The effect of controversial global sourcing practices on the ethical judgments and intentions of U.S. consumers

Global sourcing has led to lower cost and more effective supply chains for many companies. However, when the cost-driven practices of many suppliers in these chains come to light there is often considerable debate over the ethics of these practices. This research uses the well-known Hunt–Vitell framework as the theoretical foundation for a structural equation model of the deontological and teleological evaluations used by consumers when making ethical judgments of a firm's controversial cost-driven global sourcing practices. Data from a large-scale U.S. consumer survey show the importance of deontological and teleological evaluations in forming consumers’ ethical judgments of global sourcing practices, and establish a strong relationship between ethical judgment and the intention of consumers to alter consumption of a firm's products. Extensions to the framework and demographic analyses for age, gender, and income provide insights as to how perceptions of these practices affect consumer evaluations of a company involved in global sourcing and how consumers actualize their resultant intentions.     

Sustainable consumption in China: New trends and research interests

China is currently the largest CO₂ emitter in the world and demonstrates one of the highest levels of energy consumption. The sustainable consumption behavior has increased in China, especially in urban cities. Some clear evidence of this includes food purchasing behavior. Recent studies have also suggested that considering full product information transparency, consumers are willing to pay premium prices for products. With this in mind, sustainable consumption must still be facilitated by related policies, regulations, and tools. This study focuses on sustainable consumption behavior in China and collects and analyzes the literature from the last decade (2007–2017) on the topic. In so doing, it highlights new trends and research topics against the background of circular economy development. The method of systematic review is applied. The review is categorized into several main groups: national policies and regulations, the green awareness of consumers, the definition of related concepts, the barriers between sustainable consumption and the circular economy, and the indicators for circular economy assessment in China. Future research directions are discussed. Furthermore, future challenges are addressed from three perspectives: sustainable consumption facilitating the circular economy, “cradle‐to‐cradle” practices, and the link between the European Union and China. This is a fundamental study in the research domain of sustainable consumption behavior. It provides added value that benefits both academic researchers and decision makers. It also sheds light on the further study of sustainable consumption behavior in China from a macroeconomic perspective.     

How much could refuges help us recover from a global catastrophe?

Some global catastrophes (such as nuclear wars, pandemics, or an asteroid collision) might destroy civilization. Some propose building well-stocked shelters constantly staffed with people trained to rebuild civilization in such cases. These “refuges” would have an unimpressive expected cost per life saved, but could conceivably have an impressive expected cost per future generation allowed to exist. From some ethical perspectives that highly value future generations, building refuges may therefore seem like a promising idea. However, several factors significantly dilute the potential impact of refuges, even if the proposed catastrophes occur. Government/private disaster shelters, people working on submarines, and isolated peoples who prefer to be left alone serve these purposes to some extent already. Many proposed catastrophes do too much/too little damage for refuges to help, affect the environment in ways that make refuges largely irrelevant, or otherwise give relatively limited advantages to the people in refuges. In global food crises or social collapse scenarios, refuges would add little to aggregate stocks of population, resources, food, and relevant skills; but they may add something unique in terms of isolation and coordination. These potential benefits of refuges seem the most promising, and may be worthy of further analysis.     

What is the major determinant of cross-border banking flows?

This study examines the major determinant of cross-border credit flows through global banks across 70 countries. Employing a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model, we decompose volatilities of banking flows into the contribution of a global common factor, regional common factor, and country-specific factor. The results indicate that the global and regional common factor explains about 40–50 percent of volatility in overall cross-border banking flows. In particular, the contribution of the global common factor increased in the 2000s. Simultaneously, main determinants are largely heterogeneous across countries: this implies that the desirable policy response to credit inflows may differ for each host country.     

A dominance solvable global game with strategic substitutes

Global games emerged as an approach to equilibrium selection. For a general setting with supermodular payoffs, unique selection of equilibrium has been obtained through iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies. For the case of global games with strategic substitutes, uniqueness of equilibrium has not been proved by iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies, making the equilibrium less appealing. In this work we provide a condition for dominance solvability in a simple three-player binary-action global game with strategic substitutes. This opens an unexplored research agenda on the study of global games with strategic substitutes.     

A PRIMER ON GLOBAL GAMES APPLIED TO MACROECONOMICS AND FINANCE

This paper shows how to solve global games applied to macroeconomics and finance. We ascertain the roles of public and private information for the determination of a unique equilibrium, and discuss the informative role of market prices. We examine the impact of public information on social welfare, comparing models with and without complementarities at the aggregate level.     

长江经济带农业绿色生产效率及其时空分异特征研究

［目的］从静态分析和动态分析两个方面，阐释长江经济带农业绿色生产效率和农业绿色全要素生产率的时空分异特征以及生产率增长来源，以期为提高长江经济带农业绿色发展质量提供科学决策依据。［方法］文章基于资源环境约束的角度，利用MinDS模型和Global Malmquist Luenberger指数相结合的方法，测算长江经济带农业绿色生产效率和农业绿色全要素生产率，并将农业全要素生产率变化分解为纯技术效率变化（PEC）、纯技术变化（PTC）、规模效率变化（SEEC）和规模技术变化（SETC）4个部分。［结果］（1）长江经济带农业绿色生产效率水平较高，且呈不断增长趋势，下游地区的农业绿色生产效率高于中、上游，且中、上游与下游地区的差距不断拉大； （2）长江经济带农业绿色全要素生产率增长较快，以3年为1个周期，呈现波动式上升趋势，其增长主要源于纯技术进步和规模技术提高； （3）长江经济带下游农业绿色全要素生产率增长率最高，上游次之，中游最低，其中，下游农业绿色全要素生产率增长主要源于纯技术进步，中游是纯技术效率改进、纯技术进步和规模技术提高共同作用的结果，上游则源于纯技术效率改进、纯技术进步和规模效率提高。［结论］长江经济带上、中、下游三大区域的农业绿色发展水平和发展能力存在较大差异，需制定差异化政策，以调整农业增长模式，促进农业转型升级，实现高质量发展。     

A test for inflation persistence in Nigeria using fractional integration & fractional cointegration techniques

This study seeks to test for inflation persistence in Nigeria using the recently developed fractional cointegration VAR model by Johansen and Nielsen (2012) and complemented with univariate fractional integration techniques. The empirical results suggest evidence of high inflation persistence in Nigeria albeit with a lower trend after the global financial crisis. Also, the major classes of inflation – headline, core and food inflation rates, share long run properties regardless of the sample used. This suggests that any policy action directed at a particular class of inflation will have a spill-over effect on the other classes given the strong association among them. The ability to also exploit the fractional cointegration in a multivariate set-up when modeling inflation is a major contribution of this study and ignoring same may lead to wrong conclusions. However, the results are sensitive to the choice of data frequency.     

Financial statement comparability and bank risk-taking

This study examines the relationship between financial statement comparability and bank risk-taking. Our analysis of a sample of publicly listed U.S. banks over the 1994–2019 period shows that banks with more comparable financial statements are related to significantly less risk-taking. We also find that the negative relationship between comparability and risk-taking is more pronounced for firms with more severe moral hazard and agency problems. Our documented findings are robust across alternative measures of comparability and risk-taking and considering change analysis, after controlling for strength of corporate governance and using propensity score matching and two-stage least squares estimation to address endogeneity concerns. Our analysis also shows that the relationship between financial statement comparability and bank risk-taking is stronger for smaller banks than for larger banks. Overall, this study provides unique insights into the role of financial statement comparability in curbing risk-taking in the banking sector.