Deconstructing the meerkat: fabular anthropomorphism,popular culture,and the market

Abstract

In this paper we attempt to create an understanding of fabular anthropomorphism of particular relevance to marketing communication. Through an examination of the religious, anthropological, rhetorical and marketing literature on personification and anthropomorphism we arrive at six principles that characterise the use of animals as symbols in instructional storytelling. We then examine the applicability of these principles by investigating the way in which meerkats have recently been used in popular culture and marketing communication. We find that our proposed definition of a marketing-orientated fabular anthropomorphism is broadly applicable and is helpful in understanding why certain anthropomorphic depictions will resonate with audiences and others will not.

Summary statement of contribution This research proposes a set of principles that help us to understand the way in which fabular instantiations of anthropomorphism can be successfully used in marketing communication. It presents a case study that demonstrates the applicability of the findings.     

Detecting multiple breaks in time series covariance structure: a non-parametric approach based on the evolutionary spectral density

This article estimates the number of breaks and their locations in the covariance structure of a series based on the evolutionary spectral density and uses some standard information criteria. The adopted approach is non-parametric and does not privilege a priori any modelling of the series. One carries out a Monte Carlo analysis and an empirical illustration using the daily return series of exchange rate euro/US dollar to support the relevance of the theory and to produce additional insights. The simulation results are globally adequate and show that the criteria having heavy penalty are more accurate in the selection of the number of breaks. The empirical results indicate that the covariance structure of the return series considerably varies between 30 March 2000 and 6 April 2001. The unconditional volatility appears non-constant over this interval.     

Tail dependence and diversification benefits in emerging market stocks: an extreme value theory approach

This article examines tail dependence, the benefits of diversification and the relation between the two for emerging stock markets. We find most emerging equity markets are independent in limiting joint extremes. However, the dependence in finite levels of extremes is still much stronger than the dependence implied by multivariate normality. Therefore, simple correlation analysis can lead to gross underestimation of the chances of joint crashes in multiple markets. Assuming risk-averse investors guarding against extreme losses, diversification benefits are measured for each two-country optimal portfolio by the reduction in quantile risk measures such as value-at-risk and expected shortfall relative to an undiversified portfolio. It is shown that tail dependence measures developed from multivariate extreme value theory are negatively related to diversification benefits and more importantly can explain diversification benefits better than the correlation coefficient at the most extreme quantiles.     

The accuracy of interest rate forecasts in the Asia-Pacific region: opportunities for portfolio management

We analysed interest rate forecasts from Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. We assessed 532 forecast time series with a total of 85,264 individual interest rate forecasts. To do so, we carried out a comparison to naïve forecasts and investigated the forecast time series for topically orientated trend adjustments. In addition, we deployed the sign accuracy test and the unbiasedness test. The results are very sobering in part: 95.9% of all forecast time series are characterized by the phenomenon of topically orientated trend adjustments, and 99.4% of all forecast time series proved to be biased. Only a small proportion of the forecast time series (3.6%) reflected the future interest rate trend significantly more precisely than a naïve forecast. However, at the same time some of the results of the study are surprisingly positive. The sign accuracy test revealed that 48.3% of all forecast time series predict the interest rate trend significantly better than a random walk forecast.     

Cluster Dynamics: Corporate Strategy, Industry Evolution and Technology Trajectories - A Case Study of the East Midlands Aerospace Cluster

High-technology clusters have attracted the attention of researchers and policy-makers but studies have focused primarily on the computer, electronics and biotechnology industries; aerospace has attracted less attention. An example of a high-technology cluster based on aerospace is to be found in the East Midlands region of the UK. This paper analyses this cluster. The analysis focuses on the structure of the cluster and the implications of this structure for cluster dynamics. The impact of factors such as corporate strategy, industry evolution and technological trajectories on cluster development are analysed. Finally, the implications of cluster structure for economic development policy in the region are evaluated.     

Corporate debt and financial balance sheet adjustment: a comparison of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany

The level of UK corporate debt directly affects financial stability in the United Kingdom because a significant amount of the exposure of the UK financial system is to UK corporates. Our paper provides a comparison of the determinants of corporate debt in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. The comparison serves to benchmark our findings about the determinants of UK corporate debt. In addition, the UK financial sector is significantly exposed to the corporate sectors in the United States, Germany and France. The model assesses the contribution of investment, acquisitions, cash flows and market-to-book values to the determination of debt, and also the tendency of debt to revert to its optimum level. Debt was found to be positively related to the financing needs of the firm, and the optimum level of debt to be negatively related to the market-to-book ratio. This casts some light on the procyclicality of debt.     

