Modeling and Extrapolating Wheat Producer Support Using Income and Other Factors

Using wheat market support data from 55 countries for 1961–2011 from the World Bank Agricultural Distortion database, we develop a fixed effect model that shows a more complicated, nonlinear relationship between income and wheat support and its components than previously realised. We find that income generally has a greater effect on border market price support than on domestic price support. Moreover, the difference between these types of support is greater for net importers than for net exporters and has increased with the URAA or WTO accession. Holding other variables constant, the wheat support level of China, driven mainly by border market price support, is projected to rise with future income growth. Meanwhile, Japan is projected to maintain its high level of support, while the US and EU are projected to maintain their lower levels of support. These results are relevant in the context of multilateral trade negotiations, arguing against a narrow focus on past or current policy profiles and for long‐run analyses that might mistakenly rest on the inconsistent assumptions of constant agricultural policies against the backdrop of rising incomes.     

Holocaust concentration camp memorial sites: an exploratory study into expected emotional response

This study explored Dutch people's expected intensity of emotional responses of a potential visit to a concentration camp memorial site in the Netherlands. A total of 1050 online panel members participated in a questionnaire that contained a 33-item emotion scale. Results reveal that individuals with a closeness to the Holocaust expect to feel most emotions more intensely, specifically emotions that are traditionally considered ‘positive’, such as pride, love, joy, inspiration, excitement and affection. Overall, respondents expect to feel disgust, shock, compassion and sadness the strongest. Those who look from the viewpoint of the offenders mainly expect to feel emotions that are traditionally considered ‘negative’, whereas those who took the point of view of the victims also expect a more ‘positive’ emotional reaction to the visit. Managerial implications address aspects of education, storytelling and authenticity.     

DIMENSIONALITY AND DISAGREEMENT: ASYMPTOTIC BELIEF DIVERGENCE IN RESPONSE TO COMMON INFORMATION

We provide a model of boundedly rational, multidimensional learning and characterize when beliefs will converge to the truth. Agents maintain beliefs as marginal probabilities instead of joint probabilities, and agents' information is of lower dimension than the model. As a result, for some observations, agents may face an identification problem affecting the role of data in inference. Beliefs converge to the truth when these observations are rare, but beliefs diverge when observations presenting an identification problem are frequent. Robustly, two agents with differing priors who observe identical, unambiguous information may disagree forever, with stronger disagreement the more information received.     

Foreign entry,quality, and cultural distance: product-level evidence from US movie exports

This paper investigates the effect of quality on foreign entry using data on international movie exports and direct and revealed measures of movie quality. Strict quality sorting is predicted by a model of firm heterogeneity. An alternative model is random entry, in which entry decisions are independent of the movie’s quality. I develop a discrete choice model that allows for both of these extremes as special cases, and use graphical techniques and simulations to compare their predictions to the data. I then use regression analysis to estimate the effect of quality on the propensity to enter foreign markets. A one-standard-deviation increase in quality increases the probability of entry by 25–50 %. Systematic differences in taste for different genre types are used to estimate a measure of cultural distance between countries. Movies in “culturally dependent” genres are less likely to enter foreign markets and their probability of entry is less sensitive to quality. The cultural distance measure enters a gravity equation of US bilateral trade significantly.     

Can Commercialization Improve the Performance of Stock Exchanges Even without Corporatization?

We examine the performance of mutual, demutualized, and publicly listed exchanges and find evidence of improved performance along the exchange governance continuum, with publicly traded exchanges exhibiting better operating performance than demutualized exchanges. However, our robustness test, focusing on the corporatized exchanges that have gone through the three phases of the governance structure, shows that the listed exchanges do not exhibit evidence of incremental gains in efficiency and profitability beyond what they achieved at the demutualization phase. We conclude that commercialization provides sufficient freedom for exchanges to exploit monopoly rents before going public, while corporatization brings about proper valuation of the exchanges’ franchise.     

Value Congruence Awareness: Part 2. DNA Testing Sheds Light on Functionalism

Part 1 of this exploratory study demonstrated that for terminal, instrumental, and work values, supervisors could only accurately assess the extent to which their terminal values are congruent with their employees, whereas, employees could only accurately describe degrees of alignment with their supervisors' work values. Thus, supervisors appear to possess conscious awareness of the terminal values held by their employees and employees similarly possess conscious awareness of their supervisors' work values. Part 2 of the study examined what each of these two parties might do with their conscious knowledge concerning value congruence with the other member. Supervisor ratings and employee self-ratings concerning employee job performance, citizenship, climate fit, working relationship (LMX), and other issues, were correlated with supervisor terminal value congruence estimates and employee work value congruence estimates respectively. For supervisors, only one significant finding was noted, indicating a positive relationship between the supervisors' awareness of terminal value congruence with the employee and the supervisors' estimate of the employee's potential for future promotion. For employees, seven hypotheses received support demonstrating relationships between the employees' 0awareness of supervisor/employee work value congruence and self-ratings of work behaviours, citizenship behaviours, volunteerism behaviours, work climate behaviours, work climate attitudes, work climate organizational-wide attitudes, and the supervisor/employee working relationship. Implications for management and future research are discussed.     

Breast cancer risk perceptions and breast cancer worry: what predicts what?

This longitudinal study explored the relationship between perceived breast cancer risk and worry. We measured both absolute and comparative risk perceptions, and also used the Gail algorithm to assess the accuracy of participants' risk perceptions. Three hundred and one women ages 40–75 participated in a two‐part study assessing how format of breast cancer risk presentation affected perceptions of risk. Relative to their Gail scores, women were biased pessimistically about their own absolute breast cancer risk and yet largely accurate about their comparative breast cancer risk. Perceived comparative risk, but not perceived absolute risk or biases in absolute or comparative risk, predicted subsequent worry. Worry predicted subsequent perceived absolute risk and biases in absolute and comparative risk. These results suggest that women's emotional reactions to breast cancer risk are based on accurate (unbiased) perceptions of their comparative risks. In turn, greater worry prompts a re‐evaluation of absolute risk as well as changes in risk biases. Implications for screening are discussed.     

Conceptualising consumer economic nationalistic tendencies: scale development and validation

Economic nationalism has been identified as a critical component of nationalistic sentiment, influencing cognitions, attitudes, evaluation and purchase intentions. While a distinction is made between economic nationalism and other measures of national and international orientation (i.e. consumer ethnocentrism), previous empirical studies explore the concept in a ‘unified’ form. This study bridges this gap by developing a scale specifically tailored to measure consumer economic nationalistic tendencies. Scale generation, purification, validation and confirmation are achieved through four studies.