Chinese heritage tourists to heritage sites: what are the effects of heritage motivation and perceived authenticity on satisfaction?

Much of the literature on authenticity is Western-centric, while little work addresses the concept in the Asian environment. The literature relating to authenticity from Asian tourists’ point of view is even underdeveloped. This study therefore aims to fill the knowledge gap by investigating Chinese tourists’ perspective of authenticity. It also examines tourists’ perceived authenticity as a multi-dimensional construct in a consumer-based model, the relationship with heritage motivation and tourist satisfaction. Findings indicate that Chinese tourists’ perceptions of authenticity are closely related to objective and constructive authenticity. The study demonstrates that heritage motivation has a significant positive influence on perceived authenticity and that perceived authenticity has a strong ability to predict tourist satisfaction.     

How middle managers manage the political environment to achieve market goals: Insights from China's state‐owned enterprises

Research summary: Although the middle management literature has identified various bridging roles performed by middle managers in the market environment, it is relatively vague about whether and how they manage the political environment to achieve market‐related goals. In an inductive field study of four large state‐owned enterprises based in mainland Communist China, operational middle managers were found to take an active role in dealing with political actors to achieve market efficiency in their local environments, performing two distinct bridging strategies. Our field study suggests that middle managers are better equipped than their bosses (top executives) as well as their subordinates (frontline employees) to perform the bridging function between competing market and political imperatives in various local settings. Managerial summary: For firms that operate in diverse geographies, it is challenging for a handful of top executives to deal with numerous political actors. This burden could be shared with operational middle managers, who play a bridging role by drawing on their operational knowledge and local networks. Our research on middle managers who work under the scrutiny of political actors in China found that they bridge market and political ideology by conveying common features that seem legitimate to both. They also bridge market goals and political actors with personal affect. Compared to top executives and frontline employees, middle managers have unique advantages in performing these bridging functions. Firms can enhance their strategy execution ability by training middle managers in dealing with political actors in diverse contexts. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Dynamics of Commoditization in a Vietnamese Uplands Village, 1980–2000

Commodity markets have become key forces transforming upland livelihoods, social relations and landscapes in Vietnam and throughout Southeast Asia. This paper examines the processes of market formation and their effects on local livelihoods and social relations in a village of Vietnam's north-western uplands. The results indicate that villagers' reactions to new opportunities arising from decollectivization and market liberalization wove them into an increasingly intricate 'commodity web'. Differences among households widened as households with an initial advantage accumulated further advantages. Yet the relations governing access to land and product markets also provided a floor of subsistence for the disadvantaged. The findings demonstrate the need to interrogate commodity markets, investigate the practices and relations constituting them, and analyse how they distribute income and risks among the actors involved. The nature of commodity markets, together with the relations governing access to productive resources, influences processes of social differentiation in the uplands.     

Optimal surveillance against foot‐and‐mouth disease: the case of bulk milk testing in Australia

Previous foot‐and‐mouth disease (FMD) outbreaks and simulation‐based analyses suggest substantial payoffs from detecting an incursion early. However, no economic measures for early detection have been analysed in an optimising framework. We investigate the use of bulk milk testing (BMT) for active surveillance against an FMD incursion in Australia. We find that BMT can be justified, but only when the FMD entry probability is sufficiently high or the cost of BMT is low. However, BMT is well suited for post‐outbreak surveillance, to shorten the length of time and size of an epidemic and to facilitate an earlier return to market.     

Assessing the impacts of oil price fluctuations on stock returns in emerging markets

This paper investigates the effects of oil price shocks on stock market returns in emerging countries. It differs from previous works in three main aspects: i) we distinguish three groups of countries, the largest net-oil importing countries, the moderately oil-dependent countries, and the largest net-oil exporting countries; ii) The potential influence of bullish and bearish market conditions on the causal relationship between oil and stock returns is controlled for in our analysis; iii) The empirical investigation is based on an analysis of long-term correlation and a conditional multifactor pricing model. Using data from twenty-five emerging countries, our results suggest that oil price risk is significantly priced in emerging markets, and that the oil impact is asymmetric with respect to market phases.     

Microfinance and gender empowerment

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model of household production, bargaining and credit to analyse how access to microcredit affects intra-household decision-making and welfare, and identify conditions under which female household members are most likely to benefit. We show that, consistent with ethnographic accounts of the impact of microcredit programmes on poor households, access to loans can lead to a variety of outcomes for intra-household decision-making and welfare depending on initial conditions and that, in some instances, women borrowers may experience a decline in welfare. We identify two instances in which a woman is most likely to benefit: when there is scope for investing the loan profitably in a joint activity, and when a large share of the household budget is devoted to household public goods.     

Competition and risk in South East Asian commercial banking

This article investigates the effects of competition on bank risk taking behaviour in four South East Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam). Our main finding is that competition does not increase bank risk-taking behaviour and the results appear robust to different model specifications, estimation approaches and variable construction. We also find that concentration is inversely related to bank risk whereas regulatory restrictions positively influence bank risk-taking.     

Financial structure in the age of globalization

Using a large panel data set covering 160 countries over the period 1990 to 2010, this article aims to address the question of how financial structure (bank-based versus market-based system) changes when economies are liberalized and opened to international capital markets. Specifically, in this study, globalization is characterized not only by trade and financial integration but also by other important aspects, such as social globalization, political globalization and cultural globalization. The empirical results support the impacts of globalization on financial structure, which are, however, diverse and strongly depend on the way to measure globalization and financial structure. Our finding also reveals a significant change in financial structure after the globalization process, except the case of low-income countries, in which financial structure seems to be not correlated with either globalization process or other macroeconomic variables.     

The effects of multilateral trading systems on risk and return in equity markets

The event study methodology of Brown and Warner (1985) is adopted and augmented to evaluate the effect of the launch of multilateral trading systems on risk and return in equity markets. The methodology is supplemented with various techniques, such as the nonparametric ranking test and kernel regression, to find out if announcements about the introduction of Chi-X Australia generated abnormal returns (ARs). Asset pricing models are fitted with interaction variables, while GARCH, threshold ARCH (TARCH), exponential GARCH (EGARCH) and power-ARCH (PARCH) are used to determine changes in systematic risk. We find evidence in favour of Fisher’s separation theorem and detect a new market anomaly, which we call the ‘Fisher market anomaly’. Our results show that Chi-X system testings affect ARs. Consistent with the adaptive expectations theory, we confirm that the first announcement about the launch of Chi-X affected systematic risk the most. In addition, we identify industry and firm effects in risk analysis.