Tourism and economic development: Which investments produce gains for regions?

Across three decades numerous metropolitan regions have made substantial investments in different tourist amenity packages. These investments were made to either capture a portion of the growing tourism market or establish an image that attracted the human capital needed to advance economic development. This article analyzes the returns for the tourism industry and for economic development from different amenity packages and finds those related to sports and amusements generated the most significant gains for regions.     

Loan price modelling for local governments using risk premium analysis

Previous studies have highlighted the question of government loan interest as one of great current importance. Government borrowing levels are high, and reducing interest payments would generate savings to meet other spending needs and/or to lower taxation, thus supporting the sustainability of public finances. However, no previous study has presented a method for a local government to calculate its own credit risk and thus be in a position to negotiate lower interest rates on its borrowing. This article defines a financial model that enables local governments to estimate the interest rate payable on a bank loan, based on their credit risk premium, in accordance with the Basel II rules and the findings of our empirical study of large local governments.     

Country-of-origion effects:an Australian experiment in shelf labelling

The influence of country-of-origin (COO) on consumers' preferences and purchase choices has been extensively discussed in the marketing literature yet most studies dedicated to this issue have relied on durables purchases. Questionnaire-based surveys have most often aimed to identify the degree to which the COO factor influences purchase intentions, but have in general presented this factor in isolation from other product attributes. The present study attempts to address these limitations by relying on ‘real world’ conditions and exploring COO effects for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). For two categories of grocery product, ‘Australian-made’ labels were displayed according to an experimental design over a period of several weeks. No significant effect was found, suggesting that the ‘patriotic’positioning strategy followed by many Australian marketers and retailers is somewhat misguided. These findings also suggest that previous research with durable goods, which supported the existence of COO effects, may not be applicable to the FMCG category where COO effects may be less significant.     

Deployment of Restaurants Websites’ Marketing Features: The Case of Spanish Michelin-Starred Restaurants

ABSTRACT

Websites have become a fundamental marketing tool for tourism businesses and have a special importance for highly rated restaurants. The aim of this article is to propose and apply a model to evaluate the deployment and adoption of website marketing features of restaurants from a specific category. The model is based on the application of an extended model of Internet commerce adoption (eMICA) technique for technical depth, combined with content analysis for breadth. This study analyzes the website features and capabilities for Spanish restaurants in the 2015 Michelin Red Guide. A total of 102 restaurants were analyzed. The results of the website evaluation model suggest that, despite the importance of the restaurant sector in the economy and in the tourism industry, the websites of high-quality restaurants require improvements to adapt to customers’ demands. Results further found that these websites are not tourist-orientated and are established at different stages of development.     

The Tourist Bubble and the Europeanisation of Holiday Travel

This account explores certain aspects of the developments in international, interEuropean holiday travel as a part of the phenomena characterised as modernity and Europeanisation. The focus is on the idea of 'travelling parochialism', i.e. whether large proportions of contemporary international holidaymakers and other travellers on their tours within Europe adopt some kind of furtherance of a home-like culture. The main point of departure is the idea of the 'tourist bubble' understood here as a territorial and functional differentiation and as an expectation of holidaymakers going abroad. The concept of 'travel ecumene' is introduced to examine implications for travellers of the development of a western European travel system. Moreover, the study analyses the extent to which the notion of the tourist bubble is still beneficial in comprehending significant aspects of inter-European holiday travel in relation to current discourses of internationalisation, Europeanisation and cosmopolitanism. The paper also discusses advances of cosmopolitan predilections and aspirations and their possible influences on contemporary international European tourism.     

Reliable evacuation planning via demand inflation and supply deflation

This paper presents an evacuation route planning model that both accounts for demand uncertainty (i.e. the number of evacuees) as well as capacity uncertainty (i.e. the road capacities). To ensure reliability, the model plans for more evacuees (i.e. demand inflation) and less road capacity (i.e. supply deflation). A major contribution is that we provide a framework to determine the amount of demand inflation/supply deflation necessary to ensure a user-specified reliability level. The model is shown to be a natural generalization of previously proposed evacuation models. A small numerical case study reveals the key characteristics of the model.     

Earnings Volatility,Post–Earnings Announcement Drift,and Trading Frictions

We find that lower ex ante earnings volatility leads to higher Post–Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD). PEAD is a function of both the magnitude of an earnings surprise and its persistence. While prior research has largely investigated market reactions to the magnitude of the earnings surprise, in this study we show that the persistence of the earnings surprise is equally important. A unique feature of the anomalous PEAD returns documented here concerns the association between abnormal returns and trading frictions. Besides demonstrating that firms with lower earnings volatility have higher abnormal returns, we also find that lower earnings volatility firms have lower trading frictions. Taken together, these findings imply that higher abnormal returns are associated with lower trading frictions. We exploit this implication to empirically demonstrate that PEAD returns due to earnings volatility are not concentrated in the firms with the largest trading frictions, which is in contrast to the findings in prior anomaly studies.