The Effects of Digital Media Advertising Content on Message Acceptance or Rejection: Brand Trust as a Moderating Factor

The goal of this study is: (1) to expand upon prior research into general online content, (2) to analyze the acceptance and rejection factors of Internet advertising messages, and (3) to examine the moderating role of brand trust in this process. The results show that, when displaying intentions relating to the acceptance of online advertising, brand trust is not a significant influencing variable. However, when studying the intent to reject a message, brand trust does act as a barrier against the negative effect of irritation, while when this trust does not exist, irritation exercises a significant negative effect on advertising value.     

Segmented risk sharing in a continuous-time setting

Summary. The economy we study is comprised of a continuum of individuals. Each has a stochastic endowment that evolves continuously and independently of all other individuals' endowment processes. Individuals are risk averse and would therefore like to insure their endowment processes. The mutual independence of their endowment processes makes it feasible for them to obtain this insurance by pooling their endowments. We investigate whether such a scheme would survive as an equilibrium in a noncooperative setting. Received: October 16, 2000; revised version: August 8, 2001     

A MULTILAYER VIEW OF SYSTEMIC IMPORTANCE AND AGGREGATE FLUCTUATIONS

Economic systems are composed of multiple interrelated groups of agents and with multiple sources of network externalities present. This can give rise to novel systemic risks. We propose a multilayer model to understand this phenomenon. The model features complementary or substitutionary actions of agents active in multiple groups and extends the network concepts of systemic importance and microinduced aggregate fluctuations to their multigroup counterparts. The multilayer allows for the propagation of shocks through both intra- and interlayer margins. The interlayer margin can be large enough to induce a reordering of systemic importance indicators as compared to singular group considerations, and produce volatility levels that are larger than economies consisting of a single group of agents.     

Residents' attitudes towards an instant resort enclave

Researchers have suggested that residents' attitudes towards tourism depend on the expected costs and benefits of tourism. While many studies have examined this proposition towards the later stages of development, few have examined the pre-tourism phase. This study used in-depth interviews with residents of Isabela, Puerto Rico, to examine their attitudes towards a proposed “instant” enclave resort in their community. At the time the research was conducted, Isabela was the planned site of the largest resort in the Caribbean. Results indicate that respondents are aware of both some of the positive and negative impacts of tourism, and are quite ambivalent about the planned tourist site.     

Short Term External Debt and Economic Growth—Granger Causality: Evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean

In this paper the direction of the causality relationship between economic growth and short-term external debt was investigated for 27 Latin American and Caribbean countries over the period 1970–2003. The empirical results suggest the existence of bidirectional causality relationships between the two variables for several countries, which means that the performance of both variables is interrelated. The main finding is that in the short- and long- runs Granger causality from economic growth to short-term external debt is present in 13 Latin American and Caribbean countries. With the evidence suggesting, in the majority of estimated cases, economic growth Granger caused short-term external debt, short-term policy decisions related to capacity absorption enhancement should be encouraged in Latin America and the Caribbean. Further work in this regard is encouraged in the form of panel studies or specific individual case studies inclusive of foreign trade linkage parameters to capture the potential effects of omitted variables.

An assessment of the current structure of food demand in urban China

We evaluate the current structure of food demand in urban China by using household expenditure survey data from five provinces. Two complementary analyses are undertaken. First, an aggregate analysis based on a fractional logit model is used to examine how households allocate food expenditures across the food‐at‐home (FAH) and food‐away‐from‐home (FAFH) categories. This is followed by a disaggregated analysis of how households allocated their FAH expenditures across 12 commodity categories. A Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) is used. We find evidence of significant food purchase substitution and complementarity.     

An Empirical Test of Environmental Kuznets Curve for Water Pollution

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) on water pollution was investigated with both semiparametric and parametric models using watershed level data for the state of Louisiana, USA. The parametric model indicated the turning points within the range $10241–$12993, $6636–$13877, and $6467–$12758 for nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and dissolved oxygen (DO), respectively. However, only the parameters associated with N EKC were found to be significant. Model specification tests rejected parametric models in favor of semiparametric specification for P but not for N and DO.     

The human resources approach to manpower,education and income distribution planning

This paper first presents the hypothesis relating the education of the labor force to production, along with some observations about its statistical verification. The conceptual basis for the manpower approach to educational planning appears next, followed by a discussion of its use with and without the assumption of constant labor productivity. Finally, the human resources approach to manpower and educational planning is extended to include income distribution planning. The method developed is applied to Mexico.     

AN ALGORITHMIC INFORMATION THEORETIC APPROACH TO THE BEHAVIOUR OF FINANCIAL MARKETS

Using frequency distributions of daily closing price time series of several financial market indices, we investigate whether the bias away from an equiprobable sequence distribution found in the data, predicted by algorithmic information theory, may account for some of the deviation of financial markets from log‐normal, and if so for how much of said deviation and over what sequence lengths. We do so by comparing the distributions of binary sequences from actual time series of financial markets and series built up from purely algorithmic means. Our discussion is a starting point for a further investigation of the market as a rule‐based system with an algorithmic component, despite its apparent randomness, and the use of the theory of algorithmic probability with new tools that can be applied to the study of the market price phenomenon. The main discussion is cast in terms of assumptions common to areas of economics in agreement with an algorithmic view of the market.     

PHILLIPS CURVES AND UNEMPLOYMENT DYNAMICS: A CRITIQUE AND A HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract.  The conventional wisdom that inflation and unemployment are unrelated in the long run implies the compartmentalization of macroeconomics. While one branch of the literature models inflation dynamics and estimates the unemployment rate compatible with inflation stability, another one determines the real economic factors that drive the natural rate of unemployment. In the context of the new Phillips curve, we show that frictional growth, i.e. the interplay between lags and growth, generates an inflation–unemployment trade-off in the long run. We thus argue that a holistic framework, such as the chain reaction theory (CRT), should be used to jointly explain the evolution of inflation and unemployment. A further attraction of the CRT approach is that it provides a synthesis of the traditional structural macroeconometric models and the (structural) vector autoregressions.