Triple acculturation: The role of African Americans in the consumer acculturation of Kenyan immigrants

The role of a subcultural group in the consumer acculturation of Kenyan immigrants is examined. Our findings demonstrate that particular immigrant consumer behaviors are influenced by triple acculturation forces: dominant; subcultural and original culture. We find that immigrants do not arrive in the United States aware of their need to acculturate to a subcultural group. Critical incidents alert the immigrants of the need to acculturate to the African American subculture in order to fulfill some basic consumer goals such as accessing hair care, nightclub entertainment and church services. Progressively, immigrants begin to incorporate triple acculturation forces in their consumer decision making. The immigrants learn to be innovative as well as to engage in satisficing as they navigate the new consumption environment. This research contributes to acculturation studies by extending the models of Berry (Berry JW. Acculturation as varieties of adaptation. In: Padilla AM, editor. Acculturation: theory, model and some new findings, Boulder, CO: Westview Press; 1980. pp. 9-25) as well as Penaloza (Penaloza L. Altravesando Fronteras/Border Crossings: a critical ethnographic exploration of the consumer acculturation of Mexican immigrants. J Consum Res 1994;2:32-54[June]) by incorporating the role of a subcultural group in this process.     

New Place-to-Place Housing Price Indexes for U.S. Metropolitan Areas, and Their Determinants

Housing prices vary widely from market to market in the United States. The purpose of this study is to (1) construct new place-to-place indexes of the price of housing, using the 1990 Census, and (2) analyze the determinants of housing prices, with a particular focus on the supply side determinants—regulatory and natural constraint—as well as the usual demand determinants.     

Export planning orientation and its antecedents: Evidence from exporting IT products

There is strong support in the export literature for a positive relationship between export planning and export performance. However, little is known about the drivers of export planning. In addressing this knowledge gap, this article proposes that export planning is usefully analyzed in terms of a managerial orientation. Regarding the antecedents of export planning orientation, the focus here is on the role of factors internal to the firm, especially its exporting mindset (export necessity and export commitment). This article also examines to what extent export confidence (psychic distance and marketing advantage) moderates the relationship. The empirical results show that export commitment has a strong and positive effect on a firm's export planning orientation. This relationship is moderated by psychic distance and marketing advantage. Specifically, the results show that the greater the psychic distance and the weaker the marketing advantage, the stronger the relationship between export commitment and a firm's export planning orientation. The results also show that management's perceived export necessity has a negative effect on a firm's export planning orientation and that this relationship remains unaffected by psychic distance and marketing advantage.     

Performance and Performance Persistence of 'Ethical' Unit Trusts in the UK

Abstract:  We examine performance, and persistence in the performance, of UK 'ethical' or SRI funds and find that performance appears to be time-varying, showing that conclusions on performance itself are influenced by whether a static or time varying model is employed. Given evidence that many UK funds which claim to be international in nature may exhibit home bias in their portfolio allocations, we also propose a new measure for performance of international funds that allows for this and show that such recognition has important implications for the conclusions drawn with respect to these funds. We find evidence that supports persistence in performance, particularly at longer time horizons. There is some evidence that for domestic funds, past 'winning' SRI funds outperform 'losing' SRI funds to a greater extent than their control portfolio counterparts.     

Do the Right Thing: The Imprinting of Deonance at the Upper Echelons

This study expands the application of deonance theory into organizations’ upper echelons by examining how CEOs imprinted with a sense of duty can influence managerial decision-making. We hypothesize an imprint of bounded autonomy, an ought-force that constrains their decision-making and understanding of behavioral freedom, influences duty-bound CEOs to self-report errors in past financial reporting. We test deonance theory propositions of instrumentality for behavioral expansion, namely loss avoidance and gain attainment, related to institutional ownership concentration and CEO equity ownership. We use CEOs that are graduates of U.S. service academies as a proxy for duty-bound executives and find firms they lead are more likely to issue a financial restatement to correct a previous reporting error. This finding is robust to alternate explanations such as being error-prone, earnings management, auditor oversight, and risk behaviors. We also find evidence that deonance may be subject to behavioral expansion. The likelihood of issuing a restatement decreases as institutional ownership concentration and CEO equity ownership increases. This study shows imprinted deonance within the C-suite influences important organizational outcomes.

     

Sensitivity of generalized translog model estimates to alternative Pythagorean means: Evidence from US healthcare

The generalized translog cost (GTLC) methodology is widely used in applied econometric modeling of production. Usually without rationale, the mean expansion point is overwhelmingly the arithmetic. However, the arithmetic mean could yield biased estimates and inferences. Consequently, our core innovation is testing operational inferences from fitting a dual GTLC model to multiple expansion points of data concerning US physical therapy, an increasingly vital industry. Our panel data includes 4,500 bi‐weekly observations across 27 US states. The study clearly demonstrates how the economic contents (e.g., economies of scale and elasticities) of the underlying production technology differ markedly across the three Pythagorean means.     

Self-Sabotage and Durable-Goods Monopoly

We analyze a simple two-period linear demand durable-goods monopoly model with “self-sabotage.” The firm has the ability to sabotage its own production by increasing its future (period two) manufacturing costs. We find that an uncommitted monopoly seller has an incentive to engage in such self-sabotage, while a committed seller or renter has no such incentive. Unlike the previous papers on self-sabotage, we show this occurs even though the firm faces no rivals in the output market. In our durable-goods setting, the incentive for self-sabotage arises from the seller’s commitment problem with period-one buyers (the so-called Coase conjecture). Interestingly, we also find that this sort of self-sabotage can not only be profit enhancing for the uncommitted firm, but may also increase social welfare (in contrast to the earlier models on self-sabotage.)     

The national security argument for protection of domestic industries

ABSTRACT

Tracing the origin of the national security argument for protection of domestic industries to Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, and Friedrich List, we study its post-GATT applications with reference to Article XXI of the WTO and highlight some recent abuses. We compare the use of tariff, production/input subsidy, and government procurement as alternative instruments of protection from the perspective of economic efficiency and study the disapproval of inward FDI to gain insights into the underlying national security concerns. The case studies of a) the US tariffs on aluminum and steel, b) German disapproval of the acquisition of a technology firm Leifeld Metal Spinning by a Chinese firm, and c) US’ all out global effort to cripple China’s telecom equipment giant Huawei are presented for illustration.     

Measuring institutional trading costs and the implications for finance research: The case of tick size reductions

Using proprietary institutional trade data, we construct a price impact measure that represents the costs faced by institutional investors. We show that many widely used liquidity measures do not adequately capture institutional trading costs. We then find that institutional trading costs are not dramatically impacted by decimalization, casting doubt on the widely used identification strategy that employs decimalization as an exogenous shock to liquidity, particularly institutional liquidity. Indeed, we find that conclusions from prior research are significantly altered when we measure liquidity using institutional trading data.     

Unions and the Great Compression of wage inequality in the US at mid‐century: evidence from local labour markets

This article tests whether places with higher exposure to unionization during the 1940s, due to their pre‐existing industrial composition, tended to have larger declines in wage inequality, conditional on local economic and demographic observables and regional trends. We find a strong negative correlation between exposure to unionization and changes in local inequality from 1940–50 and 1940–60. This does not appear to be underpinned by skill‐specific sorting of workers or by firms leaving places with high exposure to unionization. We also find that the correlation between exposure to unionization in the 1940s and the change in inequality after 1940 persists in long‐difference regressions to the end of the twentieth century.