Encouraging Enterprise—The Belgian Experience

Nigel Lawson will meet with failure in adopting Sir Geoffrey Howe's plans for enterprise zones in Britain unless he learns from the mistakes of the Belgian E-Zones. Michael van Notten, who was instrumental in the implementation of the Belgian plan, outlines the political obstacles raised in the path of the E-Zones by empire-building bureaucrats.     

Service Satisfaction: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Satisfaction in Financial Services

Does the widely accepted espectancy-disconfirmation model apply to situations within a financial services context? Or could it be, due to specific characteristics of services, that a different model applies? This paper addresses these questions and tests the relationships between consumer expectations, performance, disconfirmation, .satisfaction and repeat purchase in a lisrel model. The results would suggest that the relevancy of disconfirmation is fairly apparent and that expectations have only an indirect influence on satisfaction where financial services are concerned. The performance level of financial services however has a strong positive direct effect on satisfaction.     

The Price Elasticity of Demand for Common Stock

We study the price elasticity of demand for the common stock of an individual corporation. Despite the prevelance of assumptions that demand is perfectly elastic, there is little if any direct evidence in the literature to either support or reject that contention. Consistent with the notion of finite price elasticities, we find that the announcement of primary stock offerings by regulated firms depresses their stock prices and little if any evidence that this decline is the result of adverse information about future cash flows. Attempts to relate offer announcement effects directly to possible determinants of price elasticities, however, are inconclusive.     

The Tone from Above: The Effect of Communicating a Supportive Regulatory Strategy on Reporting Quality

In collaboration with the Authority for the Financial Markets in the Netherlands, we manipulate the content of official letters that instruct financial intermediaries to submit a mandatory self‐assessment. As part of the Registered Report Process, we submitted our hypotheses, experimental procedure, and planned statistical analyses before data collection. We predicted that a request indicating a supportive regulatory attitude has a positive effect on reporting quality on average. We also predicted this effect to be stronger for small firms and for firms with a long‐term orientation, and to become negative for firms with a short‐term orientation. Planned analyses show that a supportive letter reduced reporting quality unless firms had a long‐term orientation, supporting the moderating influence of time horizon, but providing no support for the expected average effect or for moderation by firm size.