Model-based approach for importance–performance analysis

The importance that users or customers attach to various services and products is an essential part of customer satisfaction surveys. Some proposals for linking satisfaction and importance can be found in available literature. The objective is to identify and understand the dimensions with high importance but low perceived quality. These dimensions are primary candidates for focused improvement initiatives. In this study, we propose to apply a class of statistical models, denoted as CUB models, generally used to estimate the feeling and the uncertainty, to measure the importance of items on observed overall satisfaction. A questionnaire with explicit variables of importance for each dimension is considered to compare the obtained ranks with the observed ones. Then the estimated importance and the perceived quality, both obtained with the CUB models, will be jointly analyzed in different datasets coming from various fields. This approach will be compared with some others reported in the literature.     

Electronic monitoring in public organizations: evidence from US local governments

Technology use in the workplace expands the ability to monitor employees through activities such as website tracking, email scanning, and social media monitoring. Monitoring is a fundamental aspect of the relationship between organizations, employees, and stakeholders and can affect perceptions of privacy, autonomy, and trust in the workplace. However, electronic monitoring is little investigated in public management research and we have minimal knowledge about the factors that prompt public managers to adopt electronic monitoring. Focusing on small- and medium-sized US municipalities, we investigate types of electronic monitoring and how organizational, sociopolitical, and technological factors shape electronic monitoring intensity. We test our hypotheses with data from a 2014 national survey of 2,500 local managers, website coding data, and US Census data. We find that electronic monitoring, especially monitoring online activities, is a response to organizational centralization, participation of internal stakeholders, social media use, and technology concerns.     

Does Mandatory Shareholder Voting Prevent Bad Acquisitions? The Case of the United Kingdom

A large number of studies have shown that many companies have made large acquisitions that their own shareholders probably would not have approved if given the opportunity to do so. In this article, which summarizes the findings of their study published recently in the Review of Financial Studies, the authors present evidence that suggests the effectiveness of shareholder voting as a corporate governance mechanism designed to prevent such value‐reducing acquisitions from taking place. The authors' study focused on acquisitions in the U.K. where proposed transactions that exceed a series of 25% relative size (target's as a percentage of the acquirer's) thresholds are defined as “Class 1” transactions and require shareholder approval. The authors found strikingly positive stock market reactions to the announcements of such Class 1 acquisitions—as compared to zero if not negative average announcement returns for Class 2 transactions that were not subject to a shareholder vote. And when the authors extended their analysis to U.S. M&A markets, they found that the larger (again, in relative size) U.S. deals—large enough that they would have required a shareholder vote in the U.K.—provided returns to their shareholders that were negative, and thus significantly lower than those of their U.K counterparts. In terms of the economic significance of their findings, the authors found that Class 1 transactions were associated with aggregate gains to acquirer shareholders of $13.6 billion. By contrast, U.S. transactions of similar size, which again were not subject to shareholder approval, were associated with aggregate losses of $210 billion for acquirer shareholders; and Class 2 U.K. transactions, also not subject to shareholder approval, were associated with aggregate losses of $3 billion. In a further series of tests designed to shed light on how mandatory shareholder voting generates such substantial value improvements for acquirer shareholders, the authors also found evidence suggesting that when faced with the requirement of a shareholder vote, CEOs and boards are more likely to resist the temptation to overpay to close a deal. And the fact that the shareholders of the Class 1 acquirers did not end up blocking a single transaction that was submitted to a vote suggests that this mechanism works without the need for shareholders to actually vote down a deal. In other words, mandatory shareholder voting on acquisitions is a powerful deterrent to “bad deals” because, first of all, the vote is triggered automatically by the relative size tests and, second, CEOs and boards, with the help of their bankers, have a pretty good idea well in advance of the vote whether their shareholders are going to vote “no”—and such a vote would be viewed by top management as a major rejection, a strong vote of no confidence.     

Greenwashing and environmental communication: Effects on stakeholders' perceptions

Since the first Earth Day in the 1970s, corporate environmental performance has increased dramatically, and cases of greenwashing have increased sharply. The term greenwash refers to a variety of different misleading communications that aim to form overly positive beliefs among stakeholders about a company's environmental practices. The growing number of corporate social responsibility claims, whether founded or not, creates difficulties for stakeholders in distinguishing between truly positive business performance and companies that only appear to embrace a model of sustainable development. In this context, through the lens of legitimacy and signalling theory, we intend to understand and assess the different influences that various types of misleading communications about environmental issues have on stakeholders' perceptions of corporate environmental responsibility and greenwashing. Stakeholder responses to an environmental scandal will also be assessed. The hypotheses tested through a four‐for‐two design experiment reveal that different levels of greenwashing have a significantly different influence on stakeholders' perceptions of corporate environmental responsibility and stakeholders' reactions to environmental scandals.     

