Contract enforcement in Russian serf society, 1750–18601

This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre‐emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate.     

Endogenous objectives and the evaluation of targeting rules for monetary policy

Recent research in monetary economics has followed the advice of McCallum [1988. Robustness properties of a rule for monetary policy. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 29, 173-203] and investigated the robustness properties of monetary policy rules by evaluating them in a variety of models. Evaluation across models is typically based on an exogenously specified loss function. However, the theory on which many recent monetary policy models are based implies that changes in the structure of the model also have consequences for the policy objectives the central bank should pursue. Objectives are endogenous, not exogenous to the model. In this paper, I investigate the impact of endogenous objectives on the evaluation of targeting rules for monetary policy.     

Environmental priorities in strategic product development

This paper reports some results from a major research project on the integration of environmental issues into design in the electrical and electronic industry. Product development practice and ecodesign methods were examined along with qualitative data from 19 manufacturers, using interviews and an action research methodology. A four‐stage framework for ecodesign practice resulted: first, to make an environmental assessment from a life cycle viewpoint; then to communicate the analysis and collect feedback; thirdly to prioritize the environmental issues and finally to complete the design using relevant tools and methods. This ‘ARPI’ framework (analyse, report, prioritize, improve) applies to both strategic and operational levels. Initial testing of the framework in collaborating companies highlighted difficulties with communication with design teams; the role of ‘ecodesign champions’ is explained. Other challenges are the development of customized tools and the training of designers. The study concludes that the prioritization step is critical, as it simplifies and clarifies the tasks in design that take place after formulation of the specification. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment     

The effects of schema congruity on consumer response to celebrity advertising

The trend of celebrity-branded products is on the rise, creating a new domain in which to explore the match-up hypothesis. Moving beyond the celebrity as an endorser, but rather, a brand promoting a brand extension, this article examines how perceived congruence between a celebrity's image and the brand image of products they have developed is related to attitudinal and behavioral measures of advertising effectiveness. Employing a 2 × 3 full factorial design, congruence between the celebrity's image and the brand's image was varied (less vs. more congruent), along with the use of the celebrity's image (present, absent, non-celebrity models) to determine how schema congruity influences consumer's response to celebrity advertising. The results of a multivariate analysis of covariance analysis indicating lower levels of congruence between the celebrity's image and the brand's image led to greater advertising effectiveness compared to higher levels of congruence. Specifically, the means of the attitudinal dependent variables in the less congruent condition were significantly higher than the means in the more congruent condition. These effects were more pronounced when a celebrity's image was featured in the advertisement compared to when it was not featured. The implication of the findings suggests that moderate violations in the consumer's celebrity schema may improve advertising effectiveness.     

Creating jobs through public subsidies: An empirical analysis

This paper analyses the impact of government grants on labour demand using plant level data for manufacturing industry in Ireland. Our data consists of a large sample of plants and their complete grant history. We provide evidence that additional employment is created over and above the level that would have prevailed in the absence of grant payments. We also find differences in the employment response to subsidies between domestic and foreign-owned plants, with the former creating more additional jobs per euro of grant payment. Simple cost-benefit analysis reveals that a large part of the costs of grants appears to be recouped in additional wage streams under reasonable assumptions.     

Firm Size and Market Power in Carbonated Soft Drinks

Sutton (1998) offers us a simple way to model firm size distributions across differentiated products industries. We analyse the implications of this approach for company markups using a structural model for a specific industry. We incorporate the complexities of multi-product (brand) companies operating with different (strategic) configurations of product characteristics and stores to estimate brand markups, using Irish AC Nielsen retail data for Carbonated Soft Drinks. As a second step we estimate that market power does not increase in companies with higher market share, controlling for other factors. This challenges a traditional mind-set.     

Asset substitutability and monetary policy: An alternative characterization

A distance function is defined for a simple portfolio choice problem and then used to express the impact on asset prices of a change in an asset stock as the sum of a substitution and a wealth effect. Substitutes and complements are defined with reference to qualtity rather than price changes. This method of characterizing asset substitutability leads to simpler and more easily interpreted results when analyzing monetary policy that does the standard approach which expresses asset price changes in terms of the price elasticities of the asset demand functions.     

Replicating,validating, and reducing the length of the consumer perceived value scale

This research reports an assessment of Sweeney and Soutar's (2001) consumer perceived value (PERVAL) scale. The PERVAL scale contains four dimensions: quality, emotional, price, and social values. The present study develops and evaluates two short forms of the original 19-item PERVAL scale based on Sweeney and Soutar's (2001) original data and three other studies in two different countries. In comparison with the full scale, the short 12-item and 8-item forms have equally good dimensional properties and equivalent predictive validity. The discussion includes implications, both for research and for retail managers.