Clothing Style,Music, and Media Influences on Adolescents’ Brand Consumption Behavior

This research focuses on the influence of clothing style identification on adolescents’ brand consumption behavior. The sample consisted of 1063 adolescents. The results indicated that the clothing brands adolescents prefer depend upon the clothing style with which they are identified. The role of media and music on Generation Y adolescents and on their clothing consumption was confirmed. Adolescents’ group identification and adolescents’ sensitivity to media and music vary according to their clothing styles. These data can be employed by firms to develop brands strategies.     

Genome-wide association studies in economics and entrepreneurship research: promises and limitations

The recently developed genome-wide association study (GWAS) design enables the identification of genes specifically associated with economic outcomes such as occupational and other choices. This is a promising new approach for economics research which we aim to apply to the choice for entrepreneurship. However, due to multiple testing issues, very large sample sizes are needed to differentiate between true and false positives. For a GWAS on entrepreneurship, we expect that a sample size of at least 30,000 observations is required.     

A cross-category investigation into the effects of nine-ending pricing on brand choice

Retailers largely adopt nine-ending prices and these prices have attracted greater attention from researchers in marketing. Despite this increased interest, very few empirical studies have tried to quantify the effects of nine-ending prices on consumer actual behaviors. Those who have studied the behavioral effects of nine-ending prices have produced mixed findings. In this article, we investigated the cross-category effects of nine-ending pricing on consumer brand choice at the SKU level. We distinguished between different types of nine-ending while controlling for the rounded prices and other marketing-mix variables. We conducted our analysis on over 11,000 SKUs in 102 product categories of two (2) grocery retailers. We find that the effects of 99 ending prices on the SKU's category choice are larger in concentrated and promotional categories but smaller in expensive categories. However, their influence on purchase quantity is larger in expensive categories but smaller in concentrated categories.     

Coherent and convex monetary risk measures for unbounded càdlàg processes

Assume that the random future evolution of values is modelled in continuous time. Then, a risk measure can be viewed as a functional on a space of continuous-time stochastic processes. In this paper we study coherent and convex monetary risk measures on the space of all càdlàg processes that are adapted to a given filtration. We show that if such risk measures are required to be real-valued, then they can only depend on a stochastic process in a way that is uninteresting for many applications. Therefore, we allow them to take values in ( −∞, ∞]. The economic interpretation of a value of ∞ is that the corresponding financial position is so risky that no additional amount of money can make it acceptable. The main result of the paper gives different characterizations of coherent or convex monetary risk measures on the space of all bounded adapted càdlàg processes that can be extended to coherent or convex monetary risk measures on the space of all adapted càdlàg processes. As examples we discuss a new approach to measure the risk of an insurance company and a coherent risk measure for unbounded càdlàg processes induced by a so called m-stable set.Due to errors during the typesetting process, this article was published incorrectly in Finance Stoch 9(3):369–387 (2005). The address of the first author was printed incorrectly, and in the whole paper the angular brackets were misprinted as [ ]. The complete corrected article is given here. The online version of the original paper can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00780-004-0150-7     

英国开放大学的学习者支持服务与质量提高(上)

英国开放大学有着严格的质量保障程序,并正在将越来越多的注意力转到强化质量上。本文对英国开放大学当前的发展进行了研究,这些发展不仅确保了学生和辅导教师都能获得所需要的支持以满足外界对质量保证的要求,而且丰富了学生的体验,了解了辅导教师发展的方向。本文通过对两个具体例子的讨论,加以阐述英国开放大学的学习者支持与质量提高,其中一个例子与学生有关,另一个与辅导教师有关。第一个例子介绍了一个已启动的五年项目,该项目通过为学生提供个性化学习资源以改善学生的支持服务,这些学习资源与学生通过印刷品和电子媒体选择的学习课程有关。此外,还有来自辅导教师、其它专业人员和咨询人员的个别支持。开放大学一直将辅导教师的质量保证置于院校的优先发展领域,并在过去的36年里通过各种途径得以成功推进。本文还讨论了为学生提供电子问卷方面的最新发展情况,此举不仅能让学生向辅导教师提供反馈,还旨在告知每一个辅导教师在哪方面需要加强。当这些资料在院校层次进行汇总时,也能反映出院校今后在加强教学质量方面的具体政策。这两个例子都表明,远程教育潜在的非个性化的工业化模式现在能够在学生的体验和员工的支持与发展方面实现个性化。     

Regional demands for pulp and paper products

The pulp and paper industry has experienced dramatic changes during the past several decades with large variations in world regional market shares of production capacity and consumption patterns. Based on panel data available (1961–2000) from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, this paper estimates dynamic demand models for pulp and paper products in four major trading regions: Asia, Europe, the North American Free Trade Agreement Area, and South America. With or without price in the model, short-run demands are generally output inelastic. However, without price in the model, long-run output elasticities were more elastic, particularly in the Paper/Paperboard, Printing/Writing, and Household/Sanitary sectors with most elasticities greater than 1. With price included in the model, long-run demands were generally output inelastic, with primary exceptions being the Paper/Paperboard sector for all but the NAFTA region and Wrapping/Packaging for Asia and South America. Price was generally significant with long-run elasticities, in absolute value, in the (0.05, 0.11) range. And as a measure of urbanization, the percent of the population living in urban areas significantly affects consumption in total and in the Pulp and Printing/Writing sectors.     

Transatlantic Differences in Labour Markets: Changes in Wage and Non-Employment Structures in the 1980s and the 1990s

Abstract. Rising wage inequality in the United States and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but wage rigidities in continental Europe ('Krugman hypothesis'). This paper tests this hypothesis based on seven large person-level data sets for the 1980s and the 1990s. I use a more sophisticated categorization of low-skilled workers than previous studies, which exhibits differences between German workers with and without apprenticeship training, particularly in the 1980s. I find evidence for the Krugman hypothesis when Germany is compared with the United States. However, supply changes differ considerably between countries, with Britain experiencing enormous increases in skill supply explaining the relatively constant British skill premium in the 1990s.     

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Methods for Generating Longitudinally Correlated Binary Data

The analysis of longitudinally correlated binary data has attracted considerable attention of late. Since the estimation of parameters in models for such data is based on asymptotic theory, it is necessary to investigate the small‐sample properties of estimators by simulation. In this paper, we review the mechanisms that have been proposed for generating longitudinally correlated binary data. We compare and contrast these models with regard to various features, including computational efficiency, flexibility and the range restrictions that they impose on the longitudinal association parameters. Some extensions to the data generation mechanism originally suggested by Kanter (1975) are proposed.