Hidden in Plain Sight, Tiny Mall Kiosks Make a Surprisingly Big Impact

Typically bound by short-term leases, displaying products made by others, and run by first-time entrepreneurs with limited capital, shopping mall carts and kiosks have long been considered an unsophisticated small-business underclass. More recently, however, these small-footprint retailers have come to be seen as possessing surprising potential.

“We’d been in business five years at one of our Atlanta kiosks,” said Taki Skouras, chief executive of Cellairis, which sells chargers, batteries, decorative cases and other accessories for wireless devices. “A lady bought something and asked, ‘Hey, are you guys going to be here after the holidays?’ We just celebrated our 13th anniversary at that location.”

Today, employing a corporate staff of 130, manufacturing 70 percent of its 60,000 distinct products and shipping from nine warehouses, Cellairis has 720 retail locations. Most are no bigger than 150 or 200 square feet, but systemwide revenue now exceeds $350 million a year. For Cellairis and others, kiosks have become a very big business.

“Ten to 15 years ago, this was an opportunity for someone to take in a million dollars,” said Patricia Norins, chief executive and publisher of Specialty Retail Report, which covers the 50,000 carts, kiosks and automated vending locations in the nation’s more than 2,300 malls. “Now, I think you could point to 50 who are at least $10 million in annual sales and maybe five who are doing upwards of $100 million.” Ms. Norins is no stranger to the middle of a mall. In the 1970s, her parents sold Christmas ornaments from atop four folding tables pushed together in malls in New Jersey and on Long Island. Eventually, they expanded to 300 malls.

Much has changed since 4-foot-by-8-foot carts with wagon wheels — known as retail merchandising units, or R.M.U.’s — had their debut some four decades ago. Realizing the value of their mini-merchants, malls installed electrical outlets and better lighting in the middle of their shopping concourses. More recently, Wi-Fi-enhanced laptops and tablets have enabled merchants to maximize their tiny selling spaces. Thanks to Square and other credit card swiping apps, many operators display more merchandise where a countertop register once sat. Others use an iPad to showcase merchandise they do not have room to stock, and they close sales remotely, with real-time instructions to the warehouse to ship the goods to the buyer’s home.

But several advantages of specialty retailing remain constant and help explain the $8 billion in annual mall sales that Ms. Norins attributes to this often-overlooked venue.

“We call it 360-degree retail,” said Ted Kaminski, senior vice president of specialty leasing for The Westfield Group, owner of 47 malls in America and 104 around the world. “It’s your product, your presentation, your service exposed on all sides.”

Whereas conventional mall stores need window displays to coax customers across their thresholds, carts and kiosks are retailing islands awash in a constant flow of potential customers. “That’s the best advertising money can buy,” said Mosin Khan, vice president of operations at S.h.a.p.e.s Brow Bar, an eyebrow threading alternative to waxing and plucking. “This saves us thousands of dollars on advertising. We don’t send any mailers to houses. We just count on the people who come to the mall.”

Starting with a cart in a Chicago mall in 2004, S.h.a.p.e.s effectively road-tested the brow treatment offered by Mr. Khan’s wife in her full-service Chicago salon. And it did so cheaply, paying only $2,100 in monthly rent. Success with a second cart led to a kiosk the next year, which increased rent to $4,600 — still about half of the cost of an in-line store. Mr. Khan points to the added savings on construction: $25,000 to $30,000 for a kiosk versus a minimum of $100,000 to build out a store. Moreover, operating in what malls call “temporary leasing spaces” also lowers labor costs. Most carts can be run by a single employee per shift. Kiosks typically position two employees inside the structure.

Mr. Kaminski said carts and kiosks served as retail incubators, noting: “We often incubate a tenant from an R.M.U. to a kiosk — and sometimes the progression is from kiosk to in-line store.” But even when they make the leap into stores, many cart and kiosk merchants maintain their roots. S.h.a.p.e.s now has some two dozen full-fledged stores that offer more chairs, additional services and a more private experience — an important consideration, especially for the male customers who account for nearly 10 percent of the business. But the company also has 42 kiosks, some of which build the brand and send overflow business to a nearby store in the same mall. Mr. Khan plans to expand mostly through franchisee-run kiosks, which are made in Asia for as little as $5,000 apiece. “One of my selling points to franchisees,” he said, “is I can put you in business for as little as $30,000.”

