Employing structural topic modelling to explore perceived service quality attributes in Airbnb accommodation

This study employs the structural topic model to extract service quality attributes from 242,020 Airbnb reviews in Malaysia. 22 service related topics were extracted from the corpus and four topics have not appeared in previous Airbnb studies. A widely used modified SERVQUAL questionnaire (MSQ) is cross-validated in this study by comparing its service quality attributes with the results of the topic modelling, which indicates that this MSQ can cover general Airbnb service quality attributes. This study also examines the different preferences of Malaysian and international Airbnb users and the changing patterns of the top six service quality attributes during a five-year period. The findings reveal that Malaysian Airbnb users care more about the appearance and location of the property, and international Airbnb users pay more attention to whether the property can accommodate a group of people. In addition, communication with the host is found to play an increasingly important role in Airbnb users’ lodging experiences.     

Does reputation of sponsors matter in IPO? Evidence from Hong Kong

Contrary to other markets where underwriters perform a combined role of underwriting and sponsoring in an Initial Public Offering (IPO), IPO issuers in Hong Kong must appoint at least one sponsor in addition to the underwriters. The splitting of the single role of underwriters into two separate ones offers an ideal setting to disentangle the effects of the two roles and to examine which of the two roles—sponsor or underwriter—is more important in explaining IPO underpricing and initial volatility in the Hong Kong equity market. Interestingly, our findings provide supportive evidence that the sponsor reputation does matter in an IPO and it is even more significant than the underwriter reputation in explaining the IPO underpricing phenomenon. Given the recent high-tech fervor, our research goes deeper to examine specifically the role of sponsors on high-tech firms, with results indicating that the reliance on sponsors is higher for traditional issuers than for technology firms. We further discover that sponsors and underwriters are playing substitution roles rather than complementary roles. In order to examine the regulatory policy impact, our research also compares the role of IPO sponsors before and after the launch of the new sponsor regulatory regime in 2013. The empirical findings lend support to our argument that after the launch of the new regulations, public awareness of sponsors is raised, respect towards more reputable sponsor increases, and thus, the role of sponsors becomes more important than before.     

Becoming a tree when I will be dead? Why not! Generation X,Y and Z,and innovative green death practices

Within the theoretical field of ethical consumption, the study focuses on consumer behavior and innovative green death practices. While scarcely investigated in the marketing and consumer behavior research domains, at least four main reasons spur to consider the funeral industry as an interesting subject of enquiry: i) the sector boasts of a significant economic relevance; ii) it is extremely impactful from an environmental and social point of view; iii) it is witnessing interesting innovative processes in the direction of social and environmental sustainability; iv) consumer movements are rising all over the world asking for more sustainable death practices. Thus, adopting an augmented version of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), which includes individuals’ environmentally responsible consumption, and egoistic and altruistic environmental concern, the study investigates behavioral intention to adopt innovative green death practices (a green funeral) of people belonging to three different generations: X, Y, and Z. A purposive sample of 627 Italian people participated in an online the survey. Collected data were analyzed adopting an ordinal logit model. The results confirm the TPB predictive power also in the field of green funeral behavioral intention. Furthermore, environmentally responsible consumption and environmental concern – even though only in its altruistic component – positively influence behavioral intention, and generation exerts a moderating effect among the examined constructs. Overall, the research attempts to enrich the literature on ethical consumption by exploring the underinvestigated phenomenon of buying behavior of unsought and end-of-life products, that of green funerals, and provide managerial recommendations to funeral service sellers.     

Asset pricing and energy consumption risk

This paper proposes energy consumption in the US as a new measure for the consumption capital asset pricing model. We find that (i) industrial energy growth produces reasonable values for the relative risk aversion coefficient and the implied risk-free rate; (ii) compared to alternative consumption measures, industrial energy performs well in explaining the cross-sectional variation in stock returns with the lowest implied risk aversion and pricing errors; (iii) the industrial energy consumption risk model performs equally well as the Fama–French three-factor model in the cross-sectional asset pricing tests; and (iv) total energy consumption risk is priced in the presence of the Fama–French factor risks.     

Linking of sample data to small areas

We consider methods for estimating the means of survey variables in domains of a finite population, where sample sizes are too small to obtain reliable direct estimates. We construct generalized compositions from the direct and traditional design-based synthetic estimators and propose the methodology for evaluating their coefficients. This methodology measures similarities among sample elements and estimates of the domain means. We propose the compositions for two cases of auxiliary information: domain-level characteristics are available; true means of auxiliary variables are available for the estimation domains, and unit-level auxiliary vectors are known for the sample elements. In the simulation study, we show where the generalized compositions improve the traditional synthetic and composite estimators.     

