Accessing Tourists’ Unconscious Associations about International Destinations: Data Fuzzification of Reaction Times in the Implicit Association Test

Starting with the proposition that shorter reaction time implies stronger implicit preference, this study assesses destination-related top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) by examining respondent reaction time to specific destination icons. A total 87 college students were recruited to complete self-report surveys and computer-based implicit association tests (IAT). The results show that participants’ responses vary depending on the two measures (i.e., self-report surveys and IATs). Through a data fuzzification method, the study demonstrates that the IAT would enhance our understanding of tourist TOMA, particularly related to familiarity issues. The implications of the study pertain to destination marketing are fully discussed.     

范围经济视域下范围产品的技术关联性研究——基于有形产品的视角

企业通过充分利用剩余资源生产加工出来的不同产品之间形成了资源的相关性。企业带来范围经济的一组产品之间必然存在着内在的关联。技术作为一种极其重要的生产要素,它通过产品的技术关联为企业创造范围经济成为范围产品关联的重要表现方式。范围产品之间存在着局部独立关联、局部交叉关联、技术整体关联和技术混合关联四种形式。技术的规模化、员工的专业化、设备的高效化是技术关联创造范围经济的内在机制。企业在实施多元化战略时,要充分考虑自身所处的行业特征及经营阶段,采取合适的技术关联方式,充分创造范围经济。     

Political uncertainty and a firm's credit risk: Evidence from the international CDS market

Using a large sample of firms with single-name credit default swap (CDS) contracts in 30 countries, we document the evidence that political uncertainty, proxied by national election dummy, is positively related to firm-level credit risk. Specifically, this positive relation is more pronounced for the firms that have no political connection or poor international diversification, and in the countries with higher political uncertainty and lower investor protections. Further, by using a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence to support idiosyncratic volatility and debt rollover channels through which political uncertainty affects the credit risk of individual firm.     

Advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation.     

How historical analogies in newspapers of five countries make sense of major events: 9/11, Mumbai and Tahrir Square

We analyze how historical analogies are used in the media to make sense of novel events. While earlier work focused on single case studies, this is the first quantitative analysis comparing historical analogies invoked in three events in newspapers from five countries. With very high intercoder reliability we found 881 invocations of historical analogies. We found an interesting contrast between the roles of historical analogies in foreign policy decision making vs. newspaper articles. When the task is advocacy for policy choice, a compelling historical analogy will be one in which the causal mechanisms are as similar as possible to the current situation so that similar actions are likely to lead to similar results. Instead, newspapers spend more time at the early stages of sense-making and help the audience understand just a few features of the current situation. Newspapers thus offer a much broader range of historical analogies without much regard to maximizing similarity.     

Financial returns to collecting rare political economy books

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period 1975–2019, I find that in those 45 years investing in rare political economy books yielded an average annual real rate of return of 2.8%, which is well in line with the returns to collecting rare books of classical literature. Compared with other collectibles such as fine art, investing in rare books turns out to be financially more profitable.     

On the timing of political regime changes in resource-dependent economies

We consider a resource-dependent economy initially ruled by the elite. The transition from the autocratic to a more democratic regime takes place only if the citizens decide to revolt against the elite. The occurrence of a revolution primarily depends on the autocratic regime vulnerability and the level of inequalities, both being driven by the elite׳s redistribution and repression policies. First, we show that when a political transition is inevitable, the elite choose the maximum rate of redistribution to lengthen their period in office. Second, we find that the duration of the autocratic regime is linked to resource abundance, and how it relates to the elite׳s policies. More resources lead to a shorter reign of a redistributive regime, which may not be the case of a repressive regime. Finally, we interpret the Arab spring sequence in light of our findings.     

Politically connected directors and firm value: Evidence from forced resignations in China

The Central Committee of the Communist Party in China issued the No. 18 Document on Oct 30, 2013 to ban government officials from taking any positions in Chinese firms. Using this decision as a unique natural experiment, we examine the causal relation between political connections and firm valuation. We find that the value of firms with politically connected directors drops significantly upon the announcements of the new rule and the resulting director resignations. Furthermore, the decline in valuation is more pronounced when a firm is in a regulated industry, and when a departing director is of vital importance for building and maintaining political connections. Moreover, non-state-owned enterprises suffer more loss of value than their state-owned peers following the resignations of politically-connected directors. Finally, firms exhibit insignificant value loss when their departing directors are of less political importance in allocating resources. These results suggest that hiring politically connected directors has a positive effect on firm valuation in China.     

Globalization,political institutions,financial liberalization,and performance of the insurance industry

This paper investigates the impacts of globalization, political institutions, and financial liberalization on the performance and risk-taking of insurance firms covering 1324 individual firms in 30 selected OECD countries. We find that greater globalization and a stable political institution lead insurance companies to exhibit a better performance—i.e., insurers adjust their strategies while being aware of institutional changes. By contrast, financial liberalization has an inverse impact on insurance company performance. Thus, greater globalization and a stable political environment both drive less risk-taking for insurers. These findings are particularly important to insurance markets’ competitors and national policymakers.     

How should Engel's law be formulated?

Engel's law expresses a “negative stochastic association” of income and the proportion of income that is spent on food. However, there are many quite different notions of “negative stochastic association” and consequently there are different ways of defining Engel's law. We relate these different concepts to Engel's original statistical analysis and show that one must give credit to Engel for the first non-parametric statistical analysis of budget-data.