Antecedents of brand loyalty in South African retail banking

With new banks entering the South African market and consumers generally not satisfied with their current bank, brand loyalty in the banking sector is receiving greater attention. A gap in the literature exists regarding the issues of bank loyalty and their antecedents in South African retail banking because of the few studies available in the South African context, the new competitive environment in the banking sector, the multi-cultural nature of the market, and the likely switching behaviour by customers. The South African context is a multi-cultural environment and therefore offers a unique background as most previous brand loyalty studies have been in mono-cultural contexts. The purpose of this study was to investigate the antecedents of brand loyalty, including satisfaction, brand relationship quality, customer advocacy, and brand trust in retail banking. We report on a survey of 351 banking customers through SEM using AMOS. While the findings are generally supportive of previous studies, some surprising results are discussed and implications for both theory and practice are highlighted.

     

Adoption Gaps of Environmental Adaptation Technologies with Public Effects

Environmental and Resource Economics - As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018) testifies, the world is a long way from halting climate change, let alone reverting it. The existence...     

ON URBAN RE-ARRANGEMENTS: A Suite in Five Movements

This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re-arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons.     

Place-Based Policies and Nowcasting

There is a growing need to gauge local economic activity in real time. Localised economic challenges have been emphasised in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Real-time trackers (such as OECD trackers) and other nowcasting applications typically correspond to national or highly aggregated regions. In this discussion paper, we briefly explore how unconventional data might be used to produce nowcasts of local economies. We argue that in the absence of traditional nowcasting metrics, efforts to nowcast local economies need a local perspective, with data capture tailored to address heterogeneity across three domains: (1) resources, (2) people and (3) life.     

Farmers' participation in the Income Stabilisation Tool: Evidence from the apple sector in Italy

The Income Stabilisation Tool (IST), which was recently added to the European Common Agricultural Policy's risk management toolkit, is a mutual fund that aims at stabilising farmers' income. We investigate the drivers of farmers' participation in an IST for the apple sector in the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy, which is the only region that has operationalised the IST in the European Union. Our analysis is based on a theoretical framework based on the Unified Theory of Use and Acceptance of Technology. Using a three-year panel dataset of 3268 farm households, we estimated a logit model with the Mundlak–Chamberlain procedure. Our results show that higher crop production specialisation, associated with greater risk exposure, favours participation in the IST. Similarly, previous experience with mutual funds increases the acceptance of the IST. The analysis also provides evidence of how the new tool interacts with existing on-farm protection strategies, leading to a discussion of the presence of adverse and advantageous selection effects. Our paper sheds light on farmers' acceptance of newly implemented sector-specific ISTs and generates better knowledge and understanding of lock-ins and levers that influence participation in such schemes, which are relevant to other EU regions or member states that are considering the introduction of ISTs.