The relationship between FSI advertising style and coupon redemption

We investigate the relationship between free-standing insert advertising style and coupon redemption. Results from two experiments indicate that the propensity to clip a coupon can be enhanced by matching ad tone (emotional vs rational) to the nature of a consumer’s primary motivation with respect to coupon usage. Moreover, this result appears to hold for consumers with both procoupon and anticoupon inclinations.

The shipping strategies of internet retailers: Evidence from internet book retailing

Managing the shipment of goods to consumers is one of the central aspects of retail competition on the internet. In this article, we analyze internet retailers’ shipping strategies using data from the internet book retailing industry. We find that, controlling for a variety of observable firm characteristics, firms with lower product prices offer lower shipping fees and higher quality shipping in terms of average delivery time, compared to firms with higher product prices. These patterns cannot be readily reconciled with a large class of models of competition under perfect consumer information. Theories based on imperfect consumer information can explain the findings better.

Advertising budgets in competitive environments

Firms can approach advertising competition either by setting advertising budgets (as in the percentage of sales method) or target sales levels (as in the objective and task approach). We study firms’ incentives to adopt one or the other posture using a two-stage model of duopolistic competition. In the first stage, each firm chooses to commit either to an advertising budget, letting its sales follow from the market response function, or to a desired sales level, promising to adjust its advertising spending accordingly. In the second stage, firms choose the actual levels of their advertising budget or sales target. When prices are exogenous, we show that, due to strategic effects, if a firm benefits from its rival’s advertising (as when advertising increases awareness of the product category) then setting an advertising budget dominates setting a sales target. On the other hand, if a firm is harmed by its rival’s advertising (as when advertising increases the firm’s share of a fixed market), then committing to a sales level dominates. We extend these results in several directions and show that when firms engage in price competition as well as advertising the nature of advertising and product-market competition interact to determine whether setting an advertising budget or sales target dominates.

Internationalisation of technology-oriented firms in Germany and the UK

Based on longitudinal data, this article examines empirically the long-term export behaviour of German and British technology-oriented firms founded between 1987 and 1996. Applying logit models, the results show that firms can overcome high entry costs by acquiring firm-specific assets. Similarly, firm-specific resources prevent high-tech companies from exiting the international market. The strategic role of investment in R&D is stressed in particular by the data.

Founding family leadership and industry profitability

In this article, we argue that firms in high-margin industries can benefit from founding family influence. Specifically, in more profitable markets, the influence of the founding family provides an additional corporate governance-monitoring function. The sample consists of 294 firm-year observations from 98 publicly traded companies headquartered in Sweden, representing approximately half of all non-financial traded firms. Our support that the effect of family leadership in publicly held firms should be assessed in relation to the intensity of industry competition.

Effect of credit guarantee policy on survival and performance of SMEs in Republic of Korea

This study evaluates the effect of credit guarantee on SMEs at the firm level. To estimate the effect of credit guarantee, we analyze relations between credit guarantee, the survival of guaranteed firms, and their productive performance. The result indicates that credit guarantee frequency enabled guaranteed firms to achieve good performances in general. On the contrary, the effect of guarantee amounts is ambiguous in that there is difference between the contemporary effect and the lagged effect. Therefore, we conclude that credit guarantee satisfied partially its goal to alleviate SMEs’ difficulty in acquiring finance and to stabilize employment.

Innovation, R&D cooperation and labor recruitment: evidence from Finland

This article investigates the role played by one type of firm interaction, namely R&D cooperation, and also the acquisition of labor, in the promotion of industrial innovations. We employ a unique innovation dataset from Finland which combines firm specific information about the innovation performance of the firms along with their individual characteristics, as well as firm specific information regarding the origins of their recent labor acquisitions. Analyzing this data allows us to identify the different roles which the knowledge spillovers and labor markets play in the innovation process. Our results suggest that small firms are generally more innovative than large firms; R&D cooperation is an essential feature of innovation, but the variety of cooperation is of little importance; and labor acquisition appears to be only of limited importance for innovation.

