A Spatial Autocorrelation Approach for Examining the Effects of Urban Greenspace on Residential Property Values

This paper presents spatially explicit analyses of the greenspace contribution to residential property values in a hedonic model. The paper utilizes data from the housing market near downtown Los Angeles. We first used a standard hedonic model to estimate greenspace effects. Because the residuals were spatially autocorrelated, we implemented a spatial lag model as indicated by specification tests. Our results show that neighborhood greenspace at the immediate vicinity of houses has a significant impact on house prices even after controlling for spatial autocorrelation. The different estimation results from non-spatial and spatial models provide useful bounds for the greenspace effect. Greening of inner city areas may provide a valuable policy instrument for elevating depressed housing markets in those areas.     

Does one size fit all? exploring the relationship between attitudes towards growth,gender, and business size

To help explain the typically smaller size of businesses headed by women, this study examines a relatively unexplored dimension on which male and female entrepreneurs are expected to differ: their attitudes towards growth. An increasing number of scholars believe that the growth of a venture is at least partially determined by the entrepreneur’s motivations and intentions, yet very few have investigated whether gender differences exist. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data collected through personal interviews with 229 small business owners in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada, provide novel insights into the factors affecting an entrepreneur’s growth decision and desired pace of expansion.     

The Level of Sustainability Assurance: The Effects of Brand Reputation and Industry Specialisation of Assurance Providers

This research focuses on examining the relationship between some attributes of assurance providers and the level of sustainability assurance. By using the propensity to issue negative conclusions in the assurance statement as an indicator of the level of assurance, we examine whether the brand name and industry specialisation of the practitioners have an impact on the assurance opinion issued. Using an international sample of 1233 firm-year observations over the period 2007–2014, the findings document the impact of the brand reputation and industry specialisation of assurance providers on the level of assurance. The probability of detecting material errors and omissions in a sustainability report is higher if it is verified by a Big 4 auditing firm and by an industry expert as an assurance practitioner. The greater experience in providing audit services and the relevant skills and training provided by Big 4 firms, as well as the greater knowledge and experience of industry experts, increase the propensity to report more accurate opinions about a sustainability report. The findings are robust for alternative measures for the level of assurance and the industry specialisation.     

The effect of traditionally marginalized groups in advertising on consumer response

Increasingly, national brands have cast people from marginalized groups in advertising. It is important to understand the elements that influence consumers’ responses to advertisements featuring groups who have been traditionally excluded from advertising campaigns. Although consumers may wish to buy brands that support their own views on human rights and equality, we propose that consumers in the target market may be uncomfortable if the group portrayal contradicts their beliefs about the topic, concept, or social groups in the ad. Across two studies, we show that when an ad creates this type of internal contradiction within consumers, it may elicit a more negative response than an ad portraying a more traditional model. However, we also find preliminary evidence that using models from marginalized groups can be more effective than using more traditional models—as long as such portrayals do not violate certain target consumers’ schemas. The implications of these results will be discussed.     

Estimating a Local Food Waste Baseline

ABSTRACT

This article estimates the amounts of food that is discarded, diverted, and landfilled in Minnesota by comparing and applying approaches and statistics from selected national, regional, and local studies. Our preferred estimates suggest 2.1 million tons of food is discarded in Minnesota, of which 60% is diverted through recovery and recycling efforts. The remaining 834 thousand tons are landfilled. This landfilled amount, considered as “food waste,” is smaller than the 1.3 million tons calculated using the ReFED (2016) methods, but its estimated distribution across the food supply chain is similar. Residential losses account for the largest proportion of food waste landfilled (43%). The processing and manufacturing stage discards the largest proportion of food (36%), but generates the smallest amount landfilled because of a high diversion factor. The range of estimates obtained from various methods highlights the complexities in choosing appropriate assumptions, factors, and datasets when calculating food waste baseline amounts.     

Complementarities between organisational strategies and innovation

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether organizational strategies in various manufacturing industries are complementary with innovation. In particular, our interest is to discover which organizational strategies are complementary with major innovations (world-first and Canada-first). Knowledge of complementarity should pave the way for creating sustainable competitive advantage because the use of a complex strategy may be difficult to imitate. In other words, competitive advantage increases as the complexity of the strategy increases (i.e. because the number of strategy combinations follows a power law), which acts as a barrier to potential imitators (Rivkin, J.W. (2000) Imitation of Complex Strategies. Management Science, 46(6), 824–844.).

Because of the static nature of our results (productivity and profit are for 1997), their interpretation can only be tentative. Thus, our research is really a first step along the road to understanding the (potential) importance of complementarities among firm strategies. Caveats aside, managers may want to compare their own firm’s emphasis on particular strategies against what is empirically determined to be complementary with innovation and high-performance within their industry. The frequency of complementary pairs that involve innovation range from 40 to 50% depending on whether we are talking about profit, productivity, or strategies. This result is important—as it means that innovation outcomes are statistically significant for both increased productivity and increased profit. Furthermore, innovation was found to be complementary with many organizational strategies. The complementary strategies across industries were quite different, but this was expected to occur.     

Has SOX Enhanced Non–Big 4 Auditors' Ability to Deal with Client Pressure?

We investigate whether non–Big 4 auditors have enhanced their ability to resist client pressure over accrual reporting following the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX). Regressing abnormal accruals on proxies for economic bonding, we find that changes in the association, defined as (Post–Pre), are significantly negative, implying an improvement in auditor independence after SOX. Among non–Big 4 auditors, only Tier 3 auditors compromised reporting objectivity before SOX, but neither Tier 2 nor Tier 3 auditors yielded to client pressure after SOX. Evidence that these two groups of non–Big 4 auditors differ in the way they cope with client pressure in a loose regulatory regime highlights the importance of assessing the efficacy of SOX separately for subsets of auditors and contributes to an understanding of the underresearched, but inherently important, segment of the audit market served by non–Big 4 auditors. Further analysis indicates that the low pre‐SOX audit quality observed in the full sample is driven by non–PCAOB registrants.     

Journey into Parenthood: Commodification of Reproduction as a New Tourism Niche Market

This article examines the phenomenon of viewing life cycle stages associated with reproduction as commodities, and how this has paved the way for developing and marketing new tourism products and experiences. It traces the genesis of this trend and provides a conceptual review of this development by way of four examples—“babymoons,” hotel baby programs, reproductive tourism, and procreation tourism programs. It argues that parents-to-be and new parents form a new tourism niche market, and that these new products occupy the moral boundary of tourism marketing—packaging up previously sacred and non-commodified events for tourist consumption.     

The Relationships Between Emotional Intelligence,Job Stress,and Quality of Life Among Tour Guides

Considerable evidence supports the notion that higher job stress is associated with lower quality of life (QOL), which is an increasingly common indicator to assess an individual's general health status, mental health and well-being. Those with higher emotional intelligence (EI) levels are more aware of their emotions and have more effective coping strategies to deal with stress-related emotions, all of which lead to higher levels of well-being. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to explore the relationships between EI, job stress and QOL among tour guides, who significantly influence tourists' impressions of a destination. The obtained results indicated that EI was inversely correlated with occupational stress and positively associated with QOL, and a negative link was seen between job stress and QOL. In practice, the results can provide information for developing interventions to enhance tour guides' competencies of EI and stress management, which result in higher levels of QOL.