Entrepreneurship education and the creation of an enterprise culture: provisional results from an experiment in Egypt

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report (2008) for Egypt identified education and training as one of the main constraining factors to entrepreneurship development and the creation of an entrepreneurial culture in the country. Of the 31 countries participating in the National Experts’ Survey, Egypt was ranked in last place in terms of the contribution of the education system and the number one recommendation was that it needs to be reformed. Hence, the study examines the Entrepreneurial Tendencies of students of business administration at the British University in Egypt using the Durham University General Enterprising Tendency Test. It reveals that the entrepreneurial propensity of the Egyptian students is somewhat higher than that of their counterparts in the UK, despite the prevailing traditional “knowledge acquisition” pedagogy. When exposed to a more entrepreneurial style of teaching and learning, the students’ GET scores increased by about 8 per cent over a 12 week period, suggesting that if a change in the educational paradigm could be effected, it should be possible to effect a change in the way students think and behave, thereby helping bring about an entrepreneurial culture. The study examines the brain dominance of the students and makes proposals for future research.     

Decomposition analysis of the telecommunications sector in Indonesia: What does the cellular era shed light on?

Indonesia is currently enjoying rapid development in the telecommunications sector despite the economy having been heavily dependent for almost four decades on the two largest sectors: the manufacturing industry and trade. The telecommunications sector has played an important role in stimulating economic growth in the country during the last few years, with an annual growth rate higher than that of other sectors. This contribution is supported to a great extent by the rapid diffusion of telephony, in particular cellular telephony, as the number of subscribers increased from just 2.1 million in 1999 to 170 million in 2011. Previous studies investigating the impact of the telecommunications sector on the economy aggregate the impact of the sectors on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) without further scrutiny of what sources of growth telecommunications has contributed. Hence, an interesting question arises as to whether the achievement of cellular diffusion is also followed by structural change in the telecommunications sector. That said, this study aims to decompose the output of telecommunications into several sources of growth: domestic final demand, export effect, import substitution effect and technological coefficient effect. A particular interest in this study is to compare the source of growth concerning domestic final demand and the technological coefficient effect. The main tool for analysis in this study is the Input–Output (IO) method, while the time series of the investigation covers the period 1975–2008, allowing comparison of structural changes in the telecommunications sector between the pre- and post-cellular eras. The study found that the coefficient multiplier of the telecommunications sector, which was approximately 1.8 during the 1980s, had decreased to only 1.3 by the end of 2008. Consequently, the final demand from the telecommunications sector contributed less to economic output in the late 2000s compared to the impact in the 1980. Moreover, the cellular era that started in the early 2000s also brought about a trend of changes in telecommunications output. While final demand remains very dominant, the technological coefficient effect has diminished as the source of telecommunications output. This finding indicates a lower ability of the telecommunications sector to build an inter-industry relationship with other sectors. A possible explanation for this result is the cellular uses which are much less related to business activities than that of fixed telephony dating back to the 1970s in Indonesia.     

Trade facilitation and country size

It is argued that compared with large countries, small countries rely more on trade and therefore are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. The present paper extends this idea beyond the conventional trade openness measures by analyzing the relationship between country size and the number of documents required to export and import, a measure of trade facilitation. Three important results follow. First, trade facilitation does improve as country size becomes smaller; that is, small countries perform better than large countries in terms of trade facilitation. Second, the relationship between country size and trade facilitation is nonlinear, much stronger for the relatively small than the large countries. Third, contrary to what existing studies might suggest, the relationship between country size and trade facilitation does not appear to be driven by the fact that small countries trade more as a proportion of their gross domestic product than the large countries.     

互联网金融服务于中小微企业探析

2014年阿里巴巴在纽约证券交易所的正式上市,我国互联网金融企业迎来了一个春天。互联网涉猎于金融行业相关的服务及产品之中。互联网金融的发展在一定程度上促进了相关金融行业的整体发展,实现了相关服务信息的透明化和公开化。一方面,中小微企业相关金融服务存在融资的手续繁琐,成本相对较高,信贷配给量过低,融资渠道单一;另一方面,互联网金融实现了小额信贷的规模化和金融服务的订单化,保证了低成本服务的覆盖面积,实现了融资模式的创新。