"Marking-to-Market" and Treasury-Bill Futures Prices: Some Empirical Evidence

Financial economists have not found empirical evidence of a “marking‐to‐market” effect in Treasury‐bill futures contracts, despite a firm theoretical basis for its existence. Therefore, we speculate that confounding effects, possibly due to liquidity preferences, influence futures‐forward price spreads. By using an empirical specification that allows for both effects, we present empirical evidence that Treasury‐bill futures‐forward price spreads are sensitive to the volatility of the underlying commodity in ways predicted by the theory of the marking‐to‐market effect.     

Internationalization of Smaller Firms: Opportunity Development through Networks

This article aims to contribute toward a better understanding of the opportunity development process that rapidly internationalizing small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) undergo. Little is known about how SMEs overcome challenges in the process of recognizing and exploiting market opportunities during their rapid expansion abroad. This article presents a longitudinal case study that illustrates how a firm's relationships with business, social, and political actors enhance its opportunity development during the internationalization process. The findings highlight that conducting matching activities at different levels helps the firm overcome challenges and succeed in developing new opportunities for continued expansion abroad. This study contributes to research on rapidly internationalizing firms by broadening the empirical and theoretical understanding of the opportunity development process for smaller firms. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Corporate image and destination image: the moderating effect of the motivations on the destination image of Spain in South Korea

The research objective is to analyse the destination image and corporate image of Spain among the Korean university population. We study the moderating effect of the motivation between two potential groups of tourists, escapers (tourists who travel for relaxation) and seekers (tourists who travel for seeking culture). Information was collected in South Korea via a questionnaire and the data were analysed using structural equation and multi-group analysis. For both groups, the results show that the corporate image has influence on the cognitive component of the destination image, motivation impacts on the cognitive and affective dimensions, and the cognitive component effects the affective component.     

Measuring retail performance in an omni-channel world

Abstract

Driven by global advances in technology and changes in consumer buying behavior, brick-and-mortar retailers are being forced to become omni-channel retailers. This calls for new metrics for evaluating retail performance. We examine the challenges facing the retail industry, the metrics that traditional brick-and-mortar stores have used as well as the new metrics that retail industry experts are suggesting for online retailing. A conceptual framework for omni-channel retailers is suggested.     

Confronting the Jobs Crisis

We argue that increasing effective demand via traditional Keynesian stimuli is inadequate to resolve the job crisis in the U.S. Rather, we need a radical restructuring of the job market that necessitates a national industrial policy. We claim that to achieve such a restructuring we need a mass social movement that goes beyond standard legislative lobbying. We conclude with two sets of questions. The first set asks about the creation of new social movements, the second about leadership coming from forces within the current social movements     

Coordination in evolving networks with endogenous decay

This paper studies an evolutionary model of network formation with endogenous decay, in which agents benefit both from direct and indirect connections. In addition to forming (costly) links, agents choose actions for a coordination game that determines the level of decay of each link. We address the issues of coordination (long-run equilibrium selection) and network formation by means of stochastic stability techniques. We find that the long-run behavior of the system depends on a fine interplay of the link cost and the trade-off between efficiency and risk-dominance.     

A Permanent Jobs Program for the U.S.: Economic Restructuring to Meet Human Needs

This paper proposes a jobs program to address both the chronic problems of unemployment and underemployment in the U.S. economy and the debilitating economic and political impacts of growing inequality in the U.S. The jobs program consists of three parts. First, the reduction of unemployment and underemployment by stimulating output, either under public or private auspices, of infrastructure, or social investment, in areas such as: transportation, education, health care, human services, and parks. Second, to recognize and respond to the failure of the private market to provide needed current public services, which will include a massive upgrading of pay and working conditions of these ??human service?? jobs by expanding public employment, sharing the costs of an enhanced and expanded social safety net. Third, to, explicitly and as a matter of industrial policy, target government investment and overall job growth towards the industries of the future, particularly in the areas of energy, agriculture, and other broadly defined ??green?? technologies.     

The Practice of Networking: An Ethical Approach

Focusing on the virtue-ethics tradition, this article analyzes the practice of networking within the business context. First, it distinguishes three types of networking: utilitarian, emotional, and virtuous. Virtuous networking does not exclude utilitarian and emotional networking, but these latter forms should be practiced with reciprocity. It is argued that virtuous networking requires (1) acting with good faith, sharing honest goals, and participating in licit activities; (2) sharing information, knowledge, and resources with reciprocity and even with gratuity; (3) serving with justice in asymmetrical power relationships; and (4) exercising a positive ethical influence within the network. Specific forms of unethical behavior in the practice of networking include (1) bad faith or abuse of trust, (2) opportunism, (3) abuse and misuse of power, (4) network cronyism, (5) networking as disguised bribery, and (6) cooperating in the wrongdoing of other actors of the network. The article concludes with some remarks about the role of ethics in social networks.     

The Impact of Product Aesthetics on the Evaluation of Industrial Products

In spite of the fact that product appearance would not seem to bear upon performance, this article provides evidence that the appearance of an industrial product may have an impact on its evaluation. Utilizing a conjoint scaling approach, Mel Yamamoto and David R. Lambert find that industrial product appearance exerts an influence, which in some circumstances exceeds the influence of certain product performance or price attributes. They suggest that attention paid to product aesthetics may have a payoff in terms of sales performance. And further, the impact of product appearance affects people in different organizational functions, across a range of technical orientations.