Online grocery shopping: the impact of shopping frequency on perceived risk

Online grocery shopping has enjoyed strong growth and it is predicted this channel will continue to grow exponentially in the coming years. While online shopping has attracted an abundance of research interest, examinations of online grocery shopping behaviour are only now emerging. Shopping online for groceries differs considerably from general online shopping due to the perishability and variability of the product, and frequency of the shopping activity. Two salient gaps underpin this research into online grocery shopping. This study responds to calls to investigate the online shoppers’ experience in the context of online purchasing frequency. Second, this study examines the mediating effect of perceived risk between trust and online repurchase intention of groceries. An online survey was employed to collect data from shoppers who were recruited from a multi-channel grocery e-retailer’s database. The online survey, comprising 16 reflective validated scale items, was sent to 555 frequent and infrequent online grocery shoppers. Results find that while customer satisfaction predicts trust for both infrequent and frequent online grocery shoppers, perceived risk fully mediates the effect of trust on repurchase intentions for infrequent online grocery shoppers. Furthermore, path analysis reveals that the developed behavioural model is variant across both groups of shoppers. Theoretically, we provide a deeper understanding of the online customer experience, while gaining insight into two shopper segments identified as being important to grocery e-retailers. For managers, this study tests an online customer behavioural model with actual purchasing behaviour and identifies the continued presence of perceived risk in grocery e-retailing, regardless of purchase frequency or experience.     

Bank Relationships and Firms' Financial Performance: The Italian Experience

We examine the connection between the number of bank relationships and firms' performance using a unique data set on Italian small firms for which banks are a major source of financing. Our evidence indicates that return on equity and return on assets decrease as the number of bank relationships increases with a stronger effect on small firms than large firms. We also find that interest expense over assets increases as the number of relationships increases. Particularly for small firms, these results are consistent with analyses suggesting that fewer bank relationships reduce information asymmetries and agency problems and outweigh hold‐up problems.     

Russian Roulette at the Trade Table: A Specific Factors CGE Analysis of an Agri‐food Import Ban

In the summer of 2014 Russia imposed a ban on most agri‐food products from countries enforcing Ukraine‐related sanctions against Russia. We use a specific factors computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the short‐run impact of this retaliatory policy. The baseline is carefully designed to isolate the impacts of the ban on the European Union (EU), Russia itself and a selection of key trade partners. The modelling of the ban follows a novel approach, where it is treated as a loss of established trade preferences via reductions in consumer utility in the Armington import function. Not surprisingly, the results indicate that Russia bears the highest income loss (about €3.4 billion) while the EU recovers part of its lost trade through expansion of exports to other markets. An ex‐post comparison between simulation results and observed trade data reveals the model predictions to be broadly accurate, thereby validating the robustness of the modelling approach.     

Land productivity,farm size and returns to scale in Pakistan agriculture

It is by now a commonly accepted proposition that economic development must involve both growth and equity. That in many countries the subsidization of the owners of large farms is inequitable is also acknowledged. However, the debate on the ‘efficiency’ of large versus small farms continues. If the owners of large farms are not using the crop acreage with greater efficiency than are the small farmers and if there are no economies of scale, then the imposition of ceilings on farm size and land redistribution are clearly the right options to consider.The object of this study is to test two hypotheses. First, there is an inverse relationship between land productivity and farm size. Second, there are no economies of scale in agricultural production. The tests are performed by regression analysis on the farm-level data collected from Pakistan by the author in 1974. The merit of this study is that it deals with a country which, with a few other underdeveloped countries, has been a beneficiary of the ‘Green Revolution’. The available studies on Pakistan agriculture are limited to the aggregate analyses. Interregional micro-level studies are almost non-existent.     

Trade liberalization and the structure of protection in Turkey in the 1980s: A quantitative analysis

Zusammenfassung Handelsliberalisierung und die Struktur der Protektion in der Türkei der achtziger Jahre. Eine quantitative Analyse. — Die Autoren haben die Strukturver?nderungen in der Protektion der Türkei untersucht, die sich aus den aufeinanderfolgenden Zollsatz?nderungen von 1983 bis 1989 ergaben. Sie zeigen, da\ die Revisionen der Jahre 1988 und 1989 sowohl die H?he als auch die interindustrielle Streuung der Protektion verringert haben. Trotzdem f?rdert die Struktur der Protektion noch nicht die optimale Allokation der heimischen Ressourcen, wenn man die relativen Preise an der Grenze und damit das türkische Au\enhandelspotential in Betracht zieht. Au\erdem wurde gezeigt, da\ die türkischen Exportindustrien st?rker geschützt werden als die Industrien, die mit Importen konkurrieren.