Under Pressure, China Measures Its Impact in Myanmar

China’s ambition of transporting energy through the Indian Ocean and across the mountains of Myanmar seems close to fulfillment. Natural gas is scheduled to start flowing in July from wells deep in the Bay of Bengal through a 500-mile pipeline. Oil will run in a parallel pipe at the end of the year.

But for China, the cost of the pipelines has been far greater than the several billion dollars that the China National Petroleum Corporation, China’s energy giant, has spent on construction. With its projects challenged more than ever by activists energized by Myanmar’s democratic opening, China has been trying to repair its tarnished reputation among residents here, and in the country at large.

Farmers and fishermen in this remote coastal region — who made little headway while objecting to lost lands and diminished catches under Myanmar’s repressive military junta — are winning some concessions. In central Myanmar, monks have joined with ancestral landholders to stop a Chinese-led conglomerate from leveling a fabled mountain embedded with copper.

And last week, in a new ominous sign for the Chinese, guerrillas of the Shan State Army attacked a compound belonging to the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, a partner with the Chinese oil company, not far from the pipeline and close to China’s border.

In response to the broad opposition, Beijing has ordered secretive state-owned Chinese companies to do something they have rarely done before: publicly embrace Western-style corporate social responsibility practices and act humbly toward the people who live near their vaunted projects.

The grass-roots protests against Chinese projects disturb Beijing because they come amid a scramble for influence in Myanmar between China and the United States.

Official visits give a glimpse of the diplomatic jockeying. President Thein Sein of Myanmar, who heads the quasi-civilian government, will visit the White House on Monday in what will be the first encounter in Washington between an American president and a leader of the country formerly known as Burma, since 1966.

A member of the military junta that China backed for decades, Mr. Thein Sein met President Obama in November during what was the first visit by a sitting American president to Myanmar. Mr. Thein Sein has visited China twice in the past six months. The leader of the opposition, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was at the White House earlier this year and is expected in Beijing soon.

“It is in China’s self interest to think about the impact of their investments,” said Thant Myint-U, a Myanmar historian and author of “Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia.” “In the long term, it is difficult to see a Myanmar where China is not important. But there is a chance that China will no longer be the dominant actor in Myanmar, and that is worrying for some people in China.”

That concern has prompted Chinese officials, worried about losing Myanmar to the Americans, to push back. When a veteran Chinese diplomat, Wang Yingfan, was appointed several months ago as special envoy to Myanmar, he immediately flew there and spoke about the social obligations of Chinese state-run corporations.

And Gao Mingbo, the head of the political section at the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, said: “The companies must retain the support of the local communities. That has been the consistent message of the embassy: to be open, to be engaged.”

He created the embassy’s Facebook page; although Facebook is blocked in China, it is a tool that Chinese officials in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital and main city, are using to reach citizens.

“If you don’t walk the walk and just talk the talk, you won’t win the hearts and minds of the local people,” Mr. Gao said.

Whether China’s outreach efforts will quell anti-China protests is an open question.

Wai Moe contributed reporting.

Wealth Matters: Technology’s Impact on the Value of Financial Advice

But is the technology good enough to replace guidance from financial advisers? Or is technology actually good for advisers because they can use it to do their jobs better?

Several new reports look at what technology will mean for an adviser, who, at his or her best, protects people from their worst investment ideas. And that brings up a corollary question: What will this trend, and enormous investment, in technology mean for the clients, the people whose money is at stake?

It seems almost heretical to propose that technology will not make an existing service better. But after reading the reports and talking to advisers who have embraced technology, I was not sure that this emphasis was going to be better for clients.

The report from Accenture looked at how younger clients sought relationships through technology and how advisers had to be available to provide it.

“When we talk to firms, they think social media is a new thing, and they’re trying to control the risk of it,” said Alex Pigliucci, global managing director of the wealth and asset management business at Accenture. “I see these tools as an advantage today. They’re not something to plan for in the next five to 10 years.”

“The Out-of-Sync Advisor,” a report by Deloitte, imagined technology bringing clients who were managing their own money back to advisers and then allowing those advisers to give people with a couple of hundred thousand dollars the type of high-quality advice reserved for people with hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ed Tracy, leader of the wealth management and private banking practice at Deloitte, said this would be possible only if all the clients’ financial information was already in the system so the advisers could spend their time together talking about the clients’ goals.

Fidelity’s annual broker and adviser sentiment index, released late last year, tried to put a dollar amount on all of this: technology-adept advisers who were focused on clients in their 30s and 40s managed, on average, $8 million more than colleagues focused on baby boomers. Their clients also had slightly larger accounts. (Not in the data was how technology contributed directly to this.)