Saving and habit formation: evidence from Dutch panel data

This paper focuses on the role of habit formation in individual preferences. In this study, the model of Alessie and Lusardi (Econ Lett 55:103–108, 1997) and its extension by Guariglia and Rossi (Oxf Econ Pap 54:1–19, 2002) are considered. Our empirical specifications are based on their closed-form solutions, where current saving is expressed as a function of lagged saving and other regressors. In our study, we use a longitudinal data set from the Netherlands that allows us to disentangle the role of habit formation from unobserved heterogeneity. Contrary to most other studies using survey data, we find evidence in favor of habit formation. However, the magnitude of the habit formation coefficient is rather small. Income uncertainty seems to affect saving behavior of Dutch households.     

Determinants of Trade: the Role of Innovation in Presence of Quality Standards

This paper analyses the role that quality standards and innovation play on trade volume, by using a gravity model. The role of innovative activity and quality standards in enhancing trade performance is widely accepted in the literature. However, in this paper, we argue that the net effect of quality standards on trade is affected by the exporter’s ability to innovate and comply with these requirements. In particular, by using a sample of 60 exporting countries and 57 importing countries, for a wide range of 26 manufacturing industries over the period 1995–2000, we show that the most innovative industries are more likely to enhance the overall quality of exports, and then gain a competitive advantage. We also find that this effect depends on the level of technology intensity at industry-level and on the level of economic development of exporting country.     

International payment finality requires a supranational central-bank money： Reforming the international monetary architecture in the spirit of Keynes

Payment finality is a key issue domestically as well as across a country＇s borders. In the current international monetary architecture, the existing protocols for a delivery-versus-payment operation with central-bank money do not and cannot provide for international payment finality through the links that national central banks have established between themselves on a multilateral basis. This problem concerns each country considered as a whole, but not its residents. In this connection, moving from a positive to a normative analysis, this paper points out the lack of an international settlement institution, as well as the ways and means to provide such an institution, as the result of a structural change of the current international monetary architecture. The lack of an international means of final payment implies that, to date, countries use national currencies as objects of trade, which are thereby subjected to supply and demand on the foreign-exchange market, where exchange rates may, and do, vary daily according to a currency＇s excess demand （either positive or negative） with respect to another currency. This paper argues that exchange rates＇ erratic volatility is the result of the current international monetary disorder, which denatures national currencies when they are traded on foreign-exchange markets.     

Pesticide residues and trade,the apple of discord?

In this paper we study the impact of the regulations on Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs) of pesticides on the trade of apples and pears and related processed products with the aim of understanding how their similarity (or dissimilarity) affect trade. Most studies investigate the impact of sanitary regulations introducing directly in the analysis the MRL put in force in the importing country. They introduce in the analysis the level of the regulation in the importing country without taking into account the rule in force in the exporting country. Rather than focusing on a particular pesticide we take into account the entire list of substances set out by the various regulations. We then build a similarity index and introduce it into a gravity equation to assess the impact of the differences in MRL of pesticides on trade. Results suggest that the differences between regulations matter and may, in some case, hinder trade.     

Bayesian analysis of random coefficient logit models using aggregate data

We present a Bayesian approach for analyzing aggregate level sales data in a market with differentiated products. We consider the aggregate share model proposed by Berry et al. [Berry, Steven, Levinsohn, James, Pakes, Ariel, 1995. Automobile prices in market equilibrium. Econometrica. 63 (4), 841–890], which introduces a common demand shock into an aggregated random coefficient logit model. A full likelihood approach is possible with a specification of the distribution of the common demand shock. We introduce a reparameterization of the covariance matrix to improve the performance of the random walk Metropolis for covariance parameters. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach with both actual and simulated data. Sampling experiments show that our approach performs well relative to the GMM estimator even in the presence of a mis-specified shock distribution. We view our approach as useful for those who are willing to trade off one additional distributional assumption for increased efficiency in estimation.