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Resumen Liberalización comercial y estructura de la protección en Turquía en los a?os 80: un análisis cuantitativo. — En este trabajo se analizan los cambios en la estructura de la protección en Turquía debidos a revisiones sucesivas de los aranceles entre 1983 y 1989. Se demuestra que las revisiones de 1988 y de 1989 han disminuído tanto el nivel como la dispersión intersectorial de la protección. A pesar de ello, la estructura de la protección aún no conduce a una asignación óptima de los recursos nacionales dados los precios relativos en la frontera y, po lo tanto, el potencial del comercio exterior turco. Además, se demuestra que las industrias de exportación turcas exhiben mayor protección que las industrias que compiten con las importaciones.

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Résumé Libéralisation du commerce et la structure de la protection en Turquie dans les années 1980: une analyse quantitative. — Cette étude a analysé les changes dans la structure de la protection en Turquie à cause de plusieurs révisions successives des tarifs douaniers de 1983 jusqu’à 1989. Il est prouvé que les révisions de 1988 et 1989 ont baissé le niveau et la dispersion inter-industrielle de la protection. Malgré cela, la structure de la protection n’est pas encore convenable à une répartition optimale des ressources nationales si l’on considère les prix relatifs à la frontière et par cela le potentiel pour le commerce extérieur de la Turquie. En outre, on peut constater qu’on protège les industries d’exportation turques plus fortement que les secteurs industriels étant en concurrence avec les importations.

     

SOME ASPECTS OF FOOD CONSUMPTION AND ITS LONG-TERM PERSPECTIVE IN PAKISTAN, 1961-86

This paper attempts to answer three important questions regarding the consumption of food in Pakistan: (2) What are the recent trends of consumption in the rural and urban areas? (2) What is the likely direction and magnitude of food demand during the period 1961-86? (3) Is the growth of production of food commodities going to be sufficient to meet the requirements by 1970 and thereafter?     

An Experimental Analysis of Face to Face versus Computer Mediated Communication Channels

Experimental research on Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) has generally focused on democratic groups whose members typically share the same objectives. In organizations, however, there are many situations where groups have a leader who has the power to override the group's recommendation, the objective of the leader may not be the same as the objective of each member, and not everyone may have the same information. This paper reports the results of an experiment in which the groups, having a designated leader, worked on a mixed-motive task. Within this context, we analyze group decision outcomes and processes for groups that use a face-to-face channel of cormnunication and those that utilize computer mediated communication. We compare performance of the leader and members with respect to an objective measure of performance, the efficient frontier. The results indicate that for this task groups using face-to-face channel outperform groups using computer mediated communication.     

Macroeconomic Factors and the Asymmetric Predictability of Conditional Variances

This paper investigates the predictability of the volatilities of large versus small firms. Using AR-GARCH models we show that there is symmetry in the ability of firms of different market values to predict conditional variances. Specifically, we show that volatility surprises of small (large) firms are important in predicting the conditional variance of large (small) firms. These results are different than those previously reported which indicate that there is an asymmetry in the predictability of the volatilities of large versus small firms. This predictive ability is still present when the equation of conditional variance includes state variables such as the default premium, dividend yield and the term premium. Finally, our results indicate that the pattern of symmetric predictability is present in both pre- and post-war sample periods.     

Correcting for biases when estimating production functions: an illusion of the laws of algebra?

This paper shows that the endogeneity bias that allegedly appearswhen estimating production functions using value data, and whichthe literature has tried to deal with since the 1940s, is simplythe result of omitted-variable bias due to a poor approximationto an accounting identity. This problem has no econometric solution.As a result, recent attempts to solve the problem by developingnew estimators are questioned. The only possible way to estimatethe technological parameters of the production function is touse physical quantities.     

ICT-specific technological progress in the United Kingdom

This paper analyses the impact of rapid technological change in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector on economic growth in the United Kingdom. We find that technological progress specific to the ICT sector accounts for around 20–30% of long-run labor productivity growth. We demonstrate that a permanent increase in the growth rate of ICT-specific technological progress will increase the investment expenditure share of GDP but lower the aggregate depreciation rate, while an increase in the return to investment in ICT will increase both the expenditure share and the depreciation rate.