Well-being effects of self-employment: A spatial inquiry

Our paper presents an empirical analysis of entrepreneurial well-being using a large-scale longitudinal household survey from the UK that tracks almost 50,000 individuals across seven waves over the period 2009–2017, as well as a number of exploratory case studies. We contribute to the existing literature by investigating how entrepreneurial well-being varies across locations along the urban-rural continuum, and across wealthy-deprived neighbourhoods. We use a Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) approach to compare the well-being outcomes of individuals who switch into self-employment from waged employment, and show that entrepreneurial well-being, in the form of job satisfaction, is significantly higher for those living in semi-urban locations, relative to those living in urban and rural locations. We argue that semi-urban locations provide an optimal combination of ease of doing business and quality of life. Our results also show that individuals in wealthy neighbourhoods who switch into self-employment experience higher job satisfaction than otherwise comparable individuals living in materially deprived neighbourhoods, although the latter experience greater levels of life satisfaction following the switch.     

Income comparison,collectivism and life satisfaction in Turkey

The current research examines the impact of income comparisons on life satisfaction in Turkey which has a feature of “collectivism” or “low individualism”. This is done by analyzing the results of the “Life Satisfaction Survey” applied by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) for 2011. Using ordered logit estimations, this paper reveals that most of the income comparison, interaction variables and socio-economic variables have a significant explanatory power on life satisfaction levels in Turkey. The main emphasis of the paper is that reference group’s self-reported life satisfaction is related to income comparisons, along with other socioeconomic factors. The impact of comparisons is asymmetric, in that in most cases, under-performing one’s benchmark had a greater effect than out-performing it.     

Innovation Strategy and Entry Deterrence

We model an incumbent’s decision to pursue radical or incremental innovation when facing a rival entrant. The radical innovation may yield lucrative financial returns but entails significant technological and market‐related uncertainties. It is also particularly attractive to the rival entrant: if the market for it pans out, such an innovation obsoletes the existing technology and any incremental improvements to it. Each firm has its own assessment of the market potential for the radical innovation, and the reliability of these market forecasts can differ. We show that when the entrant’s market‐assessment capability is weak, the incumbent will pursue incremental innovation and postpone its plans to develop radical innovation even when it thinks highly of the market potential for the radical innovation. The incumbent does so to avoid validating the high market potential to the entrant, who may otherwise be encouraged to invest aggressively. The incumbent thus prefers to look “soft” with respect to its innovation strategy in order to discourage entry. Even if its innovation strategy is not observable, we show that an incumbent that assesses the commercial potential for a radical innovation favorably may pursue an incremental path and communicate its plans publicly; this strategy serves to reduce entry by affecting the entrant’s beliefs about the market potential of the innovation. Finally, we extend the model to investigate the entrant’s decision to communicate its innovation intentions. We find that the entrant communicates its plans to aggressively pursue radical innovation only if the incumbent’s market‐assessment capabilities are strong. In doing so, the entrant acts preemptively to discourage the incumbent from pursuing the radical innovation, and is less concerned with validating market potential.     

Can free-shipping hurt online retailers?

Quantitative Marketing and Economics - In this paper, we investigate optimal pricing strategies for an online grocery retailer that derives its profits from delivery fees and grocery sales. We base...     

Exploring corporate governance research in accounting journals through latent semantic and topic analyses

The literature on corporate governance (CG) has been expanding at an unprecedented rate since major corporate scandals surfaced, such as Enron, WorldCom, and HealthSouth. Corresponding with accounting's important role in CG, accounting scholars increasingly have investigated CG in recent years, so the body of literature is growing. Although previous attempts have been made to summarize extant literature on CG via reviews, none of these attempts has utilized recent developments in text analyses and natural language processing. This study uses latent semantic and topic analyses to address this research gap by analysing abstracts from 1,399 articles in all accounting journals that the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) has rated A and A*. The ABDC journal list is widely recognized as a journal‐quality indicator across many universities worldwide. The analyses revealed 10 distinct research topics on CG in the ABDC's top accounting journals. The results presented include the five most representative articles for each topic, as distinguished by topic scores. This study carries important practice and policy implications, as it reveals major research streams and exhibits how researchers respond to various CG problems.     

