Advertising and the Professions

Regulatory restrictions on advertising by professional groups have changed dramatically in recent years. Despite the waning of restrictions, tradition has prevented practitioners from embracing the use of advertising. This article reports results of a survey of 200 medical professionals' attitudes towards advertising. After discussing the implications of the findings, the authors suggest some future research directions.     

If Time Is Money Is It a Common Currency? Time in Anglo,Asian, and Latin Cultures

ABSTRACT

Social time affects the timing and frequency of purchases, the hours consumers patronize businesses, and how long consumers expect products to last. Understanding how culturally based social time attitudes differ will help marketers tailor their offerings and messages to consumers whose concepts of time differ. This exploratory study combined related streams of time literature to examine constructs of social time differences across cultures. Drawing upon a sample of 1377 respondents from six countries representing three cultural groups (Anglo, Latin, and Asian), the study explores the similarity and differences of cultural social time differences among these three groups.     

A Performance Comparison Between Cross-Sectional Stochastic Dominance and Traditional Event Study Methodologies

In this study, the performance of cross-sectional stochastic dominance (SD), first proposed by Falk and Levy (FL) (1989), is compared with three traditional event study methodologies: the Mean Adjusted model, the Market Adjusted model, and the Market and Risk Adjusted Returns model. The comparison technique we use is a simulations approach similar to that of Brown and Warner (BW) (1980). BW show that the Mean Adjusted and Market Adjusted Returns models perform as well as the more sophisticated Market and Risk Adjusted Returns model. FL, however, provide a very compelling argument against the three traditional event study methodologies. The problem, they note, is not the theoretical need for risk adjustment; it is the definition and measurement of risk. FL assert that the observed abnormal returns (or lack thereof) may be due to omitted variables, a market proxy effect, or other specification errors in implementing the traditional event study methodologies.The present research finds that SD analysis without the bootstrap method for statistical testing is not very useful at any level of abnormal return. However, when the bootstrap method of statistical testing is employed, SD is found to perform as well as, and sometimes better than, the three traditional models in detecting simulated abnormal performance at all test levels. The results are consistent with FL's assertion that the improved performance may result from the SD methodology being free from the specification errors inherent in the three traditional event study models.     

The determinants of Internet financial reporting

Responding to the widespread adoption of the Internet and the rapidly growing demands for information from stakeholders, corporations around the world are using the Internet for business and financial disclosures. Internet reporting has the benefits of low cost, wider reach, frequency and speed. Despite these benefits Internet reporting varies across companies and across countries. We study Internet financial reporting (IFR), in particular the presentation and content of IFR, of 660 large companies in 22 countries to identify the firm, and environmental determinants of IFR. The study revealed that firm size, listing on US stock exchanges and technology were firm specific determinants of IFR. Given that IFR is not just about the content of disclosure, but also about employing new presentation methods, the environment of disclosure was included in the research. The overarching disclosure environment of a country was found to be an important environmental driver for IFR presentation and less strongly for IFR content. The presentation aspect of IFR was more associated with the identified determinants than the content of IFR, which suggests that Internet presentation technologies were more related to the determinants than the content of the reports on the company Web sites.     

FDI in space: Spatial autoregressive relationships in foreign direct investment

There are a number of theoretical reasons why foreign direct investment (FDI) into a host country may depend on the FDI in proximate countries. Such spatial interdependence has been largely ignored by the empirical FDI literature, with only a couple recent papers accounting for such issues in their estimation. This paper conducts a general examination of spatial interactions in empirical FDI models using data on US outbound FDI activity. We find that estimated relationships of traditional determinants of FDI are surprisingly robust to inclusion of terms to capture spatial interdependence, even though such interdependence is estimated to be significant. However, we find that both the traditional determinants of FDI and the estimated spatial interdependence are quite sensitive to the sample of countries one examines.     

THE EFFECT OF FDICIA REGULATION ON BANK HOLDING COMPANIES

We examine market reactions to legislative announcements surrounding the passage of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) of 1991. Research shows that bank regulation adversely affects shareholder wealth on the one hand, yet often provides government subsidies on the other. The removal of Federal regulators' discretionary authority and the imposition of mandatory regulations in the FDICIA have an overall negative effect on our sample of bank holding companies. The results are consistent with either the costly regulation hypothesis or the decreased subsidies hypothesis.     

The state,capital and land

Only the business community in this country and those who have been associated with it all their lives, can fully appreciate the extent to which the present ownership of land hampers and embarrasses trade and industry (Lloyd George, ‘The People's Budget’).     

Combining Expert Systems and Hypertext: Opportunities and Obstacles

Hypertext discussions are occurring more frequently at expert systems conferences. Hypertext is not an expert system language or expert system shell, but instead it is simultaneously a method of storing and retrieving data. The growing interest in hypertext in the expert system domain is because the combination of hypertext capabilities and expert systems creates a compelling synergistic relationship (Oren, 1987). During a panel discussion at the Second International Symposium on Expert Systems in Business, Finance and Accounting, Bill Swartout compared traditional expert systems to hypertext by saying that the knowledge base (e.g. the production rules) of an expert system can be thought of as formal knowledge and hypertext can be thought of as informal knowledge. This article will demonstrate how this informal knowledge can add power to traditional expert systems by increasing the flexibility of the explanation facilities and thereby the appeal of the system to a broader range of users. The article also will discuss how expert systems can improve the functionality of hypertext systems by adding intelligence to traditional hypertext systems. This article is divided into three sections. The first describes basic hypertext concepts. The second section shows how hypertext can enhance expert systems and, conversely, how expert systems can enhance hypertext systems. The final section discusses some potential problems and concerns that must be considered when designing a hypertext system.