The Land Development Corporation: A System for Selling Rural Real Estate

This research illustrates ways in which rural real estate is converted into potential vacation home sites by large land development corporations. The individual and previously disorganized approach to selling property is replaced by an organized framework that is designed to create a demand for rural real estate.
Unfortunately, development is progressing without serious or adequate consideration being given to a number of specific problems. Developers and local governmental officials often fail to consider the environmental impact of these developments, the adequacy of service facilities being provided or the direct and indirect public costs associated with this type of developmental activity. Because of these shortcomings and others, serious questions arise concerning the desirability of this kind of developmental activity for rural areas.     

Consumer neuroscience the effect of retail brands on the perception of product packaging

Whereas classical marketing research is restricted to purely analyzing reported and/or behavioral data, the new research area of consumer neuroscience might be able to capture unconscious and emotional processes as well. The present study investigates the neural correlates associated with different retail brand frames. The authors assume that the integration of emotions and memories associated with the image and reputation of a retail brand can influence consumers’ perception of a product packaging.     

Consortium Research

Design-oriented research in the Information Systems (IS) domain aims at delivering results which are both of scientific rigor and of relevance for practitioners. Today, however, academic researchers are facing the challenge of gaining access to and capturing knowledge from the practitioner community. Against this background, the paper proposes a method for Consortium Research, which is supposed to facilitate multilateral collaboration of researchers and practitioners during the research process. The method’s design is based on a self-evaluating design process which was carried out over a period of 20 years. The paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it addresses the science of design, since it proposes guidance to researchers for practitioner collaboration during the process of artifact design. Second, the method is an artifact itself, hence, the result of a design-oriented research process.     

Pre-Acquisition Profile of Privately Held Companies Involved in Take-Overs: An Empirical Study

This study addresses the pre-acquisition financial characteristics of privately held, rather small acquiring and acquired companies involved in 143 Belgian take-overs between 1992 and 1994. Specifically, the research examines the profitability, liquidity, financial structure, added value and failure risk using statistical analysis of industryadjusted variables. Our findings show that acquisition is not an alternative to bankruptcy since acquired companies do not report high failure risk, but exhibit higher than industry liquidity and solvency. The acquirers achieve a higher growth rate in total assets and sales than the acquired firms but experience a negative industry-adjusted liquidity and are highly levered, suggesting evidence for a growth-resource mismatch within, but a financial fit between acquirers and their targets.     

Overturning Mundell: Fiscal Policy in a Monetary Union

Central to ongoing debates over the desirability of monetary unions is a supposed trade-off, outlined by Mundell (1961) : a monetary union reduces transactions costs but renders stabilization policy less effective. If shocks across countries are sufficiently correlated, then, according to this argument, delegating monetary policy to a single central bank is not very costly and a monetary union is desirable.
This paper explores this argument in a setting with both monetary and fiscal policies. In an economy with monetary policy alone, we confirm the presence of the trade-off and find that indeed a monetary union will not be welfare improving if the correlation of national shocks is too low. However, fiscal interventions by national governments, combined with a central bank that has the ability to commit to monetary policy, overturn these results. In equilibrium, such a monetary union will be welfare improving for any correlation of shocks.     

Stakeholders perception of attitudes towards major landscape changes held by the public: The case of greenhouse clusters in Flanders

The intensification of greenhouse horticulture is a notable trend in many regions around the world. This intensification causes the grouping of large-scale greenhouses on a single site, into so-called ‘greenhouse clusters’. The main incentive for clustering is the reduction of production costs by sharing infrastructure such as energy, water and gas facilities. Despite these advantages, the public remains sceptic towards greenhouse clusters and resistance in Flanders is frequent and often fierce. The objective of this research is to obtain insight into the reasons, underlying motives and processes that steer this resistance as they are perceived by the agricultural sector. A grounded theory approach resulted in a comprehensive scheme that visualizes the public resistance towards greenhouse clusters as perceived by stakeholders in the agricultural sector, and as such the scheme includes factors that are probably also seen as key factors for the resistance among the stakeholders. Our research shows that the protest actions are complex and cannot be attributed to a single concept such as the NIMBY-concept that is still often put forward by politicians, planners and investors.