Optimal investment of an insurer with regime-switching and risk constraint

We investigate an optimal investment problem of an insurance company in the presence of risk constraint and regime-switching using a game theoretic approach. A dynamic risk constraint is considered where we constrain the uncertainty aversion to the ‘true’ model for financial risk at a given level. We describe the surplus of an insurance company using a general jump process, namely, a Markov-modulated random measure. The insurance company invests the surplus in a risky financial asset whose dynamics are modeled by a regime-switching geometric Brownian motion. To incorporate model uncertainty, we consider a robust approach, where a family of probability measures is cosidered and the insurance company maximizes the expected utility of terminal wealth in the ‘worst-case’ probability scenario. The optimal investment problem is then formulated as a constrained two-player, zero-sum, stochastic differential game between the insurance company and the market. Different from the other works in the literature, our technique is to transform the problem into a deterministic differential game first, in order to obtain the optimal strategy of the game problem explicitly.     

Business and regulators partnerships: Government transformational leadership for constructive conflict management

Regulations are often thought to be impediments to collaboration between governments and businesses; however, governments and businesses are increasingly forming partnerships to help them negotiate regulation issues and more broadly work together. This study argues that governments, by exercising transformational leadership, lay the foundation for the cooperative approach, in contrast to the competitive and avoiding approaches, to conflict management that in turn results in effective partnerships. Findings from 146 pairs of government regulators and business support the hypothesis, though the evidence for the ineffectiveness of avoiding conflict was not statistically significant. Specifically, structural equation analysis results support the model that transformational leadership fosters cooperative approach to conflict and reduces competitive conflict management that in turn result in respectful, effective partnerships that develop industries.     

Gender preference and transfers from parents to children: an inter-regional comparison

This paper examines whether parents exhibit gender preference in the allocation of family resources to their adult children. Gender preference is defined in the context of an altruistic model for inter-vivos transfer from parents to children extended to include educational investment. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (United States) and the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing are used to show that the degree of gender preference differs across these culturally distinct regions. Among Korean families, empirical results point to male preference as sons receive larger inter-vivos transfers and attain higher levels of education compared with daughters. In contrast, the evidence pertaining to gender preference among American families points to daughter preference as inter-vivos transfers and educational investment is generally higher among female adult children.     

Individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses: how important are individual characteristics and country-level traits?

We study the importance of individual characteristics and national factors influencing individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses. Our sample includes more than 40 000 respondents in 29 countries from the 2003 National Identity Survey conducted by the International Social Survey Programme. We find that individual demographic factors and socioeconomic status, such as gender, age, income and education, are strong predictors of their attitudes. For example, income and education are positively associated with favourable attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on local businesses while age is negatively associated with individual attitudes towards MNCs. In addition, hierarchical ordered logit model results show that approximately 8% of total variations in individual attitudes around our sample mean are not explained by differences in personal traits. Instead, they are due to country-level heterogeneity such as, but not limited to, different degrees of openness or different aggregate income.     

EXPORT AND HEDGING DECISIONS UNDER CORRELATED REVENUE AND EXCHANGE RATE RISK

This paper examines the behaviour of a competitive exporting firm under joint revenue and exchange rate risk. The firm can trade unbiased currency futures contracts for hedging purposes. We show that neither the separation theorem nor the full‐hedging theorem holds when the revenue shock prevails. If the correlation between the revenue shock and the random spot exchange rate is non‐positive, the firm optimally produces less than the benchmark level when the revenue shock is absent. If, in addition, the firm is prudent, the optimal futures position is an under‐hedge. Finally, we derive sufficient conditions under which the firm's optimal output level is higher in the presence than in the absence of the revenue shock. Operational hedging and financial hedging as such interact in a complicated way to better cope with the multiple sources of uncertainty faced by the firm.     

Using a dual-frame design to improve phone surveys on political attitudes: developing a weighting strategy for limited external information in Hong Kong

Quality & Quantity - In recent years, rapid increases in mobile phone ownership and decreases in landline users have led to potential biases in landline phone survey estimations. Mobile-only...     

The empowerment expectation–perception gap: An examination of three alternative models

Previous empowerment research has focused on subordinate perceptions of empowering leadership and its outcomes. Met‐expectations theory suggests that subordinate expectations of leader behaviours are essential in forming their a posteriori evaluations. To address the lack of investigation of individual expectations in the empowerment literature, in this study, we explore how subordinates' empowerment expectations and perceptions combine to influence their job satisfaction and psychological empowerment based on three alternative, theoretically derived met‐expectation models, namely, the disconfirmation model, the ideal‐point model, and the experiences‐only model. The results of a 2‐stage study of 114 respondents indicate that employees are more satisfied with their work when perceived empowerment exceeds expectations. However, both empowerment perceptions and expectations positively contribute to higher psychological empowerment. We then discuss implications and directions for future research.     

Advancing tourism research through multilevel methods: research problem and agenda

Tourism research often encounters social phenomena and research problems that involve multiple levels. However, most researchers assume that the phenomena exist in a single level and perform analyses that do not reflect the hierarchical nature of social dynamics. This article heeds the call from Current Issues in Tourism by illustrating multilevel methods and proposing an agenda for multilevel research. In particular, this article seeks to reconcile the limitations of single-level analysis and to delineate how multilevel methods could be applied in tourism research. It further seeks to advance tourism theories by introducing more complex multilevel design with broader applications in various tourism settings. This article presents two common tourism research scenarios, critiques their limitations, and proposes how multilevel methods could not only address these limitations, but also how they could advance tourism theories. An empirical study is offered to demonstrate multilevel design and analytical techniques.