But is there any practical value to investors in this push for more technology? In some areas, yes. In others, it remains to be seen.

Patrick O’Connor, senior vice president for wealth, retirement, portfolio solutions at Raymond James, said some of the best technological innovations reminded him of a recent visit to his new dentist.

Instead of pointing to a murky X-ray and telling him to floss, his dentist wheeled around a monitor that showed his teeth — and the problems with them — from various angles. A bit more brushing here and flossing there, and the image changed to show healthier teeth.

“She was giving me more ownership of my teeth,” Mr. O’Connor said. “I’ve been much more diligent about flossing and paying attention to those areas. Before, I would have ignored her. I’d been lectured to for 10 years.”

Technology, he said, can do much the same thing for investors, showing them how they are doing and the consequences of their spending and saving. The technology also becomes the bearer of bad news, not the adviser. “Instead of saying, ‘Sorry you’re in the red,’ I become the facilitator in getting you from the red to the green,” he said.

And technology can help clients reduce mundane and time-consuming tasks and increase the amount of time they can talk about the things that matter most to them.

“If someone had my data, understood my goals, had buckets in my portfolio and I knew if I was on track or off track and they only spent three hours a year with me, I’d feel a lot better than I would with someone I sat down with who said, ‘Tell me what’s going on,’ ” Mr. Tracy said.

Budget Cuts’ Impact May Be Difficult to See Right Away

Late Friday night, Mr. Obama formally triggered spending cuts that will reach across the breadth of the federal government after he failed to persuade Congressional Republicans to replace them with a mix of cuts and tax increases.

In a 70-page report to Congress accompanying the order and detailing the reductions — agency by agency and program by program — Jeffrey D. Zients, Mr. Obama’s budget director, called them “deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions.”

But even as the cuts become official, some of the immediate impact is difficult to see.

The process of trimming government budgets is slow and cumbersome, involving lengthy notifications to unions about temporary furloughs, reductions in overtime pay and cuts in grant financing to state and local programs. Less federal money will, over time, mean fewer government contracts with private companies. Reduced overtime for airport security checkpoint officers will make lines longer, eventually.

And so as the first weekend began for the new, slimmer government, little of that is evident yet.

Letters to governors, informing them of the smaller grants are beginning to go out, officials said. Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, wrote to Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio: “You can expect reductions totaling approximately $35 million,” helpfully putting the amount in a bold type.

The Air Force Thunderbirds — the elite team of F-16 pilots who perform tricks at air shows — announced on its Web site that all of its shows have been canceled starting April 1. The last show will be in Titusville, Fla., on March 23.

Still, it will take some time, officials acknowledged, before the cuts begin to make life more difficult for teachers, defense contractors, Head Start students, border patrol agents or others who rely on the largess of the federal government.

Emerging from an Oval Office meeting on Friday with the lawmakers, the president called the cuts “just dumb.” He said they would slow the economic recovery and spoke emotionally about their impact on people who would feel the consequences of government layoffs and disruptions in public services.

“I don’t anticipate a huge financial crisis, but people are going to be hurt,” Mr. Obama said during a 35-minute news conference at the White House, in which he acknowledged that his campaign of highlighting fallout from the cuts had failed to persuade Republicans to consider tax increases as part of a package to avert the $85 billion in reductions over the next seven months.

But the president and his Republican adversaries said they would not carry the fight over the cuts into a coming legislative effort to finance the government through Sept. 30, essentially declaring a cease-fire in the budget wars that have dominated Washington since 2011.

The showdown in December over the so-called fiscal cliff yielded $620 billion in tax increases over 10 years. The across-the-board spending cuts now going into force will cut deficits an additional $1.2 trillion.

Both sides indicated that for now, that may be enough — a fiscal peace through political exhaustion. The two parties are now expected to move to a broader argument over the right level of taxes and spending as they seek to develop a new budget for the coming year and beyond. Republicans said they welcomed a return to a more orderly budget process but warned they would not give in on their basic principles.

“I will not be part of any back-room deal, and I will absolutely not agree to increase taxes,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

After a public relations blitz lasting weeks that was aimed at stopping the cuts, Mr. Obama said he was prepared to extend a stopgap law that finances the government to March 27 if Republicans stuck to an agreement worked out in 2011 about the level of federal spending. The decision will most likely allow the across-the-board spending reductions to remain in place for months if not years.

