Cross-sectional determinants of bank performance under deposit dollarization in emerging markets

Dollar-denominated deposits and loans could increase financial fragility in emerging market banking systems. This currency mismatch does not only increase banks' currency risk when the proportion of dollar-denominated loans with respect to local-denominated loans increases but also it increases their clients' default risk if depreciation occurs. This paper investigates the profitability of 36 dollarized banking systems. Results suggest that after controlling for some macroeconomic and institutional variables, dollarization, as the currency mismatch hypothesis suggests, depresses bank performance and lowers bank profitability. Results also show that the effect of institutions more than offsets the negative impact of dollarization on banks' profitability.     

Structural models of complementary choices

This article reviews the rapidly growing literature on structural models of complementary choices. It discusses recent modeling developments and identifies promising areas for future research.     

Ethics and Australian International Business which way to Asia?

In an era of domestic and economic reform wherein deregulation/privatisation becomes a priority, short shift has too often been given to evaluative analyses of business activities. Evaluative monitoring and oversight are especially needful in highly competitive international business environments, where the temptations are very strong to adjudge individual effectiveness by the sole criterion of the bottom line. But what additional or alternative criteria should be administered, and by whom, is less clear. That any but the most vague Judeo-Christian or secular ethical standards are applicable (e.g. notions of fairness) is widely contested. The debate is significantly only widened when doing business across national borders involving peoples from different cultures and languages. This section is devoted to explicating the normative role of international codes of conduct for guiding the decision making of managers involved in multinational operations, and clarifying what ethical frameworks are available to the international manager for taking decisions which require selecting actions inconsistent with either home or host country demands.Daniel W. Skubik is a lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University; and is also an independent consultant. He holds the PhD (philosophy), a JD (law), and an MA (Hons.).     

Encouraging Professional Skepticism in the Industry Specialization Era

This paper provides theory and experimental evidence that, under common audit conditions, industry specialization inhibits some aspects of auditors’ professional skepticism. As auditors amass industry experience, they develop extensive knowledge of non-misstatement explanations for unusual financial statement fluctuations. This knowledge coupled with confidence in their ability to analyze audit evidence inhibits their inclination to be skeptical when there are no overt indicators of elevated misstatement risk. Although these conditions are, by definition, the conditions where misstatements are least likely, they are also the same conditions where the PCAOB has alleged pervasive insufficient professional skepticism and where well-concealed fraud is possible. These results pose an ethical dilemma for the PCAOB in terms of weighing its charge to protect the public interest against the fairness of its inspections to audit firms. Encouragingly, I also predict and find that audit firm efforts to promote professional skepticism are more effective for specialists as non-specialists are skeptical regardless of these efforts.     

Foreign direct investment via M&A and domestic entrepreneurship: blessing or curse?

There are conflicting predictions in the literature about the relationship between FDI and entrepreneurship. This paper explores how foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, measured by lagged cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A), affect entrepreneurial entry in the host economy. We have constructed a micro-panel of more than two thousand individuals in each of seventy countries, 2000–2009, linked to FDI by matching sectors. We find the relationship between FDI inflows and domestic entrepreneurship to be negative across all economies. This negative effect is much more pronounced in developed than developing economies and is also identified within industries, notably in manufacturing. Policies to encourage FDI via M&A need to consider how to counteract the prevailing adverse effect on domestic entrepreneurship.     

A framework for innovative service design

Drawing on research from design science, marketing, and service science, our paper provides an integrated framework for evaluating and directing innovative service design. The main goal of our review is to highlight the strengths of existing frameworks and to suggest how they can be enhanced in combination with design science principles. Based on our review, we propose a new framework for the design of innovative services that integrates several key paradigmatic approaches and identifies fundamental open research questions. Our approach is unique as it combines three service disciplines, namely services marketing, service science, and design science, and provides a new framework that describes step by step the procedure that needs to be taken and the conditions that need to be met for developing innovative services. We believe that providing such a framework is a valuable addition to the literature.     

Antecedents of market orientation in semi-public service organizations: a study of Dutch housing associations

The purpose of this study is to explain which factors affect the market orientation of semi-public service organizations in their transition from public to private. Change capacity and interdepartmental and organizational system factors are hypothesized to affect market orientation, which is operationalized in behavioural and cultural dimensions. Results of a survey among top-level executives of Dutch housing associations show that interdepartmental and organizational system factors have a significant effect. The most important antecedents, however, are two change capacity factors: process improvement control and top management emphasis. This suggests that change capacity is crucial for understanding market orientation in many service industries.     

A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting Scheduling

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, scheduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires cancellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our ongoing work in this direction.     

Understanding communal and individual customer experiences in group-oriented event tourism: an activity theory perspective

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study, grounded in activity theory, is to empirically investigate the communal and individual mechanisms that simultaneously shape the customer experience in group-oriented event tourism. Based on a survey of 389 respondents with group travel experience to major events, the results confirm the research model, suggesting that the customer-experience construct constitutes a multidimensional structure comprising second-order components reflecting individual and communal experiences, with each containing first-order constructs. The results further confirm that the customer-experience construct predicts post-consumption evaluations of perceived value and satisfaction. Limitations of the study are outlined, and implications for research and managerial practice for the creation of customer experiences that are valuable and satisfying for group-travel consumers to events are discussed.