Art festival attendance: Who attends and why with implications on developing future festival attractiveness

Art festivals are an increasing part of a destination's event portfolio, asserted by destination marketing and management agencies to hopefully promote community engagement including attracting tourism, trade, and talent to the destination. With art festivals a common annual event feature at destinations, the competition for festival participation has increased, creating a greater need to isolate those festival attributes that are specifically appealing to targeted visitor segments. Examining participant profile and motives to attend the publically funded annually recurring Macau Arts Festival (MAF), the findings of this case study showed mostly community involvement with participants being mainly well educated, middle-aged, and female. While an aim of the festival, international participation in the festival was limited. A factor analysis on motives to attend the festival revealed that while there was common agreement with previous literature on reasons to attend, Macau's cultural background provided increased opportunity for the MAF to differentiate the event. Marketing implications also suggested investigating a communication strategy that could differ between attracting local and international audiences. With a significant cost to public finances, greater scrutiny on the appeal of the festival to specific local and international audiences was recommended to better present the cost to benefit argument for hosting.     

Unexpected SEC Resource Constraints and Comment Letter Quality

We investigate whether reviews of transactional filings by the SEC unexpectedly constrain SEC resources, leading to lower quality comment letters for periodic reports. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires the SEC to review periodic reports (e.g., 10-Ks) at least once every three years. However, the SEC also reviews transactional filings (e.g., initial public offerings and acquisitions), which are unpredictable and often occur in waves. We find comment letters for periodic reports are of lower quality (in terms of outputs, inputs, and firm responses) during periods of abnormally high transactional filings. We also find that comment letters issued during periods of abnormally high versus low transactional filings are associated with increased information asymmetry and lower earnings response coefficients in the quarter after the resolution of the comment letter. Overall, our results suggest that unexpected resource constraints affect the quality of SEC oversight of periodic reports.     

Cash Position, Credit Risk and Hedging

In choosing between forward and spot hedging, cash constrained and/or high credit risk firms are more likely to hedge foreign currency transactions forward than firms of greater quality. This arises because the cost of the levered component of a spot hedge is greater than the cost of the unlevered component and this premium increases with higher credit risk. For given cash and credit characteristics, importers are more (less) likely to hedge forward than exporters if transactions costs in the home security market are less (more) than the corresponding costs in the foreign security market.     

Performance appraisals and discrimination suits: Do courts pay attention to validity?

Performance appraisals have been reviewed by courts when there is an allegation they were used in a discriminatory manner. This article evaluates several federal court cases where performance appraisals were at issue. This analysis leads to the conclusion that courts give very little direction to employers and employees as to whether a particular type of performance appraisal system will withstand judicial scrutiny.     

Efficiency of the office properties market

This paper reports the results of an efficient markets test of the Dallas-Fort Worth office properties market. ARIMA models using a comprehensive data set did not produce superior forecasts. The results provide further evidence of the efficiency of real estate markets.     

Impacts of alternative degrees of freedom corrections in two and three stage least squares

There is a lack of uniformity concerning the appropriate degrees of freedom to use in estimating simultaneous equations. This issue is examined through a Monte Carlo study comparing estimates and inferences obtained using alternative choices of degrees of freedom in two and three stage least squares. While 2SLS estimates do not depend upon this choice, 3SLS estimates do. However, in the study the choice had little impact on 3SLS estimates. But the results strongly suggest that approximate tests conventionally used are much more accurate for both methods if estimated variances account for lost degrees of freedom.