White House officials and Senate Democrats had considered making one last stand around the March 27 deadline, declaring the Senate would not pass another government spending plan unless it undid the across-the-board cuts. But Senate Democrats were leery. The first furloughs are likely to hit in April, and the Democrats feared that little political pressure would have built on Republicans before the current stopgap spending law expired.

In his weekly address on Saturday morning, the president acknowledged that the reductions would not affect everyone equally.

“While not everyone will feel the pain of these cuts right away, the pain will be real,” Mr. Obama said. “Many middle-class families will have their lives disrupted in a significant way.”

And heading into the weekend, some officials seemed eager to offer reassurance that government would continue to function despite the deep cuts.

While Leon E. Panetta, who just left the job of defense secretary, had thundered about the critical risk to national security — and lamented what he viewed as a shift of Washington’s political class away from good governance — his successor, Chuck Hagel, spoke in more conciliatory terms.

The Impact of Different Conventions for Projecting Future Damages, Part I

When calculating damages for future periods ? such as for lost profits, loss of income in wrongful death cases, etc. ? experts are often charged with expressing an opinion as to what would happen in the future but for the wrongful act. These projections typically rely upon either industry trends or on the historical operating results of the injured party. Four of the most commonly used projection conventions when relying upon the operating results of the injured party are: the mean, the median, exponential smoothing and regression analysis. This blog post will define each of these conventions and discuss the pros and cons of each.

The Impact of Different Conventions for Projecting Future Damages, Part I

When calculating damages for future periods ? such as for lost profits, loss of income in wrongful death cases, etc. ? experts are often charged with expressing an opinion as to what would happen in the future but for the wrongful act. These projections typically rely upon either industry trends or on the historical operating results of the injured party. Four of the most commonly used projection conventions when relying upon the operating results of the injured party are: the mean, the median, exponential smoothing and regression analysis. This blog post will define each of these conventions and discuss the pros and cons of each.

DealBook: The Impact of the Latest Insider Trading Convictions

Seth Wenig/Associated PressMathew Martoma, center, the latest alumnus of SAC Capital Advisors to be accused of breaking the law.

The convictions of Anthony Chiasson and Todd Newman in a lucrative insider trading case may well send a message to Mathew Martoma, the former SAC Capital portfolio manager, about the risks he runs if he fights similar charges filed against him.

The potential sentences of more than 10 years in prison that the two defendants face puts even more pressure on Mr. Martoma to cooperate in the government’s apparent quest to get his former boss, Steven A. Cohen, the founder of SAC. (Mr. Cohen has not been accused of wrongdoing, and his spokesman has said that Mr. Cohen has acted appropriately.)

The case against Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman was a classic insider trading prosecution built on the testimony of analysts at their hedge funds who had confessed to receiving confidential information about Dell and Nvidia and then passing it on. The government did not have recordings of the defendants discussing the companies, the type of evidence that proved so devastating in other recent cases.

The cooperators, Spyridon Adondakis and Jesse Tortora, testified that they gave the information to their bosses, Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman, who understood that it was confidential and reaped a total of more than $70 million in profits.

The defense strategy was simple: Accuse the cooperators of lying about their bosses by making deals to save their own skins. Mr. Adondakis was described by the defense as an “easy, practiced liar,” while Mr. Tortora was assailed as someone who “cannot and should not be trusted.”

The defendants called just two witnesses and rested their defense case after just a few minutes. Because the case rode on the credibility of the cooperators, Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman argued they were not aware that their underlings were passing on inside information.

Louis Lanzano/Associated PressTodd Newman was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy in an insider trading case.Louis Lanzano/Associated PressAnthony Chiasson was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy in an insider trading case.

In addition to the securities fraud charges, the jury convicted the two defendants of conspiracy based on the wider circle of tippers and recipients who passed around confidential information. Although the two men did not deal with each other directly, the government claimed that they were part of a larger agreement to trade on inside information.

The conspiracy conviction may prove especially devastating to Mr. Newman. By far, the largest trade was made by Mr. Chiasson’s firm in Dell right before a negative earnings announcement in August 2008 that netted $53 million in profits. Because the jury found they were members of the same conspiracy, Mr. Chiasson’s gains are attributable to Mr. Newman, even if he was unaware of the trading.

The federal sentencing guidelines base much of the recommended sentence on the amount of the defendants’ gains or losses avoided from the insider trading. Under the guidelines, Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman face a term of over 10 years in federal prison based on the benefits reaped from the transactions.

Another problem the defendants face is that Judge Richard J. Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan will decide their sentences. He has generally followed the recommended sentence in other cases, meting out substantial prison terms for insider trading.

