TOURISM SENSE‐MAKING: THE ROLE OF THE SENSES AND TRAVEL JOURNALISM

The tourist experience is corporeal and multisensory. Tourism organizations, therefore, need to pay attention to the sensual content of promotional messages conveyed to potential tourists to provide incentives for seeking enriched experiences of place. Together with other image formation agents, travelogues (travel articles published in newspapers and magazines) offer information on and prompt imagination about destinations that help frame visitors' expectations and influence their subsequent travel decisions and behaviors. This article content‐analyzed 199 travelogues about New Zealand to identify relationships between regions and perceptions based on sensory allusions. It was found that the reporting of New Zealand as a whole by visiting journalists tended to utilize an appeal to all senses, but this was not true of individual destinations. It is suggested that urban destinations such as Auckland and Wellington possess potential for a wider sense appeal than is currently used through products based on urban adventure tourism and culinary tourism. An “ideal” itinerary is proposed that would permit journalists to capture a sensory experience of New Zealand.     

The Role of Chinese Students as Tourists and Hosts for Overseas Travel

With more visas being granted and application processes streamlined, more Chinese students are studying abroad. These students have an influential and continuing effect on the host country's tourism industry over and above their own education-related activities and expenditures because they attract family members and friends to visit the countries where they study. Unfortunately, the research on the role of Chinese students as hosts for overseas travel is quite limited. Therefore, this paper provides some insights into this issue by looking at the influence of students' satisfaction on their role as hosts for the friends and family sector while also providing some data on the students' own holiday motives and assessments of New Zealand. The data were derived from 504 self-completed surveys by Chinese students from four universities in North Island, New Zealand. Evidence was found of students fulfilling a number of roles as guides, sources of information and acting as hosts, but the relationships between their own holiday experiences and satisfaction and the degree to which they fulfilled these roles was weak at best, indicating, therefore, the importance of other variables.     

Financial statement comparability and credit risk

Prior research shows that firms’ financial statement comparability improves the accuracy of market participants’ valuation judgments and thus may reduce firms’ costs of capital. Distinct from prior research focusing on the equity market, we develop measures of comparability relevant to debt market participants based on the within-industry variability of Moody’s adjustments to reported accounting numbers for the purposes of credit rating. We examine two sets of adjustments: (1) to the interest coverage ratio and (2) to non-recurring income items. We validate these comparability measures by providing evidence that greater comparability is associated with lower frequency and magnitude of split ratings by credit rating agencies. We predict and find that greater comparability is associated with (1) lower estimated bid-ask spreads for traded bonds, (2) lower credit spreads for both bonds and five-year credit default swaps, and (3) a steeper one- to five-year credit default swap term structure. Our results are consistent with financial statement comparability reducing debt market participants’ uncertainty about and pricing of firms’ credit risk.     

Public information arrival: Price discovery and liquidity in electronic limit order markets

How information is translated into market prices is still an open question. This paper studies the impact of newswire messages on intraday price discovery, liquidity, and trading intensity in an electronic limit order market. We take an objective ex ante measure of the tone of a message to study the impacts of positive, negative, and neutral messages on price discovery and trading activity. As expected, we find higher adverse selection costs around the arrival of newswire messages. Negative messages are associated with higher adverse selection costs than positive or neutral messages. Liquidity increases around positive and neutral messages and decreases around negative messages. Available order book depth as well as the trading intensity increases around all news. Our results suggest that market participants possess different information gathering and processing capabilities and that negative news messages are particularly informative and induce stronger market reactions.     

External COO/presidents as expert directors: A new look at the service role of boards

Much of the scholarship on boards of directors has examined either the control (i.e., monitoring) role or the resource dependence role that boards fill. Relatively little has examined the service role, wherein directors provide advice and guidance to management. This study builds on recent work exploring director expertise by asking how operational expertise on boards impacts firm performance. We find that having external COO/presidents on a board of directors positively impacts firm performance when the firm's operational efficiency is declining, but negatively impacts performance when the firm's operational efficiency is improving. We also find that other types of external executives serving as directors exhibit the opposite relationship, suggesting that the value of director expertise is context‐dependent. We discuss the implications of these findings for director selection. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond managerial talent: ‘key group’ identification and differential compensation practices in multinational companies

With the maturation of strategic human resource management scholarship, there appears to be a greater call to move from monolithic workforce management to a more strategic and differentiated emphasis on employees with the greatest capacity to enhance competitive advantage. There has been little consideration in the literature as to whether organizations formally identify key groups of employees based on their impact on organizational learning and core competences. Using survey evidence from 260 multinational companies (MNCs), this paper explores the extent to which key groups of employees are formally recognized and whether they are subject to differential compensation practices. The results demonstrate that just in excess of half of these MNCs identify a key group. There was considerable differentiation in the compensation practices between these key groups, managers and the largest occupational group in the workforce. The results give rise to questions worthy of future investigation, namely whether the differentiated approaches used lead to improved performance outcomes.     

Throwing good money after bad

An “investment bubble” is a period of “excessive, and predictably unprofitable, investment” (DeMarzo et al. in J Financ Econ 85:737–754, 2007). Such bubbles most often accompany the arrival of some new technology, such as the tech stock boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s. We provide a rational explanation for investment bubbles based on the dynamics of learning in highly uncertain environments. Objective information about the earnings potential of a new technology gives rise to a set of priors or a belief function. A generalised form of Bayes’ rule is used to update this set of priors using earnings data from the new economy. In each period, agents—who are heterogeneous in their tolerance for ambiguity—make optimal occupational choices, with wages in the new economy set to clear the labour market. A preponderance of bad news about the new technology may nevertheless give rise to increasing firm formation around this technology, at least initially. To a frequentist outside observer, the pattern of adoption appears as an investment bubble.     

Trapped Cash and the Profitability of Foreign Acquisitions

Current U.S. reporting and tax laws create an incentive for some U.S. firms to avoid the repatriation of foreign earnings, as the U.S. government charges additional corporate taxes on these transfers. Prior research suggests that the combined effect of these incentives leads some U.S. multinational corporations to hold a significant amount of cash overseas. In this study, we investigate the effect of cash trapped overseas on U.S. multinational corporations' foreign acquisitions. Consistent with expectations, we observe firms with high levels of trapped cash make less profitable acquisitions of foreign target firms using cash consideration (lower announcement window returns, lower buy and hold returns, decreased ROA). The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (AJCA) reduced this effect by allowing firms to repatriate foreign earnings held as cash abroad at a much lower tax cost. Our study has implications for current proposals to change the tax laws related to foreign earnings.     

Labor Unions and Political Mobilization: Diminishing Returns of Repetitious Contact

Voter mobilization by unions has garnered some attention from scholars, and is seen as an important political tool. Unions often mobilize voters repeatedly across several campaigns; however, the literature treats mobilization as a singular event. This paper empirically analyzes turnout of 85,064 registered voters over 14 months at five election intervals in Los Angeles, exploring whether union‐led mobilization is subject to diminishing returns across multiple elections. Results indicate that diminishing returns occur; three or more contacts are no more beneficial than one or two. Contact in recent elections is more effective than distant contact, and results differ slightly by contact type.     

How and Why Has Teacher Quality Changed in Australia?

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. We find that the aptitude of new teachers has fallen considerably. Between 1983 and 2003, the average percentile rank of those entering teacher education fell from 74 to 61, while the average rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. We find that two factors account for much of the decline: a fall in average teacher pay (relative to other occupations) and a rise in pay differentials in non‐teaching occupations.