A systems approach to policy analysis and development planning: Construction sector in the Turkish 5-year development plans

In this study, we propose a new model for systems analysis ‘of’ policy and systems analysis ‘for’ policy with the example of construction sector in the Turkish 5-year development plans.Our proposed model—integrated development management model (IDMM)—is conceptually based on the principles of systems thinking and integrated management approach.We present and discuss the results of our work in which we extracted all construction-related policies and strategies from eight 5-year development plans and analyzed them using the IDMM. In the light of the analyses, we give several answers to the question: “Why did the development plans fail to meet their targets in Turkey?” We propose that any development plan has to have claritas–unitas–integritas–consonantia between the management levels (normative, strategic, and operational) and components (goals, structures, and behavior) of IDMM.The paper is the first work that brings the concepts of development planning and foresight together. In a complementary stance, the time of integrating foresight and development planning has come.     

Comparison of national foresight studies by integrated foresight management model

National foresight studies have become a common tool in the last decade of the 20th century. Despite the fact that a lot of comparative studies have been carried out to compare these projects, none of them has been capturing all dimensions and elements of foresight since a comprehensive definition of foresight was missing. The integrated foresight management model is an attempt to provide an integrated and holistic view about the impact of foresight on the management of the future. In this article, a checklist is proposed based on the integrated foresight management model to compare eight national foresight studies. Based on the results, the discussion about “generations” of foresight is revisited and a new definition of “generations” is proposed. The conceptual framework which is the integrated foresight management model and the derived checklist can be developed in the future by expanding the amount of data available for analysis and the number of independent experts to make this comparison.     

Systemic analysis of UK foresight results: Joint application of integrated management model and roadmapping

This paper proposes a new systems approach to foresight studies. The paper will first indicate the complex and conflicting nature of long-term decision-making process. Then, the need for systems approach will be highlighted by the analysis of 1995 UK Delphi survey results and the scenarios of 2000 UK foresight scenarios. The paper proposes two methodologies, namely Integrated Management Model (IMM) and Roadmapping, in order to overcome challenges introduced by the multidimensional characteristics and complex nature of foresight studies. Based on systemic approach, IMM offers a useful way of developing long-term normative policies and strategies and their transformations into actions by considering necessary changes in organizational structures and behaviors. In addition, roadmapping is used to capture, manipulate and manage information to decrease complexity in the foresight by constructing roadmaps. In the paper, IMM and roadmapping are employed first to analyze UK foresight results and then to develop a new methodology to formulate Delphi events and scenarios for the successful implementation of foresight. This paper also promotes the integrated use of foresight techniques such as scenarios and Delphi rather than one for another.     

IPO mechanism selection by using Classification and Regression Trees

The Turkish IPO market gives issuers and underwriters a choice of three different IPO selling mechanisms. The current paper sheds new light on the determinants of these issue procedures within the context of the following methods (i) book building mechanism, (ii) fixed price offer, and (iii) sale through the stock exchange. Most of the empirical models in the IPO literature use binary probit and logit models to determine the factors behind the choice of one method over another and try to answer the question of “why is such a mechanism chosen”. To understand the reasons on issuers’ selection of IPO mechanism, we have conducted a Classification and Regression Trees (CART) methodology to represent decision rules in a form of binary trees. Our results indicate that, CART methodology predicts a firms’ IPO selling mechanism with 77.42% accuracy. The most important variable that determines the IPO selling mechanism is the Arrangement Type between the issuer and the underwriter as in the form of best effort and firm-commitment.     

INTEREST RATE RULES AND WELFARE IN OPEN ECONOMIES

This paper analyses the welfare performance of a set of five alternative interest rate rules in an open economy stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities. A rule with a lagged interest rate term, high feedback on inflation and low feedback on output is found to yield the highest welfare for a small open economy. This result is robust across different degrees of openness, different sources of home and foreign shocks, alternative foreign monetary rules and different specifications for price-setting behaviour. The same rule emerges as both the Nash and cooperative equilibria in a two-country version of the model.