For example, he sentenced Zvi Goffer to 10 years for his role in organizing a group of insider traders with ties to Galleon Group for trading that resulted in profits of as much as $20 million. At the sentencing hearing, Judge Sullivan noted that Mr. Goffer fought the charges by going to trial and only accepted responsibility after his conviction.

The judge told Mr. Goffer, “You decided to gamble with your future, and you lost.” That does not bode well for Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman, who have maintained their innocence and are unlikely to express contrition.

In 2010, Judge Sullivan imposed a six-year prison term on Joseph Contorinis, a former Jefferies Group fund manager, after his conviction for receiving tips in a case that also relied on the testimony of a cooperating witness. The profits were $7 million, about 10 percent of what Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman were accused of making on their trades.

It would not be a surprise for Judge Sullivan to hand down significant sentences near the 11 years Raj Rajaratnam received. His trading produced profits of approximately $63 million, similar to those realized by Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman, so the government is likely to argue that case may serve as a guidepost for determining their punishment.

The defendants can be expected to appeal their convictions. Two likely challenges will be to the sufficiency of the evidence of the conspiracy and to limitations the court placed on expert testimony about the trading at their hedge funds to show that the transactions were unlikely to have been based on inside information.

One ray of hope for them is the recent decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit allowing Rajat Gupta, convicted of tipping Mr. Rajaratnam, to remain free on bail while his case is on appeal.

Although the issues are different, Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman can point to that decision as a basis to allow them to avoid having to report to prison until their appeals are decided, which probably won’t happen until 2014.

Mr. Martoma was charged with trading on inside information about a clinical drug trial that the government claims produced profits and losses avoided for SAC of more than $270 million.

The charges depend almost entirely on the testimony of Dr. Sidney Gilman, a prominent neurologist who reached a nonprosecution agreement with prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation.

As in the case of Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman, the defense in Mr. Martoma’s case will assail Dr. Gilman’s credibility based on the favorable deal he received. But undermining his testimony may be more difficult because he did not trade on the information and is not a Wall Street insider who regularly dealt in financial information.

Prosecutors may be able to present Dr. Gilman as someone who got “played” by a sophisticated hedge fund trader. If a jury was willing to convict based on the testimony of witnesses like Mr. Adondakis and Mr. Tortora, there is a reasonably good chance Dr. Gilman’s testimony will be sufficiently believable to support a conviction of Mr. Martoma.

A lawyer for Mr. Martoma has said that he expects his client to be exonerated.

The recommended sentence he would face if convicted starts at about 15 years, and even a sympathetic judge is likely to be swayed by the outsize benefits produced by the trading in deciding the punishment.

Whether Mr. Martoma will try to make a deal remains to be seen, and it is unclear what information he might provide about Mr. Cohen that would entice prosecutors into a favorable plea bargain. The convictions of Mr. Chiasson and Mr. Newman are unlikely to bolster Mr. Martoma’s confidence that he can beat the charges he is facing.

The Impact of Different Conventions for Projecting Future Damages, Part II

The valuation of damages is designed to put the harmed party back into the same economic position that would have existed if the harm had not occurred. The most difficult part of that equation is to project the economic conditions one would have expected without the harm. An analysis of historical results is often used to assist in making that forecast. In my last blog post, I discussed the pros and cons of four of the most commonly used methods to analyze a series of events, namely the mean, the median, exponential smoothing and regression analysis. This post will present two examples and show how each method impacts the damages calculation under each.

The Impact of Different Conventions for Projecting Future Damages, Part I

When calculating damages for future periods ? such as for lost profits, loss of income in wrongful death cases, etc. ? experts are often charged with expressing an opinion as to what would happen in the future but for the wrongful act. These projections typically rely upon either industry trends or on the historical operating results of the injured party. Four of the most commonly used projection conventions when relying upon the operating results of the injured party are: the mean, the median, exponential smoothing and regression analysis. This blog post will define each of these conventions and discuss the pros and cons of each.

Brunt of Business Impact Yet to Come

Financial markets, department stores and many big companies on the East Coast announced plans to close Tuesday for the second day in a row. Unlike past hurricanes which blew through in a day or two, Hurricane Sandy’s fallout will be felt for much of the week, broadening the economic fallout.

Overall, total economic losses from the storm could be $10 billion to $20 billion, according to an analysis by Eqecat, a firm that performs catastrophe risk modeling for the insurance industry and government.

