Bouncing Back from Extreme Weather Events: Some Preliminary Findings on Resilience Barriers Facing Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises

Extreme weather events (EWEs) pose unprecedented threats to modern societies and represent a much‐debated issue strongly interlinked with current development policies. Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), which constitute a driving force of economic growth, employment and total value added, remain highly vulnerable to and ill prepared for such environmental perturbations. This study investigates barriers to SMEs’ resilience to EWEs in an attempt to shed light on enabling factors that can define effective organizational responses to non‐linear environmental stimuli. Relying on structural equation modeling and data gathered from 109 SMEs that recently experienced EWE impacts, we link the general concept of SMEs’ resilience barriers to EWEs with a series of elements to determine specific internal and external factors that contribute the most to EWE resilience. In particular, external barriers of institutional conditions and mechanisms of support and guidance as well as internal barriers of resources and managerial perceptions are found to be the most critical ones in determining resilience. The assessment offers essential research evidence for practitioners on SME management and sets forth linkages with current mechanisms for policy interventions towards an appropriate resilience agenda for SMEs. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

House price determinants in Athens: a spatial econometric approach

In this paper, we try to identify the price determinants in the biggest real estate market of Greece, the metropolitan area of Athens. For that purpose, various spatial econometric models are used to explore their prediction ability and we are displaying the variations in property prices for the wider area of Athens. These models have been compared based on different criteria such as model fit, the Akaike information criterion and variance of the residuals. Our results indicate that, in our case, the spatial general model is the most appropriate simultaneous autoregressive model when dealing with spatially autocorrelated prices of housing properties data, in terms of our selection criteria.     

Sustainability reporting,materiality, and accountability assessment in the airport industry

Air travel is, nowadays, recognized as being one of the most popular modes of transport. Air transport is among the most significant contributors to the world gross domestic product and is accountable for a great environmental and social impact. Driven by the well‐established sustainability discourse and the vital role businesses can play in disseminating the sustainable development concept, this paper attempted to map airport industry's most material operational aspects and assess airport operators' accountability level on disclosing corporate information regarding airports' economic, environmental, and social performance. In this context, 33 reports and 903 material issues representing 193 international airports were reviewed and assessed, and a methodology for benchmarking the accountability level of best reporting airport operators was developed, showcasing materiality assessment as a useful management tool for strengthening airport operators' business strategy and enhancing their corporate performance. The paper indicated that (a) customer focus (i.e., health, safety and satisfaction), economic viability, and business continuity and preparedness are operational aspects of high materiality and (b) the disclosure level, especially concerning specific performance indicators, is still moderate. In conclusion, this study has shown that materiality assessment gains ground as a management tool among airports' management teams and the completeness of Sustainability reports is positively correlated with the “level” of adherence as described by the Global Reporting Initiative.     

Quality,Satisfaction and Customers’ Future Intention: The Case of Hotels’ Fitness Centers in Cyprus

In an era of fierce competition, financial hardship, and volatile customer expectations the hospitality industry is seeking out new revenue centers that can both enrich the customer experience, and contribute to financial success. Capturing the attention of the industry, fitness centers have become a fundamental component of the contemporary hospitality experience with numerous strategic, operational and tactical implications. Responding to the need for further empirical investigation, the study, by adopting a quantitative methodology, holistically investigates quality, satisfaction, and behavioral intention in fitness centers currently operating in upscale hospitality establishments in Cyprus. Findings suggest that satisfaction with the provision of fitness services in hotels is primarily associated with the dimensions of employee behavior and workout facilities. Moreover, workout facilities was the only quality dimension which was significantly associated with the respondents’ intention to renew their membership, whereas a strong relationship between satisfaction and future intention was substantiated.     

Behavioural Economics,Hyperbolic Discounting and Environmental Policy

This paper reviews some recent research in “behavioural economics” with an application to environmental issues. Empirical results from behavioural economics provide a reminder that human behaviour is context-dependent, implying that policy may go awry if based upon models of behaviour which are inappropriate to the contexts in which decisions are made. Recognizing that agents may, in some contexts, systematically make mistakes raises challenging questions about the role of “paternalism” in government policy. The paper considers the research into hyperbolic discounting, and examines the implications for environmental policy. We develop a model of resource management under hyperbolic discounting, which shows that if a planner is unable to commit to a policy, the temptation to re-evaluate the policy in future could lead to an inadvertent collapse in the stocks of a natural resource.     

Factors Favoring Greece’s Inward Foreign Direct Investment in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis: An Exploratory Survey

Greece has suffered the worst from the late 2000s global financial crisis. Despite the completion of the economic adjustment program the rate of recovery in Greece is still weak. The liquidity constraints in the Greek economy imply that the investment shock, which will accelerate its recovery rate, will be an outcome of investment inflows by privatizations and/or other opportunities arising to foreign investors (inward FDI) due to the devaluation of the assets in Greece caused by the crisis. However, the level of attracted by the Greek economy has always been well below the European Union average. This paper investigates the factors favoring inward FDI in Greece after the crisis. A survey is made by the use of a questionnaire for the collection of primary data on the activity of multinationals in Greece and non-parametric methods are used for investigating the attractiveness of the Greek market and the decision to invest.     

The Moderating Effect of Perceived Effectiveness of SMEs' Marketing Function on the Network Ties—Strategic Adaptiveness Relationship

This study examines the critical role of perceived effectiveness of the Marketing function (MF) in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in leveraging entrepreneurial network ties to improve strategic adaptiveness (SA). The study tests whether a MF perceived as effective by SMEs’ managers/owners moderates the relationship between SMEs network ties and SA required for improved performance. Findings of a moderated regression analysis on a sample of 263 Croatian SMEs indicate that network ties contribute significantly to their SA, and that a MF perceived as effective only moderates the impact of customer and competitor ties on SMEs’ SA. Research and practical implications are discussed.     

On the duality principle in option pricing: semimartingale setting

The purpose of this paper is to describe the appropriate mathematical framework for the study of the duality principle in option pricing. We consider models where prices evolve as general exponential semimartingales and provide a complete characterization of the dual process under the dual measure. Particular cases of these models are the ones driven by Brownian motions and by Lévy processes, which have been considered in several papers. Generally speaking, the duality principle states that the calculation of the price of a call option for a model with price process S=e ^H (with respect to the measure P) is equivalent to the calculation of the price of a put option for a suitable dual model S′=e ^H′ (with respect to the dual measure P′). More sophisticated duality results are derived for a broad spectrum of exotic options. The second named author acknowledges the financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Eb 66/9-2). This research was carried out while the third named author was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.     

Time scale evaluation of economic forecasts

A maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform is used to obtain time scale decompositions of economic forecasts and their errors. The generated time scale components can be used in loss measures and tests for comparing forecast accuracy to evaluate whether the forecasts accurately capture the cyclical features of the data.