Financial market development,global financial crisis and economic growth: evidence from developing nations

Emerging and frontier markets in Africa have witnessed various economic and financial reforms aimed at integrating the domestic markets into the global financial market to attract investment. Whether these reforms promote high economic growth remains inconclusive. The paper applies the pooled mean group estimation technique to empirically re-investigate the link between financial market development, global financial crisis, and economic growth in selected African economies. The results strongly support our hypotheses that stock market and banking sector development promotes economic growth in the selected countries. Moreover, financial crisis reduce the positive effects of both the stock market and banking sector developments on economic growth. The study suggests that both the banking sector and stock market are important to deliver the long-run economic growth that the African region desired. Moreover, effort should be made to enact policy measures that would ensure development of the stock market which has received inadequate attention.     

Consumer's Perception of Website Service Quality: An Empirical Study

With the increasing penetration of the Internet, service quality has become one of the key areas of concern for online shopping sites. Website service quality has become a vital factor in making e-commerce successful because comparing the features of products in the online environment is easier, practically free of cost, and saves on time in comparison to conventional offline markets. To empirically explore the critical factors that determine perceptions of the service quality of online shopping sites, researchers adopted the eTailQ scale suggested by Wolfinbarger and Gilly (2003 Wolfinbarger, M., and M. C. Gilly. 2003. eTailQ: dimensionalizing, measuring and predicting etail quality. Journal of retailing 79 (3):183–98. doi:10.1016/s0022-4359(03)00034-4.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Web layout, web info, customer service, fulfillment, and privacy emerged as the critical factors affecting website service quality. Findings of the study are expected to provide valuable insights to academicians in better conceptualizing the constructs and also help marketing practitioners in fine-tuning their strategies by addressing the peculiar needs of the Indian online shoppers.     

Integrating sustainability practices into islamic corporate governance for sustainable firm performance: from the lens of agency and stakeholder theories

Quality & Quantity - While the literature indicates that Islamic Corporate Governance (ICG) practices enhance firm performance, there is scant research on how sustainability practices affect...     

Macroeconomic Response to Oil and Food Price Shocks: A Structural VAR Approach to the Indian Economy

The study analyzed the dynamic impact of oil and food price shocks on the macroeconomy of India, using the monthly time series data from April 1994 to May 2016 in a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework. Being a net food exporter and net oil importer, the economy is found to face deleterious impacts of global oil and food price shocks on its macroeconomic performance. Output responds negatively to oil and food price hikes along with their volatility and positively to the fall in these prices. Inflation responds positively to all the three transformations of shocks with no signs of coming down, highlighting the price downward inflexibility in India. The study could not establish any evidence of negative demand shocks in face of oil and food price volatility. Central bank responds with a contractionary policy stance to negate the influences of external shocks. Forecast error variance decomposition points out the dominance of external shocks in influencing the domestic variables after their own shocks. Finally, the inflation downward rigidity is observed even in the long run.     

Does exchange-rate uncertainty matter in the Malaysia–E.U. bilateral trade? An industry level investigation

Due to ambiguity in the past literature, researchers have examined exchange rate volatility effect on trade using disaggregated data in recent years. Previous research has focused more on aggregated data having aggregation bias which has led to unnecessarily over-generalized findings. This study investigates the impact of exchange rate volatility on the Malaysian bilateral trade flows with European Union using industry level data. Our empirical findings, based on auto-regressive distributed lag framework, suggest that many import and export industries experience exchange rate volatility influence in the short run, while a very small number of industries show this effect in the long run. Moreover, the adverse impact of financial crisis (2007–2008) is more prevalent on import industries compared to export industries.     

Retail Banking and Customer Behaviour: A Study of Self Concept,Satisfaction and Technology Usage

Prior research has investigated the effects of self-image congruence on satisfaction and brand preference. With the help of empirical research, the paper argues that, while self-image congruence may be related to customer satisfaction in a normal context, it may not necessarily affect satisfaction levels when customers are using technology-based self-services. Furthermore, during encounters involving self-service technologies, customers might experience satisfying or dissatisfying incidents which may not be related to their overall satisfaction and brand preference levels. The paper discusses implications for brand managers in the retail banking sector and suggests future research directions.     

Greenfield Investments or Acquisitions: Impacts of Institutional Distance on Establishment Mode Choice of Multinational Enterprises in Emerging Economies

ABSTRACT

The authors analyze the impacts of formal and informal institutional distance on establishment mode choice of multinational enterprises (MNEs) using a sample of 343 foreign direct investments (FDIs) made in selected emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America by the Finnish MNEs. This study contributes to conceptualization and operationalization of institutional distance as well as its application in international business studies. The empirical analysis revealed that high informal institutional distance results in preference of greenfield investments by the Finnish MNEs as the authors hypothesized. However, the authors also found that high formal institutional distance results in preference of acquisitions, which is opposite the study hypothesis as well as the findings of previous studies addressing similar issues.     

Causality Between Exports and Economic Growth: What do the Econometric Studies Tell Us?

This paper contains an assessment of major econometric studies that have estimated the causality between exports and economic growth. These studies have used a variety of methodological approaches, such as Granger causality, cointegration with multivariate error correction models, exogeneity and structural invariance, VAR models with variance decomposition, and impulse response functions. The assessment in this paper refers both to the methodologies employed as well as to the empirical findings. A major conclusion is that empirical support for the export‐led growth in both the developed and the developing countries is considerably weaker than was estimated on the basis of earlier correlation and production function studies.     

New Product Development: Impact of Project Characteristics and Development Practices on Performance

Concurrent product development process and integrated product development teams have emerged as the two dominant new product development (NPD) “best practices” in the literature. Yet empirical evidence of their impact on product development success remains inconclusive. This paper draws upon organizational information processing theory (OIPT) to explore how these two dominant NPD best practices and two key aspects of NPD project characteristics (i.e., project uncertainty and project complexity) directly and jointly affect the NPD performance. Contrary to the “best practice” literature, the analysis, based on 266 NPD projects from three industries (i.e., automotive, electronics, and machinery) across nine countries (i.e., Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United States), found no evidence of any direct impact of process concurrency or team integration on overall NPD performance. Instead, there is evidence of negative impact of the interaction between project uncertainty and concurrent NPD process and positive impact of the interaction between project complexity and team integration on overall NPD performance. Moreover, the study found no evidence of any direct negative impact of project uncertainty or complexity on overall NPD performance as suggested in the literature, but found evidence of a direct positive relationship between project complexity and overall NPD performance. The practical implications of these results are significant. First, neither process concurrency nor team integration should be embraced universally as best practice. Second, process concurrency should be avoided in projects with high uncertainty (i.e., when working with unfamiliar product, market, or technology). Finally, team integration should be encouraged for complex product development projects. For a simple product a loosely integrated team or a more centralized decision process may work well. However, as project complexity increases, team integration becomes essential for improved product development. There is no one‐size‐fits‐all solution for managing NPD projects. The choice of a product development practice should be determined by the project characteristics.