The effect of advertising on brand awareness and perceived quality: An empirical investigation using panel data

We use a panel data set that combines annual brand-level advertising expenditures for over three hundred brands with measures of brand awareness and perceived quality from a large-scale consumer survey to study the effect of advertising. Advertising is modeled as a dynamic investment in a brand’s stocks of awareness and perceived quality and we ask how such an investment changes brand awareness and quality perceptions. Our panel data allow us to control for unobserved heterogeneity across brands and to identify the effect of advertising from the time-series variation within brands. They also allow us to account for the endogeneity of advertising through recently developed dynamic panel data estimation techniques. We find that advertising has consistently a significant positive effect on brand awareness but no significant effect on perceived quality.

Banking Competition and SMEs Bank Financing. Evidence from the Italian Provinces

This work investigates whether local differences in banking competition impact on the amount of bank debt used by Italian small and medium sized manufacturing firms. Sample selection and Double Hurdle models are adopted as the process, which results in the choice of bank financing may differ from that determining its amount. Our main finding is that more competitive banking markets seem to be associated with relatively higher usage of bank debt by less transparent firms. On the other hand, a higher banking competition seems to have no effect on the probability of receiving bank loans.

Financial development and the growth of cooperative firms

The purpose of this article is to empirically assess the relationship existing between local financial development and the growth of firms, with a special focus on cooperatives. Using Italian data, a multiplicative interaction model is specified, so as to allow the impact of local banking development to differ between cooperative and non-cooperative firms. The main finding is that although local banking development represents a determinant of firms’ growth, regardless of their legal structure, it plays a special role in boosting the growth of cooperatives. This result provides evidence in favor to the existence of an institutional complementarity relationship between the development of local banking institutions and cooperative firms.

The export intensity of venture capital backed companies

In this study we examine how venture capital (VC) firms influence the export behavior of their investee companies. VC firms perform an important governance function for investee companies by providing monitoring and value-added activities. Drawing on agency theory, the resource-based view of the firm and governance life-cycle theory we hypothesize that the relationship between VC governance resources and investee exporting behavior is moderated by investment stage. Employing a sample of 340 VC-backed firms, our results confirm this hypothesis. Monitoring resources are most effective in promoting export behavior for late-stage ventures and value-added resources in promoting export behavior in early-stage ventures.

Firm size and productivity in Spain: a stochastic frontier analysis

This paper analyses the performance of the small and medium-sized manufacturing firms during the period 1995–2001, focusing on the degree of technical inefficiency and its determinants. We use a micro panel data set to simultaneously estimate a stochastic frontier production function and the inefficiency determinants using an unbalanced panel of manufacturing firms. Our empirical results suggest that small and medium-sized firms tend to be less inefficient than the large firms are. Also, we centre our analysis in the effect on efficiency of some organisational factors related to the managerial ability to use and adjust capital and labour properly.

Succession and firm growth: results from a non-parametric matching approach

The article analyses the relationship between succession and firm performance. Applying a non-parametric matching approach on a panel of roughly 4,000 Austrian family firms we evaluate the impact of actual (past) succession as well as planned (future) successions on employment growth. Analysing succession plans, we do not find a significant difference in employment growth between firms that plan to transfer the firm in the next 10 years and those who do not. In contrast, past succession exerts a significant and positive employment growth effect, which becomes stronger over time.

The impact of public guarantees on credit to SMEs

This article provides an in-depth evaluation of the impact of public credit guarantees to SMEs in increasing credit availability and reducing borrowing costs, without compromising their financial sustainability. Extensive econometric tests have been carried out by comparing the performance of the SMEs that benefited from such guarantees in Italy with a sample of comparable firms. The findings confirm the presence of a causal relationship between the public guarantee and the higher debt leverage of guaranteed firms, as well as their lower debt cost. Italy’s guarantee instrument has proved to be an effective instrument in these respects.

Google: The World’s First Information Utility?

In only ten years, Google has achieved remarkable success from online search-based advertising. Its search engine is dominant, and its IT infrastructure is the most powerful computing system in the world running on over one million computers and serving more than one billion users globally. Google makes money by using its search engine to deliver online advertising alongside responses to user searches for information, goods, maps, directions, and a host of other services. Its capabilities make it likely to become the world’s first information utility – a concept similar to electric utilities that provide services to many corporations and individuals alike. Constant innovation is the key to Google’s success and offers lessons for other companies: hire talented people, have them work in small teams, and give them freedom to excel, but use a rigorous data-based approach to evaluating results and making course adjustments.

