Developing a Marketing Strategy for Nonprofit Organizations: An Exploratory Study

Nonprofit organizations have grown tremendously in the last three decades. With this growth has come a greater interest from the nonprofit sector in the importance of marketing. Nonprofits did not apply marketing techniques until 1960–1970, but it is now a well accepted practice. Traditional marketing strategies do not work for nonprofit organizations, and this study proposes the development of a new marketing strategy specifically for this sector. Through the use of interviews and surveys, the authors examine issues of marketing strategy that are distinct for nonprofits. Unlike previous studies, this study examines these issues from the viewpoint of the nonprofit organization. The perception of marketing is different in nonprofit organizations, and the strategic implications of this finding are discussed.     

Three types of organizational boundary spanning: Predicting CSR policy extensiveness among global consumer products companies

As part of the rise of a worldwide corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, companies have increasingly incorporated social and environmental concerns into their policies. This paper examines the extensiveness of these policies, proposing that an underappreciated contributor is the degree of organizational boundary spanning. The paper is novel in integrating multiple types of boundary spanning into a single empirical framework, including product, sub‐unit, and national boundary spanning. The paper adds complexity to the literature by theorizing that different types of boundary spanning associate with CSR policy extensiveness in different issue areas. The results show that product spanning associates with CSR policy extensiveness in the area of consumers, sub‐unit spanning in the areas of workers, and nation‐state spanning in all issue areas. A unique, comprehensive, and global data set of 2,714 prominent consumer goods companies in the GoodGuide database underpins these findings.     

TESTING THE FISHERIAN HYPOTHESIS: SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES AND FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE UK

The relationship between common stock returns and actual, expected and unexpected inflation has been subject to considerable scrutiny recently. The objectives of this paper are threefold. First, it is suggested that the Fisherian hypothesis of anticipated stock market returns has been subjected to inappropriate tests in some previous work. Second, the Fisherian hypothesis is developed into an ex post form which is suitable for estimation and which will avoid the difficulties in previous work. Thirdly, estimates of the model are reported using UK data which give some support to the hypothesis.     

Buyer information and the hedonic: The impact of a seller disclosure on the implicit price for airport noise

Revealed preference methods like the hedonic model generally assume economic agents have access to publicly available information and use it effectively. In the housing market, the recent proliferation of seller disclosure laws suggests that policymakers perceive buyers to be less than “fully informed,” presumably since they face higher information acquisition costs than sellers. The introduction of an airport noise disclosure in the residential housing market surrounding the Raleigh–Durham International Airport is used as a quasi-random experiment to analyze the impact of this type of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers on housing prices. The results from a regression analysis that controls for potential spatial and temporal confounders, suggest that the airport noise disclosure reduced the value of houses most heavily impacted by airport noise by 2.9 percent. This represents approximately a 37 percentage point increase in the implicit price of airport noise. The results provide evidence that publicly available information, such as that available for airport noise, may not be adequately considered by all buyers. They also suggest that the information environment should be carefully considered when using housing data and the hedonic model to value urban amenities and disamenities.     

Are international accounting standards more credit relevant than domestic standards?

We examine whether the credit relevance of financial statements, defined as the ability of accounting numbers to explain credit ratings, is higher after firms are required to report under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). We find an improvement in credit relevance for firms in 17 countries after mandatory IFRS reporting is introduced in 2005; this increase is higher than that reported for a matched sample of US firms. The increase in credit relevance is particularly pronounced for higher risk speculative-grade issuers, where accounting information is predicted to be more important; and for IFRS adopters with large first-time reconciliations, where the impact of IFRS is expected to be greater. These tests provide reassurance that the overall enhancement in estimated credit relevance is driven by accounting changes related to IFRS adoption. Our results suggest that credit rating analysts’ views of economic fundamentals are more closely aligned with IFRS numbers, and that analysts anticipate at least some of the effects of the IFRS transition.     

Beggar‐Thy‐Neighbour Exchange Rate Regime Misadvice from Misapplications of Mundell (1961) and the Remedy

Economists invoke Mundell (1961 ) in arguing for the general policy of a flexible exchange rate regime as a means of restoring equilibria after shocks. But there is a discrepancy between the intent of the general policy and attempts at its implementation as identified by specific changes in exchange rates. When we assemble the set of specific changes called for by distinct economists operating as advocates for individual countries, these are uniformly in the form of beggar‐thy‐neighbour advice – i.e. travesties of objectively identifying disequilibria and a menace to international cooperation and peace. This paper traces the unintended travesties to problems of complexity and uncertainty, problems that implicitly are assumed absent in Mundell (1961 ) rendering the situation so simple that equilibria are transparent. The problems remained essentially unaddressed when economists extended Mundell (1961 ) via expected utility theory since this theory also ignores the impossibility of maximising and the complexities of central bankers, private firms and others in doing the evaluation stage in reaching decisions. The problems can be overcome by modelling within SKAT, the Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory. This paper points to experimental evidence in support of the view that under all sorts of disequilibrating shocks, currency unions outperform flexible currencies by eliminating the inefficiencies generated by exchange rate uncertainty.     

Returns to scope: a metric for production synergies demonstrated for hospital production

Knowledge of the production function’s scope properties can provide insights for firms choosing their operating strategy, policy-makers considering industry structure, and analysts determining appropriate tools. We introduce a new property, returns to scope, which is distinct from scale properties and does not rely on price information. Based on desirable characteristics of an estimator of returns to scope, we propose two methods for assessment. We present examples using simulated data and hospital production data from the 2008 National Inpatient Sample of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. We find that hospitals experience negative returns to scope (productivity losses) from the joint production of minor and major diagnostic procedures. Based upon our results we conclude that the new returns to scope property allows sharper insights than classic economies of scope approaches.