Innovation and upheaval: early growth in Greek capital market listings and IPOs from 1880 to the Second World War in the Athens Stock Exchange†

The establishment and growth of the Greek stock market were coincident with development episodes, financial upheavals, and geographic expansions of the country's economy over the period 1880–1940. This article explores the growth of the Athens Stock Exchange through new listings and initial public offerings (IPOs) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We examine changes in exchange governance and listing requirements. On a theme not addressed before , we find that simple listings were far more numerous than actual IPOs. IPOs in Greece remained unregulated throughout the period. Their under‐pricing became pronounced in the later parts of the period, especially the 1920s. The study presents data on ‘quasi‐IPOs’ (that is, capital increases shortly after listing) and shows that they offer a more accurate assessment of the demand for the financing of listing firms in an emerging market. Robust evidence is presented to show that as the Exchange developed it also underwent a change in character, becoming more oriented to the domestic market and catering to smaller firms in domestic manufacturing in the post‐First World War era that marked the end of early globalization.     

Brands on the Brain: Neuro-Images of Advertising

Neuroscience is opening a new chapter of understanding in many fields. One such is how advertising works. For the first time we can directly 'see' some effects of advertisements on the brain's activity. This article reports two small-scale experiments into the differential effects of advertising's rational and emotional components. Advertising has long been seen as providing reasons to buy, however subtle. In academic research at least, the importance of emotion has often been downplayed. The preliminary experiment reported here shows how emotional ads are more likely to be remembered. The second experiment uses brain imaging to investigate the part of the brain which responds to emotionally-engaging ('affective') and reason-engaging ('cognitive') advertising stimuli. These are very early days in using brain-imaging techniques and these experiments are very exploratory. However, as the three Commentaries by Simon Broadbent, Thomas O'Guinn and Larry Percy suggest, along with other work, they may point towards a revolution in advertising research.     

Estimating the conditional mode of a stationary stochastic process from noisy observations

Let {(X _i, Y _i,)}, i≥1, be a strictly stationary process from noisy observations. We examine the effect of the noise in the response Y and the covariates X on the nonparametric estimation of the conditional mode function. To estimate this function we are using deconvoluting kernel estimators. The asymptotic behavior of these estimators depends on the smoothness of the noise distribution, which is classified as either ordinary smooth or super smooth. Uniform convergence with almost sure convergence rates is established for strongly mixing stochastic processes, when the noise distribution is ordinary smooth. Received: April 1998     

Cross-Sectional Evolution of the U.S. City Size Distribution

We report nonparametrically estimated stochastic transition kernels for the evolution of the distribution of U.S. metropolitan area populations, for the period 1900 to 1990. These suggest a fair amount of uniformity in the patterns of mobility during the study period. The distribution of city size is predominantly characterised by persistence. Additional kernel estimates do not reveal any stark differences in intra-region mobility patterns. We characterise the nature of intra-size distribution dynamics by means of measures that do not require discretisation of the city size distribution. We employ these measures to study the degree of mobility within the U.S. city size distribution and, separately, within regional and urban subsystems. We find that different regions show different degrees of intra-distribution mobility. Second-tier cities show more mobility than top-tier cities.     

The behavior of consumer loan rates during the 1990 credit slowdown

This study re-examines the 1990 credit slowdown by investigating the loan pricing behavior of commercial banks. We find strong evidence that large, undercapitalized banks contributed to the credit slowdown by charging consumers a higher-than-average loan rate relative to better-capitalized institutions. This disparity in lending exists even after accounting for bank funding costs. Thus, we argue that there was a lending slowdown that occurred among large, undercapitalized banks. The reluctance to lend among undercapitalized banks is at least suggestive of behavior that is consistent with a credit crunch.     

The ‘Polychronicity - Multiple Media Use’ (P-MMU) scale: a multi-dimensional scale to measure polychronicity in the context of multiple media use

Our paper details the development of a new multidimensional scale to measure polychronicity, ‘the preference for multiple media use’ (the P-MMU). Previous measures of polychronicity are predominantly developed for an organisational context, or do not reflect the complexity required for the measurement of the behavioural phenomenon of multiple media use, within the context of Integrated Marketing Communications. Scale development procedures follow a review of literature and prior qualitative study, uncovering motives for individuals’ preference for multiple media use. The nine dimensional P-MMU scale demonstrates stability across two data sets, using a total sample of 317 Digital Natives. In the evolving research area of multiple media use, the P-MMU scale provides an appropriate measure for the study of this phenomenon.     

Improved estimation of extreme quantiles in the multivariate Lomax (Pareto II) distribution

Estimation of a quantile of the common marginal distribution in a multivariate Lomax (Pareto II) distribution with unknown location and scale parameters is considered. For quadratic loss and specified extreme quantiles, it is established that the best affine equivariant procedure is inadmissible by constructing a better estimator.