金融危机下的风险管理

2008年以来,全世界都处于经济危机的漩涡之中,风险管理的缺失被认为是其中原因之一.一直以来,风险管理主要侧重于市场、信用和营运风险.对于银行机构来说,这些风险实际上已经在巴塞尔新协议中作了规范,而且都单独对这些风险进行管理和应对.     

FDI Location and the Relevance of Spatial Linkages: Evidence from Provincial and Industry FDI in China

In this study both aggregate and industry‐level foreign direct investment (FDI) data are employed to investigate the spatial dependence of FDI hosts. The analysis contributes to the existing literature by focusing on the heterogeneous spatial correlation of FDI in different industries. Using more comprehensive FDI data across multiple industries and multiple provinces in China from 1999 to 2007, the results show a significant spatial correlation among provinces. Aggregate FDI tends to be regional trade platform oriented indicating neighboring provinces become competitors for FDI. In contrast, results based on industry‐level provincial FDI show stronger support for vertical or complex vertical FDI.     

Working with customers: Cooperation and competition in relational marketing

The relationship and interaction between salespeople and their customers may be usefiilly examined in terms of how they believe their goals and interests are related. Twenty‐five sales persons and 40 travel agents and managers in charge of corporate travel were interviewed on specific interactions. Results support previous theorizing that productive conflict management and resulting trust and personal bonds contribute to successful marketing relationships and suggest that these dynamics occur when sales representatives and clients have developed strongly cooperative goals, but not when they have competitive or independent goals. Results were interpreted that the constructive discussion of opposing views complements cooperative goals as important contributors for developing successful relational marketing.     

Investigating the different approaches to importance–performance analysis

Importance–performance analysis (IPA) is an analytic technique that generates a two-dimensional importance–performance grid, where the values of importance and performance across attributes are plotted against each other. This technique is used to assist service and other firms in prioritizing areas for service improvement when resources are limited. This study contributes to service theory by first performing a comprehensive literature review of four different and commonly used approaches to IPA. Survey data from the ports sector are then used to elucidate the value and the distinctiveness of these four different approaches, and it is also shown how the underlying theoretical assumptions led to somewhat varying, and contradictory interpretations. Subsequently, novel guidelines for integrating results from these four different approaches are proposed. The study advances service theory by detailing the integration of the different approaches to make sense of the importance and performance of diverse service attributes. The integrative approach developed in this paper also provides practitioners with clearer guidance for the application of IPA.     

Altering the past to influence the future: the effect of mental unpacking on past evaluations and future preferences

Consumers use affective evaluations of past hedonic experiences in their future decision-making. However, past evaluations such as how enjoyable the experience was may be hard to retrieve, and consumers tend to recall what they did (i.e. the constituent activities of the prior experience) in order to reconstruct them. It is proposed here that recalling these constituent activities in a packed versus unpacked fashion will distort both the reconstruction process and its outcome. Results from two experiments show that mental unpacking interacted with experience enjoyment to alter past evaluations in two ways: if the enjoyment of the experience was high, unpacked recalls increased remembered enjoyment, but unpacking decreased remembered enjoyment if the experience enjoyment was low. Finally, mediation analysis indicated that the unpacking by enjoyment interaction distorted future preferences through the mediating role of remembered enjoyment.     

Effects of Export Duty Structure on the Performance of the Malaysian Palm Oil Industry

This study examines the impact of the abatement of the export duty on the Malaysian palm oil industry performance. The simulation results show that the impact of reductions in the export duty rates and the impact of increases in the threshold prices on the Malaysian palm oil industry have the same impact but with different magnitudes. Even the simulated results indicate that the policy of further reductions in the Malaysian export duty will promote its positive effects on the local palm oil industry; however, the impact is shown to not be significant. The further reduction of the export tax is very constrained and believed to no longer be the most effective policy in enhancing the competitiveness of local palm oil industry in the future. Hence, policymakers have to be aware of the possibility that the reduction of the export tax may no longer be an effective sustainable approach in facilitating the development of Malaysian palm oil industry.     

Environmental Reporting Through an Ethical Looking Glass

This paper adopts the lens of environmental ethics to explore whether there is a disparity between the ethical approaches of a company in comparison to those expressed by stakeholders in relation to environmental issues, specifically those communicated through the corporate environmental report. Discourse analysis is adopted to explore the environmental section of the sustainability reports of the case study company as compared to the responses of a sample of the company’s stakeholders, using the lens of three branches of environmental ethics: utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics. Results indicate that the ethical approaches expressed in the case study company’s environmental reports were grounded in utilitarianism and deontology, in contrast to a virtue ethics approach expressed by external stakeholders. The disparity widened as the relationship between the company and the stakeholder became less direct. This disparity signals a failure to meet one of the primary purposes for preparing sustainability reports: to engage with stakeholders. As such this research contributes to the literature by identifying a disparity in the how this information is communicated compared with how it is perceived by stakeholders. This has important implications for the success of current stakeholder engagement practices.     

ENHANCEMENT OF THE APPLICABILITY OF MARKOWITZ'S PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION BY UTILIZING RANDOM MATRIX THEORY

The traditional estimated return for the Markowitz mean-variance optimization has been demonstrated to seriously depart from its theoretic optimal return. We prove that this phenomenon is natural and the estimated optimal return is always       times larger than its theoretic counterpart, where       with  y  as the ratio of the dimension to sample size. Thereafter, we develop new bootstrap-corrected estimations for the optimal return and its asset allocation and prove that these bootstrap-corrected estimates are proportionally consistent with their theoretic counterparts. Our theoretical results are further confirmed by our simulations, which show that the essence of the portfolio analysis problem could be adequately captured by our proposed approach. This greatly enhances the practical uses of the Markowitz mean-variance optimization procedure.