Forecasting volatility and co-volatility of crude oil and gold futures: Effects of leverage,jumps, spillovers,and geopolitical risks

To forecast the covariance matrix for the returns of crude oil and gold futures, this paper examines the effects of leverage, jumps, spillovers, and geopolitical risks by using their respective realized covariance matrices. To guarantee the positive definiteness of the forecasts, we consider the full BEKK structure on the conditional Wishart model. By the specification, we can flexibly divide the direct and spillover effects of volatility feedback, negative returns, and jumps. The empirical analysis indicates the benefits of accommodating the spillover effects of negative returns, and the geopolitical risks indicator for modeling and forecasting the covariance matrix.     

Internal habits formation and optimality

In a very influential model with internal habits, Carroll et al., (2017, 2000), establish that an increase in economic growth may cause a positive change in savings. The optimality of this result, and of many other contributions using a similar framework, has been questioned by some authors who have observed that the parametrization used in these models always implies a utility function not jointly concave in consumption and habits. In this paper, we revisit the optimality issue and, using advanced techniques in Dynamic Programming, we answer the following long-standing open questions: (i) Is the solution found in Carroll et al., (2017, 2000) optimal? (ii) Is it also unique or do other optimal solutions exist?     

员工创造力激发研究评述：多层次多视角机制与精神性动力

员工创造力是组织创新的先决条件和根本源泉，员工创造力激发成为经典的研究主题，并取得了相当丰富的研究成果，然而，国内却鲜见针对员工创造力激发机制进行全方位、多层面和多视角的梳理与总结。对员工创造力的激发机制研究进行系统回顾和深入分析，首先，从员工创造力激发的理论基础出发，总结员工创造力激发的经典理论；其次，按照个体、团队和组织的逻辑顺序对以往散见在各个组织层次的员工创造力激发机制进行多视角梳理和探讨。随着研究的深入，组织内精神性逐渐成为员工创造力激发的新兴动力，为此，从多个视角归纳基于精神性的员工创造力激发机制；最后，展望未来研究方向，以期推动员工创造力激发机制研究走向深入和完善。     

MORE THAN A FEELING: CONFIDENCE,UNCERTAINTY, AND MACROECONOMIC FLUCTUATIONS

Economists, observers, and policy-makers often emphasize the role of sentiment as a potential driver of the business cycle. In this paper, we provide three contributions to this debate. First, we give an overview of the recent literature on the nexus between sentiment (considering both confidence and uncertainty) and economic activity. Second, we review existing empirical measures of sentiment, in particular consumer confidence, stock market volatility (SMV) and Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU), on monthly data for 27 countries, 1985–2016. Third, we identify some new stylized facts based on international evidence. While different measures are surprisingly lowly correlated on average in each country, they are typically highly positively correlated across countries, suggesting the existence of a global factor or sizeable international spillovers of sentiment. Consumer confidence has the closest co-movement with economic and financial variables, and most of the correlations are contemporaneous or forward-looking, consistent with the view that economic sentiment is indeed a driver of activity.     

External corporate venturing modes as new way to develop dynamic capabilities

Today, firms encounter scarce resources and rapid technology change which render formerly successful business models obsolete. Research shows that some firms perform better than others in continuously discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities in volatile environments and that this is dependent on firm’s dynamic capabilities. Besides obtaining dynamic capabilities through internal R&D activities, firms have open up their innovation process to pursue dynamic capabilities outside their organizational boundaries through external corporate venturing by accessing startup's technological capabilities necessary to innovate. External corporate venturing is a means to develop new distinctive capabilities and businesses by exploring and exploiting business opportunities outside a firm’s existing boundaries. Drawing on the dynamic capability literature, we use a multiple case study approach to examine the contribution of external corporate venturing to firms’ dynamic capabilities. Our results reveal that firms indeed use corporate venturing to identify and exploit startup’s technological knowledge and competencies to increase firm’s dynamic capabilities. But our empirical data also shows that not every firm is fully profiting from all dynamic capability phases as their corporate venturing modes are not linked with each other and cumulative effects are not realized.     

