Putting sense of place at the centre of place brand development

Developing a place brand involves highlighting the distinctive attributes of a place that could be used to enhance its attractiveness. This study is in line with recent literature where the concept of place identity is being replaced by sense of place, which provides an holistic view of a place by integrating all users’ experiences and feelings. Through a qualitative study involving 31 individual interviews with users and meetings with managers of a French coastal area, this paper proposes a five-dimensional definition of sense of place and its use as a tool for developing a place brand in 3 ways: defining the place brand concept, bringing together the internal stakeholders and invoving users in brand building.     

Anatomy of competitive advantage: towards a contingency theory of entrepreneurial marketing

Entrepreneurial marketing (EM), born out of the practice of firms operating in conditions of uncertainty, is emerging as a powerful alternative to cope with the decreasing effectiveness associated with traditional marketing. In this article, the authors provide their collective position regarding the field of EM. A brief history and conceptual background of EM is presented and the contextual differences that have shaped its evolution are considered. Distinctions between traditional and EM are derived based on discussions of the concepts of size, speed, market, opportunity, risk, and uncertainty. The perspective of value co-creation in uncertainty is used to develop a contingency framework to serve as the foundation towards a general theory of EM. Operand and operant resources and environmental conditions are proposed to moderate the EM process from opportunity recognition to entrepreneurial organization, EM, and temporary competitive advantage. The theoretical facets are illustrated with seven propositions and directions for future research.     

We need to talk about strategy: How to conduct effective strategic dialogue

As researchers and consultants, we have spent the last few years helping a dozen major public and private organizations understand what went wrong with their strategic planning. We discovered that executives have a hard time with strategy because they are at a loss when the time comes to engage in strategic dialogue. Either their teams debate the organization’s values and goals when such issues should be settled, or they waste time on the details of specific projects that have yet to receive the green light. But whether the conversation is too broad or too narrow, strategy stays out of view. Drawing on recent developments in strategy-as-practice and decision-making literature, we propose a model that executives can follow to take control of strategy meetings and keep their teams on track. We ask them to focus on the right decision purpose, adjust the meeting’s communication style, and cast the right leader for the job. When these three simple rules are followed, the pillars of successful dialogue are aligned, and executives can finally talk about what matters most to them: strategy.     

The Demand for Life Insurance in OECD Countries

This article examines the determinants of life insurance consumption in OECD countries. Consistent with previous results, we find a significant positive income elasticity of life insurance demand. Demand also increases with the number of dependents and level of education, and decreases with life expectancy and social security expenditure. The country's level of financial development and its insurance market's degree of competition appear to stimulate life insurance sales, whereas high inflation and real interest rates tend to decrease consumption. Overall, life insurance demand is better explained when the product market and socioeconomic factors are jointly considered. In addition, the use of GMM estimates helps reconcile our findings with previous puzzling results based on inconsistent OLS estimates given heteroscedasticity problems in the data.     

Corporate governance or globalization: What determines CEO compensation in China?

This paper examines the relationship between corporate governance and CEO compensation in China. In contrast to results derived from U.S. data, we find little evidence that Chinese CEOs take advantage of weaker board structures or less demanding shareholders to extract higher compensation packages. Instead, our results lend support to the view that the increasingly global managerial labor market and compensation standards have a greater impact on CEO pay level. Our study suggests that CEOs in developing economies like China, in our case, benefit more from their degree of exposure to these changes than from corporate governance imperfections.     

Comments on John Roemer’s first welfare theorem of market socialism*

Abstract

In this comment on John Roemer’s “theory of cooperation with an application to market socialism”, I extend Roemer’s first welfare theorem of market socialism in two directions. First, I prove a version of the theorem that deals with non-linear taxation. Second, I offer a connection between the theorem and welfare equality. I then argue that the models and questions that Roemer contribute to bring to welfare economics raise questions that go much beyond the research on socialist ethics. In particular, I introduce a positive model of moral behavior that yields different predictions from Roemer’s Kantian model. I conclude that individual morality should become a central concern of welfare economists.     

Evidence on the glass ceiling effect in France using matched worker-firm data

In this article, we investigate the relevance of the glass ceiling hypothesis in France, according to which there exist larger gender wage gaps at the upper tail of the wage distribution. Using a matched worker-firm data set of about 1 30 000 employees and 14 000 employers, we estimate quantile regressions and rely on a principal component analysis to summarize information specific to the firms. Our different results show that accounting for firm-related characteristics reduces the gender earnings gap at the top of the distribution, but the latter still remains much higher at the top than at the bottom. Furthermore, a quantile decomposition shows that the gender wage gap is mainly due to differences in the returns to observed characteristics rather than in differences in characteristics between men and women.     

Optimal privatization of vertical public utilities

Abstract We examine restructuring, divestiture, and deregulation of a vertically integrated public utility, (e.g., electricity), from a public finance perspective. How an optimal restructuring plan for the utility depends on the cost of public funds and on the X‐efficiency gains from privatization, how the optimal degree of competition in the upstream and downstream segments are connected, and implications of privatization for consumer prices are examined. The higher the cost of public funds, the more likely the post‐privatization price will exceed the regulated public utility price. The greater the X‐efficiency gains from privatization, the more likely the post‐privatization price will fall.     

The optimal capital structure of the firm with stable Lévy assets returns

This article builds a new structural default model under the assumption that a firm’s assets return follows a dynamics displaying jumps of both signs. In essence, we expand the work of Hilberink and Rogers (itself an extension of the Leland and Toft framework), which deals only with negative jumps. In contrast, we make use of stable Lévy processes, and we compute the values of the firm, debt and equity under this assumption. Theoretical credit spreads can also be obtained in our framework. They prove to be consistent with the empirical credit spreads observed in financial markets.      

Likelihood‐Based Inference and Prediction in Spatio‐Temporal Panel Count Models for Urban Crimes

We develop a panel count model with a latent spatio‐temporal heterogeneous state process for monthly severe crimes at the census‐tract level in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our dataset combines Uniform Crime Reporting data with socio‐economic data. The likelihood is estimated by efficient importance sampling techniques for high‐dimensional spatial models. Estimation results confirm the broken‐windows hypothesis whereby less severe crimes are leading indicators for severe crimes. In addition to ML parameter estimates, we compute several other statistics of interest for law enforcement such as spatio‐temporal elasticities of severe crimes with respect to less severe crimes, out‐of‐sample forecasts, predictive distributions and validation test statistics. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.