Time to Eat: Household Production under Increasing Income Inequality

Using time diaries and expenditure data for the United States for 1985 and 2003, I examine how income and time prices affect time and goods inputs into eating. Both inputs increase with income, and higher time prices reduce time inputs. Between 1985 and 2003 the goods intensity of eating increased, especially lower in the income distribution, and average time inputs dropped, particularly time spent shopping, preparing, and cleaning up after meals. The results are consistent with relatively difficult goods-time substitution in eating that becomes more difficult as household production expands.     

Employee attitudes,customer satisfaction,and sales performance: assessing the linkages in US grocery stores

Using store‐level panel data for a major supermarket company, we investigate the linkages between employee attitudes, customer satisfaction, and sales performance, while controlling for observed and unobserved differences across stores. We find that employee attitudes positively affect customer satisfaction with service but do not affect customer satisfaction with quality or value. Additionally, we find that customer satisfaction with service positively affects sales performance. Our results suggest that employee attitudes affect sales performance through their impact on customer service. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changes in the distribution of house prices over time: Structural characteristics,neighborhood, or coefficients?

Quantile hedonic house price function estimates imply that appreciation rates were higher between 1995 and 2005 for high-priced homes in Chicago. Decompositions of temporal changes in the house price distribution suggest that the types of homes sold and their location do not account for the change in the price distribution. Rather, higher appreciation rates for high-priced homes are explained by differences in the quantile regression coefficients over time.     

Business model schema: business model innovation tool based on direct causal mechanisms of profit

ABSTRACT

Defining business model as the logic/mode/way/framework to seek profit/money and glancing at the evolution of concept business, this paper develops a business model schema (BMS) as a holistic two-dimensions multi-level tool/method for business model innovation (BMI) based on the direct causal mechanisms of profit (DCMP). First, this paper takes DCMP as the logical/theoretical framework by which business model innovation process is identified and specified. And according to that process, it develops a BMS, illustrates an example of BMS to show up its practical usefulness, compares the similarities and differences between BMS and the existing powerful one business model canvas (BMC), and finally asserts that BMS must be a good and useful method in theory and practice because it stands on DCMP that ensures the genuine causality of profit and also it turns out practically useful, recalling the Kurt Lewin’s maxim (1945), “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.     

USING EL NIÑO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION CLIMATE DATA TO IMPROVE FOOD POLICY PLANNING IN INDONESIA

Despite the impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on climate in the Indo-Pacific region, models linking ENSO-based climate variability to Indonesian cereal production are not well developed. This study measures connections among sea-surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs), rainfall, and Indonesian rice and corn production from 1971 to 1998. Year-to-year August SSTA fluctuations explain about half the interannual variance in paddy production during the main (wet) season. These effects are cumulative for rice: during strong El Niño years, wet season production shortfalls are not made up subsequently. For corn, the cumulative area sown is actually higher in El Niño years than La Niña years. Indonesia's paddy production varies on average by 1.4 million tons for every 1°C change in August SSTAs. The paper illustrates how an SSTA model might assist policy makers with budgetary processes, and private sector cereal traders with framing production expectations.     

A simple model of credit contagion

We propose a simple model of credit contagion in which we include macro- and microstructural interdependencies among the debtors within a credit portfolio. The microstructure captures interdependencies between debtors that go beyond their exposure to common factors, e.g., business or legal interdependencies. We show that even for diversified portfolios, moderate microstructural interdependencies have a significant impact on the tails of the loss distribution. This impact increases dramatically for less diversified microstructures.     

Another look at GAAP versus the Street: an empirical assessment of measurement error bias

Bradshaw and Sloan (2002, Journal of Accounting Research, 40, 41–66.) document a significant increase in the difference between the earnings response coefficients (ERCs) for GAAP and Street (I/B/E/S) earnings over the 1990s, suggesting that the market has become increasingly reliant or fixated on Street earnings. In this study we investigate whether, alternatively, an “errors in variables” problem caused by a mismatch between the definitions of realized and expected earnings drives the ERC divergence. Our findings suggest that results from conventional analyses of GAAP and Street ERCs, including the ERC divergence pattern, are significantly contaminated by measurement errors in earnings surprises.     

A Cross-Section Analysis of the Income Elasticity of Housing Demand in Spain: Is There a Real Estate Bubble?

Much attention has been given to claims that real estate prices in Spain are overvalued in relation to income and how plummeting house prices can jeopardize the economy (The Economist, 2003 and IMF, 2004). The measure of income elasticity on housing expenditure is often of considerable interest to applied researchers and policy makers in real estate economics, but the problem of omitted variables in some estimation techniques can lead to severe biases. In this paper we estimate the income elasticity of the demand for housing in Spain based on the cross-section of prices and income in fifty Spanish provinces from 1996 to 2002. In comparison to long-run equilibrium models fitted with time-series data, our results show a much weaker role of income growth as a vehicle for house price increases in the long run. According to our estimates, the rate of growth of house prices in Spain between 1998 and 2003 points to a real estate bubble with prices above the long-term equilibrium level.     

Share Repurchases,Dividends and Executive Options: the Effect of Dividend Protection

We study the determinants of share repurchases and dividends in Finland. We find that higher foreign ownership serves as a determinant of share repurchases and suggest that this is explained by the different tax treatment of foreign and domestic investors. Further, we also find support for the signalling and agency cost hypotheses for cash distributions. The fact that 41% of the option programmes in our sample are dividend protected allows us to test more directly the ‘substitution/managerial wealth’ hypothesis for the choice of distribution method. When options are dividend protected, the relationship between dividend distributions and the scope of the options programme turns to a significantly positive one instead of the negative one documented in US data.