Sustainability as corporate culture of a brand for superior performance

Sustainability research highlights new challenges and opportunities for businesses. This paper reviews the literature to understand the ability of sustainable green initiatives when practiced as a corporate culture to individually create new opportunities for operations, management and marketing. According to current research, business opportunities exclusively available to different functions of a firm can drive its performance. The role of marketing in the achievement of superior performance by virtue of sustainability practices is also explained by the existing literature. Branding literature, however, fails to explain the influence of a brand on sustainability-driven opportunities available to a firm for superior performance. The objective of this study is to explore if a brand can strengthen the ability of sustainability-based green initiatives of managers to drive opportunities available to a firm for superior performance. A conceptual framework grounded in the triple bottom line theory is presented based on the assumption that brand as a stimulating factor can accelerate the conversion of opportunities available to a business into superior performance. Academic and managerial perspectives have been used to draw upon the implications of the model. Both practitioners and academic researchers will benefit from future research on this topic.     

Modelling the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System's Energy Consumption Under‐Coverage

The new data source for the Australian Energy Statistics, the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System, does not require businesses using less than 200 terajoules to report their energy consumption. This results in a data gap in the total industry energy consumption. To estimate the gap, this study models business energy consumption using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 2008–09 Energy, Water and Environment Survey and data from the 2008 to 2009 business activity statement unit record estimates. The article discusses the modelling approaches and methodological issues associated with the estimation of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System's energy consumption under‐coverage. It provides estimation results and suggestions for future research, based on available data.

     

Var and Impulse-Response: A Note

Journal of Quantitative Economics -     

How do successful scholars get their best research ideas? An exploration

We interview 24 marketing professors to ask how they got the ideas for 64 of their papers. More than three-quarters of the papers were inspired by holes in the literature, by a “stylized fact” that the current literature cannot explain, or by an interaction with a manager. The rest fall into several smaller categories that to a large extent can be seen as special cases of the three big ones. We describe how papers from each of the three big categories help move the literature forward. We also illustrate the range of situations contained in each category by way of several examples. Among the authors we interview, most do not use a single source. As these authors become more senior, managerial contacts play an increasing role, while the balance between literature and stylized facts appears to be unchanged.

     

Implications of bank ownership for the credit channel of monetary policy transmission: Evidence from India

Using bank-level data from India, we examine the impact of ownership on the reaction of banks to monetary policy, and also test whether the reaction of different types of banks to monetary policy changes is different in easy and tight policy regimes. Our results suggest that there are considerable differences in the reactions of different types of banks to monetary policy initiatives of the central bank, and that the bank lending channel of monetary policy is likely to be much more effective in a tight money period than in an easy money period. We also find differences in impact of monetary policy changes on less risky short-term and more risky medium-term lending. We discuss the policy implications of the findings.     

Sustainability of A Pay‐as‐you‐Go Pension System in A Small Open Economy with Ageing,Human Capital and Endogenous Fertility

The aim of the article is to theoretically investigate if a pay‐as‐you‐go (PAYG) pension system is sustainable in the presence of a declining population and increasing longevity of the retired generation. For this purpose, we use an overlapping generation model with endogenous fertility, endogenous longevity and human capital accumulation in a small open economy. We find that pensions will always increase as long as it is beneficial for parents to invest in human capital. Furthermore, we get the result that the ratio between pension benefits and the consumption of the young generation will strive to a positive limit value, and that a pure PAYG pension system will not run into any solvency problem due to a decreasing fertility rate or ageing.     

Conceptualizing the Evolution and Future of Advertising

Technology has irreversibly changed the way that firms identify who is more likely to buy, what they are more likely to buy, when they are more likely to buy, why they are likely to buy, and how they are likely to buy, repurchase, and recommend. It is now easier than ever for firms to have a body of evidence in the form of actual insights, as opposed to having mere guestimates, on consumers' apparent intentions to buy. Power dynamics have changed in the marketing climate, and firms have to factor in not only aggressive competitors but also empowered customers with limited attention spans. In such a climate, what lies in the future for advertising? And how can marketing managers make the most of the changing climate and maximize their returns on advertising? How can academics advance research related to maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of advertising? These are the questions that this article addresses via an integrated framework that expounds all the factors related to customers, firms, technological environment, and data resources, as well as the contextual factors, including product life cycle, customer life cycle, and so on, and their collective impact on advertising strategy, which includes advertising content, media selection, message, and targeting.     

A note on a semiparametric approach to estimating financing constraints in firms

In this paper, we present a novel approach to modeling financing constraints of firms. Specifically, we adopt an approach in which firm-level investment is a nonparametric function of some relevant firm characteristics, cash flow in particular. This enables us to generate firm-year specific measures of cash flow sensitivity of investment. We are therefore able to draw conclusions about financing constraints of individual firms as well as cohorts of firms without having to split our sample on an ad hoc basis. This is a significant improvement over the stylized approach that is based on comparison of point estimates of cash flow sensitivity of investment of the average firm of ad hoc sub-samples of firms. We use firm-level data from India to highlight the advantages of our approach. Our results suggest that the estimates generated by this approach are meaningful from an economic point of view and are consistent with the literature.     

Constructing the Economy: The Role of Construction Sector in India’s Growth

On empirically examining the importance of construction sector in propelling economic growth rate in India, the study has found that in the presence of the dominant influence of capital stock, the impact of the construction sector gets blurred or neutralized. Once capital stock is dropped from the model, the construction sector emerges as a significant determinant of economic growth, while other financial variables such as interest rate and non-food bank credit including the financial liberalization dummy do not play significant roles in economic growth. However, from an investigation of the impact of the construction sector on economic growth through the channel of employment, it is seen that the construction sector might be impacting the growth rate through increasing employment and thereby increasing the aggregate output in the economy.