Most Popular Books by David Booth

Birds of a feather flock together. For the Birds! is for the bird fan and, for that matter, anyone interested in learning about beaks and bills. Birds of prey and birds who can't fly are just some of the topics covered through poetry, factual articles, personal accounts, a graphic story and much more.

The Buffalo and the Cowbird follows the commensalism between two animal friends who have their friendship criticised by other animals. The book�s main objective is to have children think about the way they make friends, and exclude others who are different. My father, a retired artist and graphic designer has provided the illustrations to compliment the story. The words are colour-coded and relate to a separate activity section for children to develop their skills further.

Ceteris Paribus, highly productive industries should translate into high economic growth and high expected returns. To test this, we create a productivity factor using industry-level total factor productivity estimates. This factor captures the difference in returns between industries with high productivity and industries with low productivity. On average, the productivity premium contributes 0.75 to 2.41 percent per annum for the range of productivity factors we construct, from July 1963 to December 2002. To test whether productivity drives the cross-section of stock returns, we augment standard asset pricing models with this productivity factor. Our results show that i) in accordance with our hypothesis, productivity has a bigger impact on smaller firms, and that growth firms have a higher productivity beta, and ii) productivity is priced even when size and book-to-market factors are included. Finally, we examine the impact of productivity in different market structures, where the latter is measured by the Herfindahl index for each industry.

Don't Just Present. Persuade, Inspire, and Perform! Powerhouse presentations that engage and move your audience Imagine if every presentation received rapt attention and buy-in from the audience. Start getting these results with Own the Room, featuring the renowned Eloqui Method-innovative techniques that leave boring behind. Research shows a memorable presentation is a combination of stirring your audience's emotions while appealing to its intellect. This team of authors has developed techniques that tap into the persuasive, expressive aspects of presentations-employed over the past ten years by Fortune 500 companies such as TD Ameritrade, Mattel, Fisher-Price, Merrill Lynch, Siemens, and Pfizer. This effective method brings you: An award-winning actor who applies performance techniques from the stage to engage and move an audience A television and film director who demonstrates how to craft and deliver your message with authority, credibility, and authenticity A psychologist who specializes in memory and stage fright and reveals how to overcome fear and activate an audience's attention and memory Own the Room is written by a unique set of authors with the expertise perfect for creating vivid narratives. Own the Room shares how to excite your audience's emotions and intellect. And Own the Room will give you a communication toolkit to make any presentation lively, compelling, and memorable.

"Will Jay get to be a superhero?" (publisher).

Economic transformation is a continuous, long-term process of shifting labour and other resources from lower- to higher-productivity activities both within and between sectors, to facilitate aggregate labour productivity growth over a sustained period and result in more diversified and complex productive activities. Structural transformations are often started in agriculture but then go hand-in-hand with movements from agriculture to industry or higher-productivity services over time. This paper explores the factors that shape the prospects of success in economic transformation at the sector level. It provides an evidence base on the factors and conditions that drive or hold back economic transformation by focusing on examples where changes at a sector level triggered economic transformation, and the roles different actors played throughout this process.

Grade level: 1, 2, 3, 4, k, p, e, i.

This paper examines the relation between dividend smoothing and asymmetric information between managers and investors. We find that the extent of dividend smoothing are negatively related to the measures of information asymmetry. Firms with higher levels of asymmetric information have a higher propensity to smooth their dividends. These results imply that a firm's information environment affects its dividend smoothing decision.

Over the past 20 years, many African countries have experienced sustained economic growth. Few, however, have embarked on the kind of structural change, driven by rising productivity in key sectors, that has been responsible for transforming mass living standards in parts of Asia. The Developmental Regimes in Africa (DRA) project has been investigating the causes and implications of this worrying scenario. TD found that policy differences, especially different priorities with respect to agriculture and rural development, lie behind the strikingly different development outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia over the last half-century. TD and APPP converged in showing that differences in outcomes across countries are not related to different levels of compliance with standard criteria of good governance, contradicting an assumption that is still widely promoted by international development agencies. The differences among regimes that are relevant to explaining development performance are to be found at a deeper level. Our findings on regime origins add weight to the TD proposition that the policy priorities and choices of the political leadership are the key explanatory variable. often started under exceptional political leaders and ended with their death or declining capabilities. Our findings, based on comparative analysis of Southeast Asian and African experiences, suggest that the key to leadership transitions that do not interrupt economic growth is the presence of one or other of two sorts of strong institution: a governing party with a tradition of consensual decision-making or, in the special case of Thailand, a state bureaucracy that can insulate policy from changes in political leadership. Therefore, the proposition that successful development depends on having the right institutions is correct, but the typical formulation is misleading. The version that emphasises liberal-democratic norms or 'inclusive institutions' is not supported by this analysis or by the wider literature.

Discount rates are essential to applied finance, especially in setting prices for regulated utilities and valuing the liabilities of insurance companies and defined benefit pension plans. This paper reviews the basic building blocks for estimating discount rates. It also examines market risk premiums, as well as what constitutes a benchmark fair or required rate of return, in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the U.S. Federal Reserve's bond-buying program. Some of the results are disconcerting. In Canada, utilities and pension regulators responded to the crash in different ways. Utilities regulators haven't passed on the full impact of low interest rates, so that consumers face higher prices than they should whereas pension regulators have done the opposite, and forced some contributors to pay more. In both cases this is opposite to the desired effect of monetary policy which is to stimulate aggregate demand. A comprehensive survey of global finance professionals carried out last year provides some clues as to where adjustments are needed. In the U.S., the average equity market required return was estimated at 8.0 per cent; Canada's is 7.40 per cent, due to the lower market risk premium and the lower risk-free rate. This paper adds a wealth of historic and survey data to conclude that the ideal base long-term interest rate used in risk premium models should be 4.0 per cent, producing an overall expected market return of 9-10.0 per cent. The same data indicate that allowed returns to utilities are currently too high, while the use of current bond yields in solvency valuations of pension plans and life insurers is unhelpful unless there is a realistic expectation that the plans will soon be terminated.