Marketing as Diffusion in a Single Population

The paper examines the optimal advertising policy for a profit-maximizing firm in a single market area. The results are first derived for a spaceless market, indicating the steady-state equilibrium advertising policy and market size. The model is then extended to account for the costs of overcoming distance. It is shown that there is an outward limit to marketing, and that this distance is dependent on the market price and retirement rate of the good and the interest rate. The minimal price necessary for covering any given distance is derived, along with the minimal advertising effort necessary to reach the steady-state market size. It is shown that the steady-state market size, advertising policy, and switching time are all monotonic functions of distance.     

Outmigration from California: The Role of Migrant Selectivity

Frey (1995) noted that California generated two, separate outmigration streams. The first stream was composed of “negatively selected” migrants, or those with low education and low income levels. These migrants usually selected destinations in neighboring states such as Washington, Oregon, or Colorado. The second stream was more typical of interstate migration flows. Migrants were typically better educated, had higher incomes and destinations that were more national in scope (positively selected). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the income selectivity of outmigrants from California. It was hypothesized that poorly educated migrants are negatively self-selective and the better educated would be positively self-selective. Using data derived from the 1990 PUMS data file, this paper studies the effects of expected wage differentials in determining the selectivity of outmigrants from California. Self-selectivity is accounted for in the modeling process via a two-stage estimation procedure, since estimated returns to migration based on a comparison of individual migrants may be biased due to self-selection. Results reveal no significant or systematic selectivity of the better educated migrants, while self-selection was more important among the poorly educated nonmigrants.     

Mercantile Transformations: Understanding the State,Global Debt and Philippine Agriculture

This paper examines an important continuity in the political economy of the Philippines: the interplay between domestic merchant capitalists and the state over the role of the state in the Philippine economy. During the Marcos regime, this interplay increasingly took the form of competition between state mercantile interests and ‘private’ merchant interests. This competition is still being played out. To better understand the nature of the competition, consideration is focused on two essential contemporary facts: the Philippines has a major external debt crisis and the Philippines, still predominantly an agrarian country, suffers from stagnant productivity growth and enduring rural poverty. While the Philippine external debt problem can be attributed in significant part to various international hegemonic interests, the analysis concludes that the characteristics of the crisis primarily reflect changing state/class/economy configurations within the Philippines. These same configurations, in turn, significantly influence the implications of the external debt crisis on Philippine agriculture.     

Changing roles,changing rules: procedural development and difference in Australian State upper houses

The status and potential of Australian State upper houses have been enhanced, to a greater or lesser degree from State to State, by electoral system change over the past half century. The purpose of this article is to determine the extent to which those changes have been accompanied by efforts on the part of the upper houses to improve performance of their core functions of review of legislation and scrutiny of government. The focus is the parliamentary procedures that facilitate performance of these functions. As well as surveying innovation in, and use of, relevant parliamentary procedures in the five upper houses, the article explains differential outcomes in innovation and effectiveness across the States in terms of the consequences of choice of electoral system and size of upper house membership.     

Enlightened histories: civilization,war and the Scottish enlightenment

The concept of civil society continues to generate considerable interest, while the concept of civilization attracts comparatively little attention. This has led to a tendency to oversimplify the relationship between civil societies and militarily powerful sovereign states. Civil societies, it is often argued, are those societies that have emerged from a successful process of domestic pacification and effective control of state power. In this paper, it will be argued that some prominent Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed theories of civilization grounded in more complex historical narratives, in which the accomplishments of civil society were tied to the achievement of state sovereignty based on the successful monopoly of military might. The purpose of this paper is to trace the role of state sovereignty and military monopolization, and the consequent prominence given to the practice of war, in the “historical” theories of civilization articulated by David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.     

Protest, Scale, and Publicity: The FBI and the H Rap Brown Act

This paper deals with issues of political dissent and the geography of state power through the lens of a particular law and its deployment by the US state in the context of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota by American Indian Movement activists and local residents. I explore how the state responded to the highly mediated nature of the Wounded Knee occupation through tactics that minimized the visibility of its efforts to contain the protest. These efforts, I argue, also constituted a broader politics of scale. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the intersection of protest, scale and publicity. I then use the empirical example of the H Rap Brown Act to show how these dynamics were being reworked in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, I place the emergence of the H Rap Brown Act within a context of changing geographies of race and state power, more specifically as they were articulated around the unrest that was engulfing American cities. I then analyze how the law was deployed by the state during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what the case of the H Rap Brown Act has to tell us more broadly about our theoretical understandings of the geographies of public protest.