The major determinants of logistic performance in a global perspective: evidence from panel data analysis

The global logistics industry has grown significantly and logistics has become an important sector of the business economic system and a major global economic activity in recent years. Logistics activities accelerate economic and productivity growth. Efficient logistics is also important to a country’s competitiveness and source of employment. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and understand the major determinants of logistics performance (LP) to further lift the LP of countries. Using unbalanced panel data of 93 selected countries from 2007 to 2014, the present research attempts to critically investigate the major determinants of LP. In estimating the model, this study prefers to use static panel data approach owing to limited data. The findings of the present study reveal that (a) countries with low level of corruption and stable political environment are likely to yield a high level of LP; (b) improvement in resources supply such as infrastructure, technology, labour, and education also have a significant positive effect on LP. Therefore, institutional reforms and upgrading resources will effectively accelerate LP.     

The empowerment expectation–perception gap: An examination of three alternative models

Previous empowerment research has focused on subordinate perceptions of empowering leadership and its outcomes. Met‐expectations theory suggests that subordinate expectations of leader behaviours are essential in forming their a posteriori evaluations. To address the lack of investigation of individual expectations in the empowerment literature, in this study, we explore how subordinates' empowerment expectations and perceptions combine to influence their job satisfaction and psychological empowerment based on three alternative, theoretically derived met‐expectation models, namely, the disconfirmation model, the ideal‐point model, and the experiences‐only model. The results of a 2‐stage study of 114 respondents indicate that employees are more satisfied with their work when perceived empowerment exceeds expectations. However, both empowerment perceptions and expectations positively contribute to higher psychological empowerment. We then discuss implications and directions for future research.     

Using a dual-frame design to improve phone surveys on political attitudes: developing a weighting strategy for limited external information in Hong Kong

Quality & Quantity - In recent years, rapid increases in mobile phone ownership and decreases in landline users have led to potential biases in landline phone survey estimations. Mobile-only...     

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.     

TAXATION IN MATCHING MARKETS

We analyze the effects of taxation in two-sided matching markets where agents have heterogeneous preferences over potential partners. Our model provides a continuous link between models of matching with and without transfers. Taxes generate inefficiency on the allocative margin, by changing who matches with whom. This allocative inefficiency can be nonmonotonic, but is weakly increasing in the tax rate under linear taxation if each worker has negative nonpecuniary utility of working. We adapt existing econometric methods for markets without taxes to our setting, and estimate preferences in the college-coach football market. We show through simulations that standard methods inaccurately measure deadweight loss.     

Segmenting and Understanding Publics in a Social Media Information Sharing Network: An Interactional and Dynamic Approach

This study segments social media publics and analyzes their informational behaviors during organizational crises. With a public-centric perspective, our study highlights how social media publics interact with each other (i.e., interdependence) and share different information through crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Following the situational approach to segmentation, we identify different types of social media publics (i.e., influentials, broadcasters, and followers) based on their informational behaviors and their positions in an information sharing network. Crisis managers are recommended to pay more attention to publics with higher influence, namely key influentials and broadcasters. In addition, we try to understand social media publics’ changing concerns by analyzing whether and how publics share messages of different themes and forms in different stages of a crisis. Crisis managers are recommended to customize crisis communication content to fit publics’ needs, prioritize organizational resources, and maximize positive communication effect. With big data from Chipotle’s E. coli crisis, we analyzed the Twitter activities surrounding this crisis over a 6-month period. Our segmentation receives initial support from the network analysis and content analysis on the Twitter data, which lays the foundation for effective social media crisis management.     

Twenty years of Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese rule: being absorbed under ‘one country,two systems’

This paper examines the implementation of ‘one country, two systems’ (1C2S) in the two former Western colonies, Hong Kong and Macao, as a policy innovation in managing inter-governmental relations of a large, diverse country like China. 1C2S embodies internal tensions because the Hong Kong and Chinese governments have multiple and often incompatible goals. After 20 years, these two special administrative regions (SARs) of China are gradually being absorbed.     

Changes in analysts’ stock recommendations following regulatory action against their brokerage

Review of Accounting Studies - Despite the importance of sell-side analysts in the capital markets, we know little about the effectiveness of routine monitoring of the sell-side industry. We...