The impact of Financial Times Deutschland news on stock prices: post-announcement drifts and inattention of investors

In this paper, we analyze the impact of Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) news on stock prices and trading volumes. Based on a sample of all news about German DAX, MDAX, and SDAX companies published in the news section of the FTD between 2006 and 2010, our results show that articles that contain positive (negative) information are associated with significantly positive (negative) abnormal returns and abnormal trading volumes around their publication. Furthermore, our results show an initial underreaction to these articles and subsequent post-publication drift. Based on the inattention hypothesis, we show that high-attention news (proxied by abnormal trading volume) almost instantaneously moves stock prices to their new valuation levels, whereas the price adjustment process takes much longer following low-attention news. Our results also hold within multivariate regressions where we additionally control for stock-specific characteristics (e.g., institutional ownership, size, and price-to-book ratio) as well as other attention-grabbing events (as measured by ad hoc announcements and cover-page news articles). Finally, we show that results primarily hold in the non-crisis period.     

The global field of multi-family offices: An institutionalist perspective

We apply the notion of the organisational field to internationally operating multi-family offices. These organisations specialise on the preservation of enterprising and geographically dispersed families’ fortunes. They provide their services across generations and countries. On the basis of secondary data of Bloomberg’s Top 50 Family Offices, we show that they constitute a global organisational field that comprises two clusters of homogeneity. Clients may decide between two different configurations of activities, depending on their preferences regarding asset management, resource management, family management and service architecture. The findings also reveal that multi-family offices make relatively similar value propositions all over the world. The distinctiveness of the clusters within the field is not driven by the embeddedness of the multi-family offices in different national environments or their various degrees of international experience. Rather, it is weakly affected by two out of four possible value propositions, namely the exclusiveness and the transparency of services.     

The power of social media in regional tourism development: a case study from Ōkunoshima Island in Hiroshima,Japan

This research letter introduces a new insight into the power of social media in tourism development using a case study from ōkunoshima Island in Hiroshima, Japan. The island has been experiencing an unprecedented tourism boom since 2014, when videos posted by social media led to an increase in international tourists in a formerly domestic destination. The results of our structured interviews suggest that tourists acquired information about the island through social media. This result implicated social media’s power in developing tourism in peripheral regional areas, which are often left out from the international tourism circuit.     

Analyzing the Efficiency of County Road Production – Evidence from Eastern German Counties

This study analyzes the efficiency of the road production by local governments using data envelopment analysis. The production of roads is a costly public service, which makes an efficiency analysis in this field an interesting subject. I enhance the previous literature, first, by examining the differences in the efficiencies of eastern German counties while considering the deformation of the pavement and foundation of roads, which previous studies have not included due to data limitations. Second, I use a unique dataset on road quality for my efficiency analysis and show that the efficiency levels differ from those in studies that apply proxies, such as the number of accidents, to capture the quality of roads. These findings indicate that there is a great need to develop reliable variables to describe government services. Additionally, I show that the correlations between efficiency levels and county characteristics vary greatly depending on the quality indicator used.     

What Does Granger Causality Prove? A Critical Examination of the Interpretation of Granger Causality Results on Price Effects of Index Trading in Agricultural Commodity Markets

The influence of index trading on price levels, returns, spreads or volatility in agricultural commodity markets is frequently investigated with bivariate Granger Causality (GC) tests. A joint review of existing empirical studies reveals scant and inconsistent evidence of GC from index activity to prices. Some findings of reverse GC from prices to index activity are reported. The literature offers three different interpretations of GC test results: (i) as prima facie causal evidence; (ii) as a test for informational efficiency of the markets; or (iii) as a test for the ability of one variable to improve the forecast of another variable. A critical examination of these interpretations against an extended theoretical background reveals that none allows direct inferences about the existence or absence of an influence from index trading activity on the price mechanism in the market. This severely limits the usefulness of a stand‐alone application of GC tests.     

Organizational public value and employee life satisfaction: the mediating roles of work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

Building on Meynhardt’s public value concept, which has been developed to make transparent an organization’s contributions to the common good, we investigate the influence of organizational common good practices in the perceptions of employees (measured as public value) on employees’ work attitudes and life satisfaction. The proposed model is tested on a sample of 1045 Swiss employees taken from the 2015 Swiss Public Value Atlas data-set. Study findings reveal that organizational public value is positively related to employee life satisfaction, and that this relationship is partially mediated by work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Further, we show that employee common good orientations strengthen the positive impact of organizational public value on employee work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Results also provide evidence that the indirect effects of organizational public value on employee life satisfaction via work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior are stronger at higher employee common good orientation levels.