure-theoretic mean-preserving transformations (MPTs), also known as second-order stochastic dominance. This study first points out that such abstract MPTs have distributional equivalents and then shows that the distributional MPTs often provide analytical settings that are more accessible than those provided by their measure-theoretic analogs. It is shown that a number of abstract results on information value could be readily obtained via the distributional MPTs. The focus is on the central issue of negative value for information.