Agglomeration, Relative Wage Costs and Foreign Direct Investment—Evidence from Swedish MNCs 1974–1998

This paper examines the relationship between agglomeration economies and relative wage costs in influencing location of multinational corporations. An inflow of firms to certain regions and industries is likely to increase demand for labor. If mobility of labor is low increased costs can be expected to deter additional inflows of firms, albeit agglomeration economies may compensate for higher wages. Despite its important policy implications this relationship has to our knowledge not been exposed to empirical testing. The empirical analysis finds that foreign direct investment has become increasingly sensitive to differences in wage cost across industrialized countries, but also that agglomeration economies related to knowledge externalities positively influences higher costs. The relative strength of these two forces impacts the spatial distribution of production.

Food Advertising and Obesity Prevention: What Role for the European Union?

When the Television Without Frontiers Directive (TVWF Directive) was first adopted in 1989, there was very little discussion on how food advertising should be regulated at Community level. However, things have changed as a result of rising levels of obesity in all EU Member States. Consequently, several stakeholders have suggested that the advertising of unhealthy food to children should be restricted. This article analyses whether and how, bearing the obesity epidemic in mind, the European Union could regulate the marketing of food high in fat, sugar and salt to children (HFSS food). It starts by presenting the evidence supporting such regulation. It then focuses on the contribution which the TVWF Directive and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS Directive) could make to the debate. It finally looks at the broader regulatory framework by discussing their relationship with other instruments of Community law relating to food advertising, and in particular the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCP Directive) and the recently adopted Regulation on nutrition and health claims made on foods.

(Noisy) communication

Communication is central to many settings in marketing and economics. A focal attribute of communication is miscommunication. We model this key characteristic as a noise in the messages communicated, so that the sender of a message is uncertain about its perception by the receiver, and then identify the strategic consequences of miscommunication. We study a model where competing senders (of different types) can invest in improving the precision of the informative but noisy message they send to a receiver, and find that there exists a separating equilibrium where senders’ types are completely revealed. Thus, although communication is noisy it delivers perfect results in equilibrium. This result stems from the fact that a sender’s willingness to invest in improving the precision of their messages can itself serve as a signal. Interestingly, the content of the messages is ignored by the receiver in such a signaling equilibrium, but plays a central role by shaping her beliefs off the equilibrium path (and thus, enables separation between the types). This result also illustrates the uniqueness of the signaling model presented here. Unlike other signaling models, the suggested model does not require that the costs and benefits of the senders will be correlated with their types to achieve separation. The model’s results have implications for various marketing communication tools such as advertising and sales forces.

Science parks: seedbeds of innovation? A duration analysis of firms’ patenting activity

This article investigates the role of Science Parks (SPs) as seedbeds of innovation. It aims to verify if and to what extent firms’ innovative performance is affected by relocating inside a SP. The analysis is structured in the form of a duration model that holds patenting as a repeated and event-dependent phenomenon and accounts for the persistence of innovative activities and the cumulativeness of knowledge. Estimates are based on a conditional risk-set model. The study relies on an original database regarding Finnish SPs: 252 firms that in the year 2002 were located in the Parks and the firms’ lifetime patenting activity, over a 33-year-period. We find support for the existence of spillovers and for the positive role of incubators over those firms joining SPs when very young.

Innovation and productivity in SMEs: empirical evidence for Italy

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation that incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual R&D expenditures and productivity measures. We then apply the model to data on Italian SMEs from the “Survey on Manufacturing Firms” conducted by Mediocredito-Capitalia covering the period 1995–2003. The model is estimated in steps, following the logic of firms’ decisions and outcomes. We find that international competition fosters R&D intensity, especially for high-tech firms. Firm size and R&D intensity, along with investment in equipment, enhances the likelihood of having both process and product innovation. Both these kinds of innovation have a positive impact on firm’s productivity, especially process innovation. Among SMEs, larger and older firms seem to be less productive.