How is Business Adapting to Climate Change Impacts Appropriately? Insight from the Commercial Port Sector

Adaptation to climate change impacts is a key research topic in business ethics that poses substantial implications on the good lives of human beings. The commercial port sector is a highly relevant study focus with its pivotal roles in supply chains and international trade. Hence, it is important to investigate whether the port planning system and practice is appropriate in tackling climate change impacts. But beforehand, we must thoroughly understand the attitude and behaviors of port planners and operators on ports’ climate adaptation planning. Through a survey towards 21 ports (seaports and dry ports) in Canada, the paper investigates the attitude and behaviors of port planners and operators on ports’ climate adaptation planning. Towards the end, we propose a new approach so as to enable port stakeholders to carry out climate adaptation planning effectively. The paper offers important insight to researchers to investigate the ways in developing effective climate adaptation plans and practice for ports and other business sectors.     

Mergers & acquisitions and the acquirer-target cultural differences

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We investigate the impacts of cultural environment on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the U.S. To measure the cultural environment of a...     

Planned behaviour of tourism students’ entrepreneurial intentions in China

This research aims to investigate the influence of planned behaviour and personal variables on entrepreneurial intention in order to explain and improve low entrepreneurial intention among tourism students in China. A total of 109 tourism students were surveyed to find the key factors affecting their entrepreneurial intention by factor analysis. The six hypotheses were then tested in a sample of 267 Chinese tourism students. According to structural equation modelling (SEM), it was found that there are statistically significant relationships between personal attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control and entrepreneurial intention. Multi-group analysis further showed that there are differences between personal attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control according to different personal variables. The results highlight the importance of taking a subdividing approach when researching the factors that influence entrepreneurial intention. Thus, we believe a number of implications about the most effective role of creating entrepreneurial atmosphere from universities, enhancing tourism students’ self-efficacy, and setting student-centred policies in promoting and developing entrepreneurial intention.     

A Dynamic Fuzzy Money Management Approach for Controlling the Intraday Risk-Adjusted Performance of AI Trading Algorithms

The majority of existing artificial intelligence (AI) studies in computational finance literature are devoted solely to predicting market movements. In this paper we shift the attention to how AI can be applied to control risk-based money management decisions. We propose an innovative fuzzy logic approach which identifies and categorizes technical rules performance across different regions in the trend and volatility space. The model dynamically prioritizes higher performing regions at an intraday level and adapts money management policies with the objective to maximize global risk-adjusted performance. By adopting a hybrid method in conjunction with a popular neural network (NN) trend prediction model, our results show significant performance improvements compared with both standard NN and buy-and-hold approaches. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Volatility and Market Risk of Rubber Price in Malaysia: Pre- and Post-Global Financial Crisis

The volatility in rubber price is a significant risk to producers, traders, consumers and others who are involved in the production and marketing of natural rubber. Such being the case, forecasting the rubber price volatility is desired to assist in decision-making in this uncertain situation. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis caused some disruptions and uncertainties in the future supply or demand for natural rubber and thus leading to higher rubber price volatility. Using ARCH-type models, this paper intends to model the dynamics of the price volatility of Standard Malaysia Rubber Grade 20 (SMR 20) in the Malaysian market before and after the Global Financial Crisis. Additionally, Value-at-Risk (VaR) approach is implemented to evaluate the market risk of SMR 20. Our empirical result denotes the existence of volatility clustering and long memory volatility in the SMR 20 market for both crisis periods. Leverage effect is also detected in the SMR 20 market where negative innovations (bad news) have a larger impact on the volatility than positive innovations (good news) for post-crisis period. When tested with Superior Predictive Ability (SPA) test, FIGARCH model is the best model across five loss functions for short- and long-term forecasts for pre-crisis period. Meanwhile, over post-crisis period, FIGARCH and GJR GARCH indicate the superior out-of-sample-forecast results and better forecasting accuracy over short- and long-term horizons, respectively. In terms of market risk, the short trading position encounters higher risk or greater losses than the long trading position at both 1 and 5 % VaR quantile for pre-crisis period. In contrast, over post-crisis period, long traders of rubber SMR 20 tend to face limited gains but unlimited losses.

     

The effect of perceived advertising effort on brand perception: implication for retailers in Hong Kong

This paper examines how advertising effort, specifically advertising creativity and advertising believability, may influence consumers’ perceptions of a retailer’s business philosophy, and in turn consumers’ behavior toward retailers in Hong Kong. Altogether five hundred and eighty-three respondents (i.e. 320 college students and 263 shoppers) were surveyed. The results suggested that retailers that are regarded as having more creative advertising are perceived as being more learning-oriented, which leads to higher brand recognition. Meanwhile, retailers that are regarded as having more believable advertisements are perceived as having higher levels of integrity, and as a result are better recognized and more likely to be patronized. This research contributes to literature in retailing and marketing communication by establishing the antecedents and consequences of building a learning-oriented and trustworthy business philosophy in a cultural specific context. It also provides practical guidance for retailers who aim to increase brand recognition and purchase intentions through promotional effort.     

Does board gender diversity improve the informativeness of stock prices?

We show that stock prices of firms with gender-diverse boards reflect more firm-specific information after controlling for corporate governance, earnings quality, institutional ownership and acquisition activity. Further, we show that the relationship is stronger for firms with weak corporate governance suggesting that gender-diverse boards could act as a substitute mechanism for corporate governance that would be otherwise weak. The results are robust to alternative specifications of informativeness and gender diversity and to sensitivity tests controlling for time-invariant firm characteristics and alternative measures of stock price informativeness. We also find that gender diversity improves stock price informativeness through the mechanism of increased public disclosure in large firms and by encouraging private information collection in small firms.     

A tale of two yield curves: Modeling the joint term structure of dollar and euro interest rates

Modeling the joint term structure of interest rates in the United States and the European Union, the two largest economies in the world, is extremely important in international finance. In this article, we provide both theoretical and empirical analysis of multi-factor joint affine term structure models (ATSM) for dollar and euro interest rates. In particular, we provide a systematic classification of multi-factor joint ATSM similar to that of Dai and Singleton (2000). A principal component analysis of daily dollar and euro interest rates reveals four factors in the data. We estimate four-factor joint ATSM using the approximate maximum likelihood method of [A?t-Sahalia, 2002] and [A?t-Sahalia, forthcoming] and compare the in-sample and out-of-sample performances of these models using some of the latest nonparametric methods. We find that a new four-factor model with two common and two local factors captures the joint term structure dynamics in the US and the EU reasonably well.