Consumer preferences for human uniqueness in marketing communications

Brand images that remind us of our similarities with other animals are not uncommon in marketing. Conversely, research indicates that we hold subconscious preferences for human distinctiveness from all other animals as a means to defend existentially related self-esteem. The current research explores the different conditions in which these preferences materialize and are reversed. Consumers with high levels of existential anxiety reveal more favorable brand attitudes after being exposed to advertisements promoting human uniqueness as opposed to human–animal sameness. These effects also lead to increased donation likelihood toward a charitable organization fighting for the preservation of endangered species. Interestingly under conditions of low existential anxiety, these effects reverse.     

Privatization and Corporate Governance: Principles, Evidence, and Future Challenges

Unless developing countries embrace a corporate governance perspective,privatization is unlikely to provide the benefits of improvedperformance with accountability. This article introduces theconcept of governance chains that can constrain the grabbinghands of public and private actors by providing informationand accountability mechanisms to help investors monitor managers.Empirical data on established firms from 49 countries provideestimates of the relative importance and strength of privateand formal chains of governance. The framework and empiricalbenchmarks help explain the outcomes of past privatizationsand suggest certain steps that governments can pursue to besure to get the most out of future privatization activity.      

Tax-based Own Resources to Finance the EU Budget

Intereconomics - In the current negotiations about the European Union’s next medium-term Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for the period 2021 to 2027, the system of own resources...     

Segmenting mean-nonstationary time series via trending regressions

In this paper, we provide a segmentation procedure for mean-nonstationary time series. The segmentation is obtained by casting the problem into the framework of detecting structural breaks in trending regression models in which the regressors are generated by suitably smooth functions. As test statistics we propose to use the maximally selected likelihood ratio statistics and a related statistics based on partial sums of weighted residuals. The main theoretical contribution of the paper establishes the extreme value distribution of these statistics and their consistency. To circumvent the slow convergence to the extreme value limit, we propose to employ a version of the circular bootstrap. This procedure is completely data-driven and does not require knowledge of the time series structure. In an empirical part, we show in a simulation study and applications to air carrier traffic and S&P 500 data that the finite sample performance is very satisfactory.     

Stability,pseudo-stability,information and pseudo-information

This paper takes issue with Kuhner (1997) on four main points:

? the implications of accounting conventions, principles and valuation conventions;

? the role of Notes to the accounts;

? the relationship between distributable profits and liquidity;

? the significance of the efficient markets hypothesis.

Kuhner's desire to make (page 749) ‘published data on companies as informative as possible’ is strongly supported, but we differ on what this may mean in practice.     

Productivity Paradoxes and Their Resolution

Journal of Productivity Analysis - Foran objective function, how should each argument be assigned itsappropriate role in the change of the objective function, whenthe arguments are interrelated? In...