Organizational resources enabling service responsiveness: Evidence from Greece

This article examines the implementation of relationship marketing strategy based on a sample of business-to-business firms operating in Greece. Organizational resources, including a focus on learning and flexibility/adaptation in strategic planning, are demonstrated to be antecedents of effective relationship marketing strategies. The possession of these resources lead to superior customer performance (as measured by customer satisfaction and loyalty) and, ultimately, superior financial performance (as measured by profit levels, profit margin, and ROI). Our results provide support for the development of organizational resources that foster and enable relationship marketing in business-to-business environments since such resources are linked with improved firm performance.     

Exploring Diversity in Accounting through Faculty Journal Perceptions*

The accounting research community has frequently been described as being both diverse and focused on local issues. At the same time, increasing pressure is being placed on researchers to publish in internationally highly regarded journals. Since faculty evaluations depend on journal rankings, such rankings need to take into account the diversity of the research community. Therefore, this study examines how contextual factors such as a researcher's location and research orientation may influence journal quality perceptions and readership patterns based on an international sample of 1,230 accounting academics. The perceived quality of journals is measured across a number of dimensions, including journal familiarity, average rank position, percent of respondents who classify a journal as top tier, and readership. The results support that a significant variation in journal quality perceptions exists based on a researcher's geographic origin, research orientation, and affiliation with a journal.     

Quantifying preferential trading in the e-MID interbank market

Interbank markets allow credit institutions to exchange capital for purposes of liquidity management. These markets are among the most liquid markets in the financial system. However, liquidity of interbank markets dropped during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and such a lack of liquidity influenced the entire economic system. In this paper, we analyse transaction data from the e-MID market which is the only electronic interbank market in the Euro Area and US, over a period of 11 years (1999–2009). We adapt a method developed to detect statistically validated links in a network, in order to reveal preferential trading in a directed network. Preferential trading between banks is detected by comparing empirically observed trading relationships with a null hypothesis that assumes random trading among banks doing a heterogeneous number of transactions. Preferential trading patterns are revealed at time windows of 3-maintenance periods. We show that preferential trading is observed throughout the whole period of analysis and that the number of preferential trading links does not show any significant trend in time, in spite of a decreasing trend in the number of pairs of banks making transactions. We observe that preferential trading connections typically involve large trading volumes. During the crisis, we also observe that transactions occurring between banks with a preferential connection occur at larger interest rates than the complement set—an effect that is not observed before the crisis.     

Factors determining municipal broadband strategies across Europe

Recognizing that high-speed broadband connectivity emerges as a key element for growth, city authorities engage in fiber access deployments to empower their local communities in the digital economy. Currently, a growing number of municipal fiber projects are underway or planned while the international community and the telecommunications industry are yet undecided about the role and type of municipal intervention. This paper takes a holistic view of municipal broadband in Europe, aiming to understand the factors that determine municipal strategies in fixed Next-Generation Access (NGA) networks and the implications of municipal broadband to regulation and markets. The data suggests that the determining factors are (a) the engagement of public utilities; (b) the involvement of the private sector in joint infrastructure projects; (c) the local demand for retail and wholesale services; and (d) the institutional and regulatory framework at the European and national scale. The findings of the study indicate that (a) municipal initiatives are highly dependent on national factors, thus the resulting interventions fare strong resemblance within a single country, while they can be substantially different across national contexts; (b) current EU provisions for public involvement in broadband development stimulate municipal plans for large scale arrangements; and (c) national regulatory frameworks, that primarily address vertical integrated incumbents and nationwide markets, may need adjustments to handle emerging access monopolies of regional and city broadband infrastructures.     

Going Down the Slippery Slope of Legitimacy Lies in Early-Stage Ventures: The Role of Moral Disengagement

Journal of Business Ethics - Aristotle’s philosophical insights into ethics, wisdom and practice have drawn the attention of scholars. In the current professional context where ethics are...     

Price linkages in the international skim milk powder market: empirical evidence from nonparametric and time‐varying copulas

The objective of this article is to assess the integration of the international skim milk powder (SMP) market. This is pursued using monthly data over 2001 to 2014 from the three principal SMP‐producing regions (the EU, the USA and Oceania) and nonparametric kernel‐based and time‐varying copulas. The empirical results point to a strong and an increasing degree of overall price co‐movement and to statistically significant probabilities for joint price crashes and booms. While the EU and Oceania have been the regions with the highest degree of integration, the USA has been catching up with them.     

A test of cross section dependence for a linear dynamic panel model with regressors

This paper proposes a new testing procedure for detecting error cross section dependence after estimating a linear dynamic panel data model with regressors using the generalised method of moments (GMM). The test is valid when the cross-sectional dimension of the panel is large relative to the time series dimension. Importantly, our approach allows one to examine whether any error cross section dependence remains after including time dummies (or after transforming the data in terms of deviations from time-specific averages), which will be the case under heterogeneous error cross section dependence. Finite sample simulation-based results suggest that our tests perform well, particularly the version based on the [Blundell, R., Bond, S., 1998. Initial conditions and moment restrictions in dynamic panel data models. Journal of Econometrics 87, 115–143] system GMM estimator. In addition, it is shown that the system GMM estimator, based only on partial instruments consisting of the regressors, can be a reliable alternative to the standard GMM estimators under heterogeneous error cross section dependence. The proposed tests are applied to employment equations using UK firm data and the results show little evidence of heterogeneous error cross section dependence.     

Perceptual Differences of Marketing Journals: A Worldwide Perspective

The practice of evaluating faculty and business schools based on their journal publications has increased the emphasis on research output in peer reviewed journals. Since journal standings are a frequently debated issue, this study seeks to examine the perceptual differences of journals between different segments of marketing academics. Based on a worldwide online survey, journals are assessed in terms of four subjective quality metrics: journal familiarity, average rank position, percent of respondents who classify a journal as top tier, and readership. It is demonstrated that an individual's geographic origin, research interests or journal affiliation can have a significant impact on journal rankings.     

A Partially Heterogeneous Framework for Analyzing Panel Data

This article proposes a partially heterogeneous framework for the analysis of panel data with fixed T. In particular, the population of cross‐sectional units is grouped into clusters, such that slope parameter homogeneity is maintained only within clusters. Our method assumes no a priori information about the number of clusters and cluster membership and relies on the data instead. The unknown number of clusters and the corresponding partition are determined based on the concept of ‘partitional clustering’, using an information‐based criterion. It is shown that this is strongly consistent, that is, it selects the true number of clusters with probability one as N→∞. Simulation experiments show that the proposed criterion performs well even with moderate N and the resulting parameter estimates are close to the true values. We apply the method in a panel data set of commercial banks in the US and we find five clusters, with significant differences in the slope parameters across clusters.