Foreign direct investment and economic growth: Is more financial development better?

We investigate the extent to which an increase in financial development affects the positive effect of foreign direct investment on economic growth. Although the financial sector is beneficial for economic growth, the effect of further financial development on growth is found to become insignificant. Using a dynamic panel threshold model on 62 middle- and high-income countries spanning the period 1987–2016, we re-examine the possible nonlinearity between finance, foreign direct investment, and growth. Consistent with the “vanishing effect” of financial development, we find significant evidence that foreign direct investment fosters growth in general, but the growth effect of foreign direct investment becomes negligible when the ratio of private sector credit to gross domestic product exceeds 95.6%. This finding is robust to different econometric methods, various subsamples and interaction analyses, and distinct financial development indicators.     

Identifying Price Reviews by Firms: An Econometric Approach

Price reviews are a potentially costly activity. A significant fraction of unchanged prices may stem from firms not reviewing prices, rather than from obstacles to changing prices per se, such as menu costs. In this paper, we disentangle these two causes of price stickiness by estimating an inflated ordered probit model on a panel of French manufacturing firms. The results point to a low frequency of price reviews, suggestive of the relevance of information costs as a determinant of the observed price stickiness. In view of the “inattentive producers” literature, pointing that the source of price rigidity matters, this is suggestive of a large real effect of monetary policy.     

Impacts of Australia’s free trade agreements on trade in agricultural products: an aggregative and disaggregative analysis

The importance of free trade agreements (FTAs) has been increasing as such agreements help reduce barriers to trade. This paper estimates the agricultural trade creation and export diversion effects of Australia’s free trade agreements (FTAs) at the aggregate and disaggregate levels, using the Poisson pseudo‐maximum‐likelihood (PPML) estimator. It includes 24 of Australia’s major trading partner countries comprising FTA and non‐FTA members and covers 22 years from 1996 to 2017. The heteroscedasticity robust regression error specification test (RESET) confirms the relevance of PPML over the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimator. Results showed that China–Australia, Korea–Australia, Australia–USA and Japan–Australia have larger trade creation effects in the agricultural sector. At the commodity level, variation in trade creation effects is estimated from the different trade agreements. Among the selected commodities, the larger effects were generated in trade in sugar and wine by the implementation of the majority of the trade agreements. Overall, the trade creation was greater than the export diversion of the FTAs. The findings of the study have implications for Australia’s future trade agreements.     

The Competitive Advantage of Collaboration – Throwing New Light on The Nordic Model

ABSTRACT

In one of the most influential contributions to modern political economy, Hall and Soskice have launched a distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘coordinated’ market economies, placing the Nordic countries firmly in the latter category. We argue that, while the H&S distinction may serve classificatory purposes, seeing the Nordic model in terms of ‘coordinated capitalism’ blurs the distinctive features of the Nordic countries’ success as productive and fair economies. We contend that the central formula behind this success lies in what we call the Nordic model’s ambidexterity – the capacity to combine collaborative and competitive elements and skilfully navigate between them. Using an interdisciplinary perspective (inspired by organisation theory, cultural semiotics and evolutionary analysis), we provide a conceptual basis for reinterpreting the Nordic Model as an ambidextrous combination of culturally rooted, collaborative strategies that are subsequently competitively exposed. The article illustrates the workings of this ambidexterity in three societal domains: work life (including female participation), resource management – illustrated by the Norwegian petro-economy – and international business management and regulation with a focus on CSR. In each case we will show how collaboration is intertwined with pragmatic competitive exposure, yielding high productivity, high welfare, as well as fair income and wealth distribution.     

财政压力、地方政府行为与环境污染

地方政府是生态环境治理的关键主体，财政压力以地方政府行为作为传导变量，对环境污染及其治理效果有深刻影响。实证检验地方政府行为的促污和治污效应对财政压力冲击的响应。结果表明：激励生产型地方政府行为促进污染增加，在财政压力下促进污染增加效应的激化，即压力越大越污染。环境治理型地方政府行为中的环境保护支出对污染治理有效，财政压力对其治污效应有提升作用；排污费征收不治污、反促污，财政高压使其促污效应强化。在财政增支减收、压力不断攀升的背景下，可从治理体制性财政压力诱因、强化对地方政府行为监督和约束以及优化治理工具提升环境治理绩效等方面来平抑财政压力通过地方政府行为引发的环境污染加剧。