The impact of foreign interest rates on the economy: The role of the exchange rate regime

It is often argued that many economies are affected by conditions in foreign countries. This paper explores the connection between interest rates in major industrial countries and annual real output growth in other countries. The results show that high foreign interest rates have a contractionary effect on annual real GDP growth in the domestic economy, but that this effect is centered on countries with fixed exchange rates. The paper then examines the potential channels through which major-country interest rates affect other economies. The effect of foreign interest rates on domestic interest rates is the most likely channel when compared with other possibilities, such as a trade effect.     

Corporate identity and the societal constituent

Increasingly, the management of corporations’ identities is being conducted in the context of empowered, socially engaged, culturally adept social actors who present organizations with a range of conflicting societal and economic expectations. These social actors, referred to as societal constituents, claim moral legitimacy to influence the decisions and actions of corporations they feel have affected their personal and community space. Firms’ environments come to be regarded as complex webs of social groups whereby the cultural meanings embedded in their corporate brands come to be morphed across the range of social groups. As such, the management of corporate brands becomes a task of symbolic facilitation and managing contradictions. Jay M. Handelman (jhandelman@business.queensu.ca) is an associate professor of marketing in the Queen’s University School of Business, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His articles have appeared in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Consumer Research, and theJournal of Retailing. His current research interests include the application of institutional theory to help understand how product and corporate brands come to be managed in the context of a turbulent social environment. His teaching interests include brand management, marketing ethics, marketing theory and history, and interpretive research methods.     

YOUNG BABY BOOMERS' WEALTH

Researchers know relatively little about the beginnings of wealth accumulation. This paper analyzes the wealth of young baby boomers, individuals born from 1957 to 1964, using a previously ignored wealth data set, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). First, a detailed data quality evaluation is performed. Findings suggest that not cleaning NLSY79 wealth data causes nonsensical results, but there are no other serious problems. Analyzing the cleaned wealth data quantifies many stylized facts. For example, the typical baby boomer's wealth holdings increase by more than $2,000 a year. Married females hold more wealth than either married or unmarried males. Finally, while young boomers start with a majority of their wealth in illiquid holdings such as automobiles and possessions, they rapidly shift their wealth holdings into homes as they grow older.     

The Effect of Corporate Governance on Investment: Evidence from Real Estate Investment Trusts

This study investigates the relation between firms' investment choices and various governance mechanisms, using a sample of real estate investment trusts (REITs). We find evidence that the responsiveness of REITs' investment expenditures to their opportunities depends on their corporate governance structures. Within the set of governance mechanisms that we examine, we find particularly strong links between investment behavior and ownership. Specifically, we find that the investment choices of REITs are more closely tied to Tobin's q if they have greater institutional ownership or if they have lower director and officer stock ownership. These results are consistent with institutional owners monitoring the firm's investment policies as well as with high insider ownership allowing managers to follow their own investment agendas.     

An empirical investigation and comparison of neural networks and regression for scanner data analysis

The objective of this study is to examine neural networks as an alternative to traditional statistical methods for the analysis of scanner data. The results of the study showed that neural networks can be an effective alternative to regression for modeling and predicting the effects of retailer activity on brand sales. The neural network models exhibited better performance in terms of both mean squared error and R² than the regression model.     

伦敦商学院：如何看待事会自我评议

组织内如何做出决策，这一问题甚至在管理学被视为一项研究领域之前，就吸引着管理研究者。然而，尽管研究人员、顾问和认真的从业者付出了种种努力，但在大多数组织里，决策仍然和以往一样停留在业余水平。重要决策往往是匆忙采取的即兴之作。更糟的是，几乎没几个组织会费心反省糟糕决定是如何做出的，以便从经验中吸取教训。     

The international assignment of stabilization policies under fixed and flexible exchange rates

This paper investigates the ability of policymakers to achieve stabilization targets in the face of spillover effects from abroad. In the context of a two-country Keynesian model, each country's stabilization policy turns out to have a comparative advantage over domestic economic activity under fixed exchange rates and sterilization. By assigning policy domestically, both employment targets can be eventually achieved despite trade linkage spillovers. The same conclusion is reached for the case of floating exchange rates despite spillover effects associated with capital mobility. Finally, it is discovered that coordination under fixed exchange rates may benefit one country and injure the other.     

An experiment with multiple currencies: the American monetary system from 1838–60

This paper finds that the combination of state regulated bank notes and deposits acting as the principal form of money and heterogeneous bank laws in the antebellum United States led to a loosely fixed exchange rate system where states were capable of exercising limited independent monetary policy. It finds that bank note circulation and deposits moved differently across the states, and based on narrative evidence, it seems states were aware of their ability to affect the money supply of their economies and that some states did in fact try to change their banking systems to do so.     

Influences on what consumers know and what they think they know regarding marketer pricing tactics

Although a considerable amount of research has investigated consumer knowledge of individual prices, consumer knowledge of marketer pricing tactics (e.g., partitioned prices, pennies a day) has received only limited attention. In the current research, a model depicting hypothesized antecedents of consumer knowledge (both accurate and self‐perceived) regarding pricing tactics marketers use is proposed and then investigated in two studies. Tests of the model provided support for the hypothesized antecedents of both objective and subjective pricing tactic knowledge and suggested that experience is a key moderator of the objective pricing tactic knowledge–subjective pricing tactic knowledge relationship. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.