B2B service brand identity: Scale development and validation

Several brand identity frameworks have been published in the B2C and the B2B brand marketing literature. A reliable, valid and parsimonious service brand identity scale that empirically establishes the construct's dimensionality in a B2B market has yet to be developed. This paper reports the findings of a study conducted amongst 421 senior executives working in the UK IT Service sector to develop and validate a B2B Service Brand Identity Scale. Following established scale development procedures support is provided for a B2B Service Brand Identity Scale comprising five dimensions; employee and client focus, visual identity, brand personality, consistent communications and human resource initiatives. Concluding remarks discuss theoretical and managerial implications with limitations and directions for future research.     

Does Bank Monitoring Influence Loan Contract Terms?

We examine the impact of bank monitoring on loan contract terms using a new proxy for monitoring ability based on the labor input into monitoring. We show in out-of-sample tests that the proxy is a statistically and economically significant determinant of future loan quality. Accounting for clustering of observations by lead bank, and controlling for borrower characteristics, contract features and bank risk, we find a statistically significant direct relationship between monitoring ability and loan maturity and a statistically and economically significant direct relationship between monitoring ability and the loan yield spread. The relationships are particularly strong for working capital loans. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.     

Business Student Ethics: Selected Predictors of Attitudes Toward Cheating

This research addresses the frequently reported finding that business education reduces the ethical sensitivity of students. It presents evidence that supports the view that much of the prior research has relied upon a narrow set of explanatory variables as well as dependent measures of ethical reasoning that often lacked external validity. This research proposes instead, a dependent measure based on students' attitudes toward academic dishonesty and the use of two additional independent variables, locus of control and personality type. In an empirical study,both locus of control and personality type were found to significantly influence students' attitudes to academic dishonesty. Students who studied business however, were no more tolerant of academic dishonesty than students in other programs. Nor did they have a different locus of control or personality-type. Locusof control and personality type were however,significantly correlated. Findings also support the predictive utility of using cheating to understand ethical attitudes in general.     

Hair-brained or great-hair business? : Assessing alternative markets and product-service designs for successful startups by small-retail entrepreneurs

Deborah Lunt had wanted to see a business building with her name on it since she was thirteen years old. She now wanted to build upon the reputation that she had earned through her twenty years in the hair-care industry. She decided to move from the upscale streets of Boston to the suburbs where she felt she could provide a more relaxed and personalized ambience. Deborah excels in hair cutting, color, styling, and her perceptiveness of what her clients want. She built her entire clientele through word-of-mouth and even after she relocated to the Boston suburbs, her clients continued to travel long distances to obtain her services. As Deborah sat in her office one day sipping mineral water between her appointments, she wondered how she could grow her client base. She started day dreaming and was suddenly brought back to the present with the “ding dong” at the door, and one of her clients and friend, a marketing professor at a nearby university, walked in for her monthly appointment. As Deborah cut and styled her client's hair, she shared her thoughts and dreams with her. The professor knew that Deborah was ambitious and hardworking, and that if she had a clear marketing plan, she could succeed in growing her business. The professor also knew that, although Deborah had left her job at an upscale hair salon in a high-end retailing location in the city (the most expensive street for shopping in Boston) to startup her own business, Deborah had done so without a written plan and only a vague vision for the future. The professor suggested to Deborah that she needed to put some effort into developing a viable written marketing plan.     

Tax,credit constraints,and the big costs of small inflation

This paper develops a heterogeneous‐agent overlapping generations model that examines how the neutrality of the tax system with respect to inflation depends on the price elasticity of the housing supply. The model, which endogenises house prices and rents, and which incorporates detailed tax regulations and bank‐imposed credit constraints, shows (a) inflation has large effects on the tenure arrangements of young households irrespective of the housing supply elasticity; and (b) inflation can improve the welfare of some low income young households if the supply is sufficiently elastic. The welfare costs of inflation are reduced by taxing real rather than nominal interest.     

THE ANALYSIS OF MEMORY BIAS IN AGRICULTURAL LABOUR DATA COLLECTION: A CASE STUDY OF SMALL FARMERS IN NIGERIA

An analysis is undertaken of daily labour data collected once-per-week for a sample of 129 farm households in Benue State, Nigeria during 1979/80. The purpose of the analysis is to test for the presence of memory bias in these data for which the recall period is up to seven days. The analysis indicates significant between-day differences in hours of agricultural work. This is partly due to the low work input for Sunday but it is also noted that the mean number of hours of agricultural work reported for the day prior to data collection is significantly lower than the means for days further removed from the time of data collection. This finding is taken to be confirmation that a significant level of memory bias exists in the labour data and it is estimated that reported hours of agricultural labour may overstate actual hours of such work by almost 38 per cent.