Social Media for Socially Responsible Firms: Analysis of Fortune 500’s Twitter Profiles and their CSR/CSIR Ratings

The instrumental benefits of firm’s CSR activities are contingent upon the stakeholders’ awareness and favorable attribution. While social media creates an important momentum for firms to cultivate favorable awareness by establishing a powerful framework of stakeholder relationships, the opportunities are not distributed evenly for all firms. In this paper, we investigate the impact of CSR credentials on the effectiveness of social media as a stakeholder-relationship management platform. The analysis of Fortune 500 companies in the Twitter sphere reveals that a higher CSR rating is a strong indicator of an earlier adoption, a faster establishment of online presence (followers), a higher responsiveness to the firm’s identity (replies and mentions), and a stronger virality of the messages (retweets). Incidentally, the higher CSIR rating is also found to be associated with the stronger virality. Our findings also suggest that socially responsible firms can harvest proactive stakeholders’ participation (user-driven communication) without investing more resources (firm-driven communication). As the first study that conceptualizes the social media as a proponent of CSR, this paper contends that “being socially responsible” makes more practical sense for firms with the rise of social media.     

Infrastructure Bond Markets Development in Asia: Challenges and Solutions

To sustain economic growth momentum, Asia needs to continue investing heavily in infrastructure such as roads, ports, and power plants. Financing the region’s huge demand for infrastructure investments is an essential issue for policy-makers across the region. Against the backdrop of expanding fiscal burdens of Asian governments and more stringent capital requirements on bank lending, local currency bonds can serve as an alternative for infrastructure financing in Asia. In this paper, we use empirical analysis to identify the major determinants of infrastructure bond market development. Evidence indicates that an economy’s size is positively related to infrastructure bond market development. Furthermore, we find that Project Bond Initiative, a European Union initiative, contributed significantly to infrastructure development in Europe. The implication for Asian policy-makers is that deepening regional integration of Asian bond markets would help Asian economies to reach an efficient economic scale to foster infrastructure bond market and policy measures in the forms of credit enhancement would facilitate issuance of infrastructure bonds.     

Adoption of digital repositories for CO2 emissions reduction: the case of Korea

This study aims to estimate the potential economic benefits, energy and CO₂ emissions reductions when using trusted third-party digital repository (TTPR) services in one individual bank, and within the banking industry in Korea. First, the cost, benefit and net benefit of using TTPR services in the banking industry are estimated. Second, the net induced output effect is estimated. Third, based on an environmentally extended input–output analysis, CO₂ emissions reduction was estimated as 1924.32 tons in 2009 and the energy consumption reduction as 640.70 TOE. Fourth, the total economic benefit, which is the sum of the net induced output effect and economic value of CO₂ emissions reductions, is approximately $11.04 million. The findings demonstrate that energy consumption and CO₂ emissions reductions are meaningful enough to result in significant economic benefits. Therefore, the Korean government should promote the use of TTPR services in the entire industry.     

Hospitality and tourism marketing: recent developments in research and future directions

This study reviews marketing research published in selected hospitality and tourism journals for the period of 2002–2003. The review includes summaries of research topics, industry applications, and methods of study design and data analyses. Significant topical research trends are identified and discussed to raise issues for future research. Included also are the industry-specific current trends and issues that dictate immediate research attention. The gaps between hospitality and tourism marketing research and industry's research needs are addressed to encourage additional research on neglected topics. The study concludes with general suggestions for future hospitality and tourism marketing research.     

Human Capital Spending,Inequality, and Growth in Middle-Income Asia

Asia’s rapid population aging fortifies the case for strengthening human capital investments. Further, the experience of the newly industrialized economies suggests that human capital investments will be a vital ingredient of the transition from middle income to high income. Those investments can also affect equity and public finances. In this article, we use data from the National Transfer Accounts to empirically analyze the effect of human capital investment in Asian countries on economic growth, inequality, and fiscal balance. Our empirical evidence suggests that human capital investments have a positive effect on labor productivity and, hence, output. The positive effect is stronger for poorer households and, hence, beneficial for equity. We also find that such investments can generate sufficient tax revenues to improve the fiscal balance. Overall, our evidence points to a positive effect of human capital on growth, equity, and fiscal balance in Asia.     

Developing countries’ financial vulnerability to the eurozone crisis: an event study of equity and bond markets

The global crisis highlights the continued vulnerability of developing countries to shocks from advanced economies. Just a few years after the global crisis, the eurozone sovereign debt crisis has emerged as the single biggest threat to the global outlook. In this paper, we apply the event study methodology to gauge the scope for financial contagion from the EU to developing countries. More specifically, we estimate the responsiveness of equity and bond markets in developing countries to global crisis period and eurozone crisis news. Overall, we find that whereas global crisis period had a consistently negative effect on returns of equity and bond markets in developing countries, the effect of eurozone crisis news was more mixed and limited.     

Korean Television Dramas and the Political Economy of City Promotion

This article examines the ways in which urban processes are associated with the production of culture. It does so by exploring how Korean cities sponsor drama. The historically conditioned and economically neglected status of regional cities, combined with elected local leaders' desire to promote their own areas, has led to a strategy to publicize them by leveraging the popularity of Korean television dramas in Asia. Two distinct types of drama sponsorship by cities — the construction of outdoor settings for drama and ‘city placement’ — manifest the interactions between story‐making and place‐making. The affective process that blends city sites with the characters, storylines and emotional flows of TV drama imbues those sites with a dramatic quality that stimulates the audience's empathy and persuasively motivates them to actually visit the places they have seen televised. Thanks to the broad penetration of television drama, sponsorship by cities has strikingly boosted drama‐driven tourism. Nevertheless, reflecting the speculative nature of TV drama, city promotion through this medium has had limited stability and sustainability. In sum, this article demonstrates that the production of Korean television dramas is deeply associated with the material and spatial conditions in Korean cities.     

Why Do Firms Dump at a Loss? An Economies-of-Scale Explanation

Dumping is an international form of standard monopolistic price discrimination. At the same time, economies of large-scale production can be an independent source of international trade. I combine the two insights to provide a possible explanation for the following paradox—products often seem to be dumped below costs.