The influence of multiple types of service convenience on behavioral intentions: The mediating role of consumer satisfaction in a Taiwanese leisure setting

Service organizations are looking for ways to better deliver consumer value and to increase consumers’ purchase intentions. Organizations can differentiate themselves by making their services easier to consume, that is, more convenient. Service convenience is complex and is comprised of five convenience types, namely, decision, access, transaction, benefit, and post-benefit. Research into service convenience has examined how these types of convenience affect consumers’ experiences and intentions, but limited research has studied it within a leisure setting. With data collected from a sample of 443 Taiwanese, this research uses mediated regression to examine the influence of the five types of convenience on consumers’ behavioral intentions, and the mediating role satisfaction plays in the relationship. The findings indicate that only benefit and post-benefit convenience are associated with improved behavioral intentions and that satisfaction partially mediates the relationship for those two types of convenience. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

China-United States joint ventures: a typological model of goal congruence and cultural understanding and their importance for effective human resource management

Little has been written about enhancing human resource management effectiveness in joint ventures with China. This study presented a typology of potential relationships between Chinese and American partners in a joint venture based on goal congruence and cultural understanding. Each relationship is described, and implications for the management of human resources are discussed.     

Value relevance of discretionary accruals in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998

This study investigates whether and how the information values of reported earnings and their components changed around the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Regression analyses on a sample of 10,406 firm-years from nine Asian countries from 1995 to 2000 reveal the following. First, the crisis led to a significant decline in the value relevance of discretionary accruals but had no significant impact on the value relevance of non-discretionary earnings components such as operating cash flows and non-discretionary accruals. Second, the decrease in the value relevance of discretionary accruals during the crisis was more severe for firms in countries with weak institutions than for those in countries with strong institutions. Third, the value relevance of discretionary accruals declined to a greater extent for firms with high information asymmetries than for firms with low information asymmetries. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks.     

A New Measure of Trade Openness

Trade openness, popularly measured as (X + M)/GDP in the hundreds of studies published to date, consistently considers the world's biggest trading countries such as the USA, the UK, Japan and Germany to be closed economies, irrespective of the data set used. This study suggests a composite trade share measure that more completely reflects reality by combining two important dimensions of trade openness: trade share and the relative importance of a country's trade level to total world trade. Robustness tests support the new proposed measure in lieu of the conventional measure of openness and suggest that the latter may not only be incomplete but may also overstate the impact of trade on such things as income and the environment.     

Europe's Second Markets for Small Companies

European stock exchanges have repeatedly opened second markets to list small companies. We explain the motivation for the creation of these second markets, and the reasons why many of them have failed. We find that the average long‐run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) on second markets is dramatically worse than for main market IPOs. However, the second markets have provided firms with the opportunity to raise funds at the IPO and in follow‐on offerings. The relative success of London's AIM, which is an exchange‐regulated market with minimal regulations, has led other European stock exchanges to establish similar non‐EU regulated second markets. Most of the IPOs on these exchange‐regulated markets are offered exclusively to institutional investors, and are equivalent to private placements. These IPOs, which frequently raise only a few million euros, rarely develop liquid trading.     

Effects of a short-term linguistic class on communication competence of international nurses: implications for practice, policy, and research

International nurses face a host of challenges in their transition and adaptation to the U.S. health care environment. Language and communication barriers have been ranked consistently as a top concern by employers, regulatory agencies, and international nurses themselves. Researchers in this study examined the effects of a 10-week linguistic class on the reduction of phonologic errors affecting foreign accent in a sample of international nurses. The linguistic course appeared to be effective in improving the international nurses' linguistic competence by reducing their phonologic errors significantly. Moreover, the intervention narrowed the linguistic gap between international nurses from non-English and English-speaking countries. Findings from this study have important implications for practice, policy, and research regarding quality of care, as well as for the transition, job satisfaction, and retention of international nurses.     

Financial factors in foreign direct investments: A dynamic analysis of international data

In contrast to existing empirical foreign direct investment (FDI) studies that examine the static effects of strategic or real economic variables, this paper focuses on the impacts of financial variables on FDI outflows for four largest industrial countries using dynamic time series methods. The results show that FDI outflows are non-stationary but have a long-run cointegrating relationship with real exchange rates. In addition, there are causal effects of exchange rates on direct investments in the short run. Multivariate cointegration analysis shows the significance of financial channels such as cost of capital and real wealth through which the real exchange rate effects operate. The effects of financial channels are comparable to those of the real wage rate channel. Overall, the present paper provides significant and methodologically consistent international evidence for dynamic interactions between FDIs and financial variables.