The Strategic Role of Listing Price in Marketing Real Estate: Theory and Evidence

The seller of a real estate property and his broker have two primary goals: to sell the properly for as high a price as possible and as quickly as possible. While these are separate objectives, they are closely related through the listing price of the seller. The listing price affects how long it takes to find a buyer (i.e., Time On the Market = TOM), and TOM influences the price that results from the bargaining between the seller and the buyer. This leaves the seller and his agent with an important question: What is the optimal price to be asked for the property? The objective of this research is to provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of listing price on TOM and the transaction price.     

Factors affecting consumers’ intention towards purchasing halal food in South Africa: a structural equation modelling

This research study highlighted the factors that influence the intention of consumers to buy halal food products. In this study, the researchers have chosen to address the gap in the literature pertaining to non-South African consumers’ purchase intention. Non-South Africans are foreign people who reside in South Africa including immigrants, workers, and students. Through utilising the theory of planned behaviour, this study aims to determine the attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behaviour control, and awareness of non-South African towards purchasing halal food products. This also attempts to identify the strongest factor that influences the purchasing intention of halal food by non-South African consumers. The sample of the study consisted of 230 non-South African consumers in Cape Town. Data were collected through self-administered questionnaires. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to identify the structural relationships among the constructs identified and to test the study hypotheses. The findings of this study indicate that there is a significant relationship between awareness and buying behaviour. Interestingly it found that only the attitude dimension of TPB had a significant relationship with purchase intention, whereas subjective norms and perceived behavioural control did not show a significant relationship with the consumer intention variable.     

Do women borrowers augment financial performance of MFIs?

There is some consensus that depth of outreach and financial performance of Microfinance Institutions (MFI) are positively correlated. A majority of microcredit borrowers are women and since the prevalence of female borrowers is even greater among the very poor, there should be a positive correlation between female borrowers and financial performance. Most of the MFIs target women as preferred borrowers. However, no study to date has investigated the relationship between targeting women and MFI’s sustainability with respect to profitability and yield. Utilizing a panel of 892 MFIs over a period of 10 years, this study shows that increased proportion of women borrowers has a statistically significant positive impact on yield and financial performance of MFIs. Consequently, this article also analyses the implication as to whether female borrowers have better repayment rate than male borrowers.     

Prepayment Penalty as a Screening Mechanism for Default and Prepayment Risks

The objective of this article is to offer a theoretical model of asymmetric information to analyze the screening role of prepayment penalty. We consider both default risk and prepayment risk. What makes the role of prepayment penalty interesting and more complicated is that a borrower's contract choice could send conflicting signals to the lender about that borrower's default and prepayment risk type. This is different from earlier theoretical models of mortgage choice under asymmetric information where a certain aspect of the contract (e.g., discount points or loan‐to‐value ratio) is explored as a screening mechanism for a single risk dimension (default risk or prepayment risk) of the borrower type. We show the existence of separating equilibria where different default and prepayment risk types choose contracts with different combinations of prepayment penalty and interest rate. For certain parameter combinations, the model also generates a pooling equilibrium where all borrower types obtain the same contract. Our analysis could offer a partial explanation for the observation that contracts with prepayment penalties are a lot less prevalent than contracts with points.     

Executive compensation in government-linked companies: evidence from Malaysia

The aim of this study was to explore the characteristics of executive pay, equity ownership incentives and pay–performance relationship in government-controlled firms. Data were hand-collected from the annual reports of 179 companies listed on Bursa Malaysia. The results show that executive pay is lower in government-linked companies. Positive pay–performance relationship is also not evident for this category of firms, which indicates that their executives were largely guaranteed with certain level of pay irrespective of performance. The level of equity ownership incentives provides the executives in government-controlled firms with very little incentive to produce effort that can improve firm performance. Overall, our findings are consistent with the inefficient pay hypothesis developed in this study.     

How Does Mortgage Debt Affect Household Consumption? Micro Evidence from China

The high growth rate of mortgage debt in various emerging and developed economies has captured headlines following the financial crisis. In this article, we investigate how mortgage debt impacts household consumption behavior and various components of household consumption. Utilizing comprehensive household survey data from China, we show that households with a mortgage consume a higher portion of income than households without a mortgage. This is in line with the argument that having a mortgage reduces the uncertainty that the household faces regarding how much to save each month in order to be able to own a house, and this reduced uncertainty leads to lower monthly savings for the purpose of buying a house. We also find that among households with a mortgage, those who spend a larger share of their income on mortgage payments spend less on consumption, reflecting the crowding out effect of mortgage payments on household consumption. Furthermore, we show that a government policy of decreasing the maximum loan‐to‐value ratio has a significant impact on households’ consumption. The article offers the first evidence of the impact of growing mortgage debt on the consumption behavior of households, and will have implications for government policies that encourage mortgage borrowing.     

Market ambiguity and individual investor information demand

We examine whether ambiguity in the market leads to an increase in information demand by individual investors. Drawing on the asset-pricing model proposed by Mele and Sangiorgi (2015), which incorporates market ambiguity, we measure individual information demand using daily Google searches and measure market ambiguity using a metric based on the market trades of institutional investors. We find that individual investors increase their information demand during periods of greater market ambiguity. We also provide evidence that information demand from individual investors spikes around earnings announcement days primarily when market uncertainty is driven by net-selling activity. Overall, these results suggest that the disagreement among institutional investors either represents uncertainty or contributes to the uncertainty related to a stock, leading to increased demand for information from individual investors.     

A Simple Search and Bargaining Model of Real Estate Markets

This paper examines the impact of brokers on buyers' and sellers' search behavior and on the transaction prices in real estate markets. It is shown that the seller and the buyer search less intensively if the house is listed with a broker. The seller gets a higher price when he employs a broker, but the increase in price is smaller than the commission fee. More specifically, the portion of the commission covered by the increase in price is directly related to the bargaining powers of the buyer and the seller. In the special case where the price is determined according to the Nash bargaining solution, the increase in price is shown to be half of the commission fee. It is also shown that an increase in the commission rate increases the equilibrium price but decreases the equilibrium search intensities.     

Racial Differences in the Returns to Financial Literacy Education

We examine financial literacy and the returns to financial literacy education, specifically focusing on the racial financial literacy gap. We confirm evidence that whites have higher financial literacy scores relative to minorities and that financial literacy increases with participation in financial literacy education. However, we find the benefit of participation in financial literacy education is higher for whites than that for minorities. Thus, the impact of being white alone persists, indicating a racial financial literacy and/or behavioral difference despite financial literacy education. Our findings have implications for policymakers interested in narrowing the racial wealth gap via financial literacy education.