农业增长和经济发展:全球化视角的观点

本文重新考察了农业部门增长对经济全面发展的贡献这一古老命题,并试图探讨在一个日益全球化的世界中,这一命题是否依然有效。有足够的经验证据支持这一命题。实际上,除了一些城市型国家的经济发展没有强劲的农业增长外,很难再找出其他什么例外。然而,有很多国家既没有见到其农业增长,也没有见到其经济发展。即使在那些农业增长显著的国家,国内也存在巨大的地区差异。本文同时研究了促进或限制农业转型的因素。全球化进程及其引致的农业食品体系变革,是为农业主导的增长提供了新的机会？还是使得那些受排斥的国家、地区或群体被进一步的边缘化？本文还研究了导致这种被排斥的因素,包括全球化力量和国内政策与治理方面的弱点。最后,本文探讨了降低农业体系转型成本的政策措施,包括向那些落后的国家、地区或群体提供安全保障体系等。     

Disentangling the performance effects of efficiency and bargaining power in horizontal growth strategies: An empirical investigation in the global retail industry

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and organic growth are two common strategies to achieve horizontal growth. In this study, we disentangle two distinct sources of firm performance corresponding to different theoretical perspectives on firm size: firms' bargaining power with respect to suppliers and customers, and operating efficiency arising from scale economies. We conceptually argue and empirically show that relatively, M&A enhance bargaining power in the short term while organic growth enhances operating efficiency over the long term. In order to disaggregate these effects, we use accounting rather than financial or managerial data and test our predictions in the global retail industry over a 20‐year period. We examine implications of these results for sustainability of size‐based competitive advantages. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of Price Disclosure on Dynamic Shopping Decisions

A potentially powerful way to assist consumers in making dynamic shopping decisions is to disclose price information to them before they shop, for example by posting prices on the Internet. This paper addresses the differential impact of disclosing either only current, or both current and future prices, on consumer shopping decisions in multi-period tasks involving multiple product purchases. In the context of an Internet-based experiment, we find that consumer expenditure deviates more strongly from that of a normative model when both current and future prices are disclosed than if only current prices are disclosed. We investigate the behavioral effects underlying this finding by estimating a model that allows for variations in consumer discounting, strength of store price format preferences, as well as choice consistency between different price disclosure conditions.     

Development of Trust Scores in Social Media (TSM) Algorithm and Application to Advertising Practice and Research

Trust is an important factor, particularly in viral/social advertising, and computing trust scores for individual users of a social network is crucial for several applications in the advertising research and practice. However, research on trust in the advertising field has been limited, and the application of computational trust to advertising research using big data is rare. Addressing the gap in the research literature, this study proposed and empirically tested a new social media analytics method, the Trust Scores in Social Media (TSM) algorithm, for measuring individual users' trust levels in a social network. TSM proposes the concept of negatively reinforced trust scores and introduces two complementary measures of trust, trustingness, and trustworthiness. Another unique and important element in the TSM algorithm is the incorporation of trust-decision involvement to adjust trust scores depending on the level of trust-decision involvement of different networks. Using small survey data and big data from social networks, this study demonstrated the effectiveness of the TSM algorithm. Various applications of the TSM algorithm to viral/social advertising research and practice are also discussed.     

Ex-dividend day abnormal returns for special dividends

Past research shows that the difference between dividend amount and ex-dividend day price drop reflects the transaction costs and the differential in the tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Moreover, it is also documented that the higher the dividend yield, the lower is the ex-dividend day return. This paper focuses on large special dividends and tests the two competing hypothesis, tax hypothesis and short term trading hypothesis. Our focus on large special dividends is motivated by the following three considerations. First, special dividends have experienced a surge in recent years. Second, special dividends are important for dividend capture by institutions, corporations and arbitragers. Third, using a sample of large special dividends allows us to reduce the market microstructure effects and focus more directly on the two competing hypotheses. Based on a sample of large special dividends, we find that price drop on ex-dividend day is significantly less than the dividend amount. Furthermore, we show that ex-dividend day returns are positive and hence, are not fully arbitraged away. Our tests indicate that tax hypothesis explains some portion of ex-dividend day abnormal returns even for large special dividends, whereas the support for the short-term trading hypothesis is weak.