Proud volunteers: the role of self- and vicarious-pride in promoting volunteering

This research examines the role of self- and vicarious-pride in eliciting divergent mindsets and behaviors toward volunteering. We propose that the congruent matching of self-pride (vicarious-pride) emotions with promotion (prevention) focus-framed messages increases the effectiveness of promoting volunteering behaviors. The positive “match-up” effects arise because self-pride elicits a competitive mindset, whereas vicarious-pride elicits a collaborative mindset toward volunteering. We test our predictions across three experimental studies using behavioral measures in different non-profit organizational settings. The findings contribute to research on the role of pride in prosocial consumer behavior by providing empirical evidence that self-pride and vicarious-pride lead to different mindsets and behavioral outcomes.     

The relationship between works councils and firms’ further training provision in times of technological change

Participating in further training is strategically important for employees to ensure their employability. Particularly for employees in low-skilled jobs, works councils — firm-level organizations that represent employees — constitute an important employee advocacy instrument in European countries, such as France and Germany. With comprehensive co-determination rights, works councils can influence firms’ hiring policies, job design and career paths (e.g. promotions). Using German firm-level data, we empirically investigate the influence of works councils on firms’ training provision for employees in firms below and above the industry level of technology. The results show that works councils have a positive effect on the percentage of employees in general, and of employees in low-skilled jobs in particular, participating in training, but only for firms below the industry level of technology. These results show the importance of works councils in supporting training in such firms and enhancing the employment prospects of employees in low-skilled jobs. In contrast, firms above the industry level of technology invest in training with or without a works council, indicating that the training interests of employers and employees are aligned.     

The effect of perceived advertising effort on brand perception: implication for retailers in Hong Kong

This paper examines how advertising effort, specifically advertising creativity and advertising believability, may influence consumers’ perceptions of a retailer’s business philosophy, and in turn consumers’ behavior toward retailers in Hong Kong. Altogether five hundred and eighty-three respondents (i.e. 320 college students and 263 shoppers) were surveyed. The results suggested that retailers that are regarded as having more creative advertising are perceived as being more learning-oriented, which leads to higher brand recognition. Meanwhile, retailers that are regarded as having more believable advertisements are perceived as having higher levels of integrity, and as a result are better recognized and more likely to be patronized. This research contributes to literature in retailing and marketing communication by establishing the antecedents and consequences of building a learning-oriented and trustworthy business philosophy in a cultural specific context. It also provides practical guidance for retailers who aim to increase brand recognition and purchase intentions through promotional effort.     

Imperfect legal unbundling of monopolistic bottlenecks

We study an industry with a monopolistic bottleneck supplying an essential input to several downstream firms. Under legal unbundling the bottleneck must be operated by a legally independent upstream firm, which may be partly or fully owned by an incumbent active in downstream markets. Access prices are regulated but the upstream firm can perform non-tariff discrimination. Under perfect legal unbundling the upstream firm maximizes only own profits; with imperfections it is biased and to some extent accounts also for the incumbent’s downstream profits. We show that increasing the incumbent’s ownership share increases total output if the upstream firm’s bias is sufficiently small, while otherwise effects are ambiguous. Stronger regulation that reduces the bias without changing ownership shares generally increases total output. We also endogenize the bias and show that it can depend non-monotonically on the ownership share.     

Social Sustainability in Selecting Emerging Economy Suppliers

Despite the growing public awareness of social sustainability issues, little is known about what drives firms to emphasize social criteria in their supplier management practices and what the precise benefits of such efforts are. This is especially true for relationships with international suppliers from the world’s emerging economies in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Building on stakeholder theory, we address the issue by examining how pressures from customers, the government, and employees as primary constituencies of the firm determine the extent to which firms consider social aspects in the selection of emerging economy suppliers. Further, we analyze how such socially sustainable supplier selection relates to the capabilities of the firm’s suppliers, its market reputation, and the learning in its supply management organization. We test the developed research framework empirically using data from 244 U.S. and German corporations. Our findings, consistent with our hypothesized model, suggest that middle-level supply managers as internal stakeholders play a major driving role for firms’ socially sustainable supplier selection, and that strong positive links exist between that selection and the investigated outcomes.     

COLLATERAL REQUIREMENTS AND ASSET PRICES

Many assets derive their value not only from future cash flows but also from their ability to serve as collateral. In this article, we investigate this collateral premium and its impact on asset returns in an infinite‐horizon general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents. We document that borrowing against collateral substantially increases the return volatility of long‐lived assets. Moreover, otherwise identical assets with different degrees of collateralizability exhibit substantially different return dynamics because their prices contain a sizable collateral premium that varies over time. This premium can be positive even for assets that never pay dividends.     

Intangible Capital and Labor Productivity Growth: Panel Evidence for the EU from 1998–2005

Using new international comparable data on intangible capital investment by business within a panel analysis between 1998 and 2005 in an EU country sample, a positive and significant relationship between intangible capital investment and labor productivity growth is detected. This relationship proves to be robust to a range of alterations. The empirical analysis confirms previous findings that the inclusion of business intangible capital investment in the asset boundary of the national accounting framework increases the rate of change of output per hour worked more rapidly. In addition, intangible capital is able to explain a significant portion of the unexplained international variance in labor productivity growth, and becomes a dominant source of growth.     

Financial constraints of private firms and bank lending behavior

We investigate whether and how financial constraints of private firms depend on bank lending behavior. Bank lending behavior, especially its scale, scope and timing, is largely driven by bank business models which differ between privately owned and state-owned banks. Using a unique dataset on private small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) we find that an increase in relative borrowings from local state-owned banks significantly reduces firms’ financial constraints, while there is no such effect for privately owned banks. Improved credit availability and private information production are the main channels that explain our result. We also show that the lending behavior of local state-owned banks can be sustainable because it is less cyclical and neither leads to more risk taking nor underperformance.