Waste of money or growth opportunity: The causal effect of EU subsidies on Hungarian SMEs

Although EU subsidies aiming at economic development play a pivotal role not only for Hungary but for the entire European Union as well, there is a debate regarding their effectiveness in the literature. This paper investigates the impact of direct economic development subsidies extended in the context of Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund as part of the 2007–2013 programming period of the European Union on Hungarian micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Based on a micro database, we evaluate the impact of corporates’ first subsidies on various performance indicators, using a combination of propensity score matching and fixed effects panel regression. According to our results, economic development funds had a significant positive effect on the number of employees, sales revenue, gross value added and, in some cases, operating profit. However, the labour productivity of enterprises was not significantly affected by any of the support schemes. Furthermore, by explicitly comparing non-refundable subsidies (grants) and refundable assistance (financial instruments), we find that there is no significant difference in the effectiveness of the two types of subsidy.     

Does computer penetration increase farmers’ income? An empirical study from China

The diffusion and adoption of modern information technology provide new chance for China to close urban-rural income gap. This paper uses China's provincial panel data from 2002 to 2013 to investigate the effect of computer penetration on rural residents' income. A public program aiming to connect every village with broadband Internet and other rural facilities provides plausibly exogenous variation in rural residents' availability and adoption of the broadband Internet, which is used to explore the instrument variable for rural computer penetration. The results show that rural computer penetration tends to increase rural residents' income over time, but the average effect remains limited. The dynamic panel threshold effects model, which allows for both the threshold variable and other covariates to be endogenous, is further used to explore the constraints of the income-increase effect of rural computer penetration. It shows that the effect is at least doubled over the average effect estimated from instrument variables method, once the digital divide causes are removed. Our findings have important implications for the government to increase rural residents' income and reduce urban-rural income gap by encouraging rural computer usage and removing the digital divide.     

Supplier empowerment: Mediating situational factors and perceived performance

The understanding of the behavioral and cognitive factors that affect organizations' performance has attracted increasing attention of scholars and practitioners. Based on the literature of psychological empowerment at the individual and the team levels, this study develops the concept of supplier empowerment in the context of purchasing and supply management. Further, this study proposes a research model that explores the role of supplier empowerment as a cognitive concept in mediating the relationship between situational factors (a supplier's process modularity and the mutual trust with its customers/buyers) and the supplier's perceived performance in its operations and customer service. This model is tested with 208 responses from automotive industry suppliers. The findings highlight the importance of empowered suppliers in decreasing inventory levels and increasing order fulfillment performance.     

A train of thought in product experientiality: Working memory,distraction, and inconsistencies in cue order effects

The sequence of informational cues and the level of distraction have an impact on the judgment of a product’s quality and preference. Two quasi-experimental studies (N_total = 340) investigate the influence of the force behind the processing of these cues – working memory (WM). Previous research found that, in the presence of a distractor, high WM individuals are more able to recall the initial cue, and thus derive their product judgment from the initial strong cue. Study 1 contradicts these findings and raises important methodological questions regarding the conceptualization of strong and weak cues. Specifically, commonly accepted strong cues (e.g., product reputation) might not influence consumers as expected. Additionally, in a sequence of product evaluation with high vs. low degree of experientiality, study 2 reveals that consumers tend to show a primacy effect that is stronger for higher levels of WM capacity. Moreover, in a sequence of assessing low vs. high degree of experientiality products, consumers reveal stronger recency effects, thus showing that WM reinforces this recency effect. Our findings have important implications for marketers by suggesting that consumers with high WMC are more able to process complex stimuli and retrieve previously presented information on a product quality. These consumers also have a higher tendency to retrieve more information from product scenarios with a high degree of experientiality.     

Fire sales by euro area banks and funds: What is their asset price impact?

The assets under management of investment funds have soared in recent years, triggering a debate on their possible implications for financial stability. We contribute to this debate assessing the asset price impact of fire sales in a novel partial equilibrium model of euro area funds and banks calibrated over the period between 2008 and 2017. An initial shock to yields causes funds to sell assets to address investor redemptions, while both banks and funds sell assets to keep their leverage constant. These fire sales generate second-round price effects. We find that the potential losses due to the price impact of fire sales have decreased over time for the system. The contribution of funds to this impact is lower than that of banks. However, funds’ relative contribution has risen due to their increased assets under management and banks’ lower leverage and rebalancing towards loans. Should this trend continue, funds will become an increasingly important source of systemic risk.