Determinants of UK Box Office Success: The Impact of Quality Signals

This paper analyses the roles of various quality signals in the demand for cinema attendance in the United Kingdom. Estimation of a three-stage least squares model with data for 527 films released in the United Kingdom shows that the impacts of advertising and critical reviews on box office revenues vary both in channels and magnitudes of impact. Our model treats total advertising as endogenous, alongside the number of opening screens and total box office revenues, while critical reviews are considered exogenous. Our results show that total advertising affects total box office revenue while responding endogenously to critical reviews.     

Leadership training for managers: An Adlerian approach

Adlerian theory—a social model of human behavior—provides an effective framework to improve managerial practices and enhance organizational leadership. Developed by Alfred Adler (1870–1937), founder of the influential school of individual psychology, Adlerian theory promotes principles of social interest, democracy, and encouragement. These principles may guide leaders in building collaborative, productive workforces through participative management, coaching, and employee engagement. Experiential training exercises that integrate Adlerian principles can help managers expand their interpersonal competencies and increase leadership effectiveness.     

How does strategic orientation matter in Chinese firms?

As China continues to transition toward a market economy, how strategic orientation affects firm performance has received significant attention. This article reviews the extant literature with a framework that depicts contemporary work on strategic orientation, the drivers of strategic orientation, and its boundary conditions. We identify important research gaps and propose to integrate institutional theory, dynamic capability perspective, and the knowledge-based view within the strategic orientation research stream for future investigations.

Trade Union Responses to zero hours work in Ireland

This paper examines the strategies adopted by Irish unions in responding to zero hours work in four sectors. It concludes that rather than adopting either a passive or a uniform approach, unions have pragmatically varied their strategies to curtail zero‐hours work through actively combining both bargaining and regulatory approaches.     

Theorizing the Financial Statecraft of Emerging Powers

‘Financial statecraft’, or the intentional use of credit, investment and currency levers by the incumbent governments of creditor – and sometimes debtor – states for both international economic and political advantage, has a long history, ranging from money doctors to currency wars. A neorealist, zero-sum framing of international monetary relations is not inevitable, yet casts a persistent shadow especially during periods of prospective interstate power transitions when previously peripheral countries find themselves with unexpected new capabilities. This article seeks to understand and theorise the financial statecraft of emerging economies, moving beyond the traditional understanding that closely identifies the concept with financial sanctions imposed by a strong state on a weaker state. We propose that the aims of financial statecraft may be either ‘defensive' or ‘offensive’. Financial statecraft may be targeted either ‘bilaterally' or ‘systemically’. Finally such statecraft may employ instruments that are either ‘financial' or ‘monetary’. As emerging market economies have moved up in the ranks in the interstate distribution of capabilities, they have also expanded their financial statecraft strategies from narrowly defensive and bilateral to those involving offensive tactics and targeted at the global and systemic level. Historical and contemporary examples illustrate the analysis.     

How algorithmic cultural recommendation influence the marketing of cultural collections

Museums make their collections available online to keep pace with developments in how people access and share information. While museums have traditionally understood the notion of public access as part of their institutional remit, in this paper I draw on policy documents and qualitative interviews with Australasian cultural professionals, to examine how the discourse of access might account for the museum’s transformation from a community space to a resource that is beneficial to marketers. I use Google Arts & Culture as a case study, to suggest the terms of public access have altered to adapt to the needs of commercial “digital enclosures.” When people engage with the museum in virtual spaces data are collected. Algorithms work as a set of instructions that make it possible to search, sort and organise the data, linking together people and their online practices in order to enact a form of algorithmic cultural recommendation.     

International environmental outsourcing

In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of firms shifting stages of their production processes overseas. In this paper we investigate whether firms outsource the dirtier stages of production to minimise domestic environmental regulation costs—a process broadly consistent with the pollution haven hypothesis. We develop a theoretical model of international environmental outsourcing that focuses on the roles played by firm size and productivity, transport costs and environmental regulations. We test the model’s predictions using a firm-level dataset for Japan and do find evidence of an ‘environmental outsourcing’ effect.     

Dynamic optimal capital structure with regime switching

We investigate the optimal capital structure of a corporate when the dynamics of the assets (both growth rate and volatility) change following different states of the economy. Two structural models are examined in the paper. The first considers the case when the firm is not facing tax benefit and bankruptcy costs with a regime switching dynamics. This model extends the Black and Cox (J Financ 31:351–367, 1976) model to allow for regime switching risk. The second model incorporates both tax benefit and bankruptcy costs with a regime switching dynamics. This is is more realistic, and is an extension of the Leland (J Financ 49(4):1213–1252, 1994) model with regime switching risk. We obtain closed-form analytic solutions for the optimal capital structure and default barrier for both models.     

Pricing of discount bonds with a Markov switching regime

We consider a Markov switching regime and price a discount bond using a CIR-type short rate model. An explicit formula is obtained for the bond price which includes the solution of a matrix ODE. Our model is easy to calculate and captures the effect of regime uncertainty in the price and term structure.     

Developments of the German Heat Market of Private Households Until 2030: A Simulation Based Analysis

The paper at hand studies the future development of the German heat market of private households until 2030 using a microeconomic simulation model developed by the authors. The model simulates the development of insulation measures and installed heating systems in the building stock, thereby incorporating a discrete choice model to represent the household decisions for heating systems. Because of the long lifetime of heating systems, the residential heating market adopts slowly. Natural gas fired burners still remain the most important heating system until 2030 whereas fuel oil technologies further lose market shares. Final energy consumption is projected to decrease by about 20?% between 2010 and 2030 primarily due to modernization of heating systems and therefore a higher fuel efficiency. Accordingly, sectoral greenhouse gas emissions will decrease by 24?%.