“We think it’s going to be big,” said Tom Larsen, senior vice president and product architect at Equecat, suggesting the toll could fall somewhere between that of Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Irene last year.

Besides the halt in both electronic and floor trading in virtually all Wall Street financial markets Monday and Tuesday, several prominent companies also delayed scheduled announcements.

Pfizer, the big drug maker, put off its third-quarter earnings report until Thursday, while Thomson Reuters and NRG Energy delayed their reports until Friday.

Google was forced to cancel Monday’s event to unveil a new smartphone, the Nexus 4, as well as several new tablets, all aimed at the holiday shopping season. Facebook also called off an event, showcasing its new Facebook Gifts platform, that had been set to take place at F. A. O. Schwarz in Manhattan on Thursday.

Major retailers began closing New York stores on Sunday afternoon. Saks Fifth Avenue boarded up its flagship store in Manhattan, a striking image for a retailer known for its high-fashion windows.

“We have taken the necessary precautions in each store to protect our property and limit damage,” a spokeswoman, Julia Bentley, wrote in an e-mail. Saks closed stores in nine other locations from Maryland to Boston.

On Monday, about 130 of the 850 Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s stores nationwide were closed, said Jim Sluzewski, a spokesman.

“We’re not selling generators or bottled water or any of those sorts of items, so given that much of what we sell is discretionary, it’s not as big of an issue for our customers,” he said.

Oliver Chen, an analyst for Citi, wrote in a research note that he expected traffic to retailers could be down as much as 40 percent for the week in impacted areas, and November comparable-store sales could be hit by as much as 2 percent to 3 percent. However, he said, stores that sell emergency supplies, food and other staples should see an uptick in traffic and sales.

The business effects of the storm only added to the uncertainty pervading markets, economists said, with investors and executives already worried by the impending “fiscal cliff” in Washington as well as continuing economic problems in Europe and slowing growth in Asia.

For now, economists were playing down the long-term impact from the storm, even if it results in billions of dollars in property damage from the high winds and lashing rain.

In the short term, however, powerful storms disrupt consumer spending and can cause sharp month-to-month swings in economic data, said Christopher D. Carroll, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University who has analyzed the impact of weather events for the Federal Reserve.

“It is something that serious analysts pay attention to, and you can find evidence that it does have an impact on the monthly data,” Mr. Carroll said.

Eventually, most spending or other activity is simply pushed forward, a phenomenon known in economics as intertemporal substitution. For example, since the New York Stock Exchange is closed on Monday and, as seems likely, on Tuesday, volume will probably rise on Wednesday and Thursday when trading resumes.

The most powerful hurricanes that come along once or twice a decade — like Katrina or Andrew — can actually boost economic growth in the short-term, since the value of what is rebuilt is often more than that is replaced.

“It’s a problematic aspect of economics,” said Mr. Carroll. “If there’s a lot of damage and stuff gets destroyed, like in Katrina, that doesn’t show up in the calculation of gross domestic product. However, the rebuilt house does.”

The Impact of Different Conventions for Projecting Future Damages, Part I

When calculating damages for future periods ? such as for lost profits, loss of income in wrongful death cases, etc. ? experts are often charged with expressing an opinion as to what would happen in the future but for the wrongful act. These projections typically rely upon either industry trends or on the historical operating results of the injured party. Four of the most commonly used projection conventions when relying upon the operating results of the injured party are: the mean, the median, exponential smoothing and regression analysis. This blog post will define each of these conventions and discuss the pros and cons of each.

The Impact of Different Conventions for Projecting Future Damages, Part I

When calculating damages for future periods ? such as for lost profits, loss of income in wrongful death cases, etc. ? experts are often charged with expressing an opinion as to what would happen in the future but for the wrongful act. These projections typically rely upon either industry trends or on the historical operating results of the injured party. Four of the most commonly used projection conventions when relying upon the operating results of the injured party are: the mean, the median, exponential smoothing and regression analysis. This blog post will define each of these conventions and discuss the pros and cons of each.

The Impact of Different Conventions for Projecting Future Damages, Part I

When calculating damages for future periods ? such as for lost profits, loss of income in wrongful death cases, etc. ? experts are often charged with expressing an opinion as to what would happen in the future but for the wrongful act. These projections typically rely upon either industry trends or on the historical operating results of the injured party. Four of the most commonly used projection conventions when relying upon the operating results of the injured party are: the mean, the median, exponential smoothing and regression analysis. This blog post will define each of these conventions and discuss the pros and cons of each.