Networking among Russian farmers and their prospects for success

In most post-socialist economies, private farming has re-emerged after regime change, although even today this sector most often accounts for only a minor proportion of national production. Russian private farmers are reported to dislike formal cooperatives, so this study investigated whether their informal collaborative arrangements may affect their business results. A survey involving personal interviews with 158 randomly chosen private farmers in the Kurgan Region examined whether collaborating farmers are economically more successful and consider their financial situation to be better than that of neighbouring farmers. Ordinary least square and ordered probit regression analysis indicated that farmers with stronger networks are more successful in terms of farm wealth, and also relative to the financial situation of their immediate neighbours. This suggests that success among private farmers in a post-socialist setting is related to their networks.     

Emerging trends in retail pricing practice: implications for research

This article represents the first of several editorials to appear in the Journal of Retailing designed to examine the nexus between retail practice and research, with the goal of stimulating further research. This essay on emerging trends in pricing discusses recent advances in retail pricing optimization. We begin with a review of how retailers typically make pricing decisions using time-honored heuristics and attempt to infer the optimal decisions. However, current methods are suboptimal because they do not consider the affects of advertising, competition, substitute products, or complementary products on sales. Most fail to take into account how price elasticity changes over time, particularly for fashion merchandise, or how market segments react differentially to price changes. In addition, many retailers find it difficult to know how to price merchandise when their suppliers offer temporary “deals.” They are also generally unaware of how their pricing strategy influences their overall image. As these issues demonstrate, optimal pricing is not a static problem. Retailers must be able to react quickly to changes in the environment or sales patterns. This paper also provides examples of the more sophisticated pricing techniques that are currently being tested in practice. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the critical components that must be incorporated into retail pricing.     

Smart Growth—Creating Real Long-term Value

Most U.S. business leaders appear to believe that all businesses either “grow or die”—and many act as if they believed that all growth is good, and that public companies should grow in a linear, continuous manner as reflected in ever-increasing quarterly earnings. But if these tenets of “the U.S. Growth Model” inform the short-term business view that prevails in many C-suites and boardrooms, there has been surprisingly little analysis of the extent to which the pursuit of continuous growth translates into longer-run success. In this article, the author reports finding no theoretical or empirical support in the fields of economics, finance, strategy, organizational design (or biology) for the idea that continuous growth is either a realistic possibility or a useful corporate objective. In business organizations, the pursuit of continuous growth can drive bad corporate behavior and inhibit real growth and innovation. Based on extensive research, the author suggests a new model of “smart growth”—one in which companies grow successfully by building internal comprehensive systems designed to encourage growth through specific kinds of culture, leadership, and processes. Smart-growth companies use experimental learning processes designed to test growth ideas and build diversified “growth portfolios” while also attempting to limit the risks associated with the pursuit of growth.     

How do people perceive graphical risk communication? The role of subjective numeracy

This study aims to evaluate directly how a graphical risk ladder is perceived and how this perception is related to people’s subjective numeracy. Gaze durations and frequencies were used to examine visual attention. Participants (N = 47) appeared to focus on the target risk information, whereas referential information was less attended. Subjective numeracy was negatively correlated with total watching time and the absolute number of gaze events. Results suggest that participants with low subjective numeracy have more difficulty in comprehending the graph, and that they process the graphical information less efficiently than the participants with high subjective numeracy. In addition, the position of referential risks on risk ladders could influence people’s risk perception. Based on these findings, we provide some implications for the design of risk communication graphs and for the use of graphs in informing persons with low subjective numeracy about risks.     

Institutions and Deposit Insurance: Empirical Evidence

Do banks’ responses to changes in deposit insurance vary across countries even if the countries have comparable institutions? If so, by how much? Using data on the financial performance of large banks in 15 financially and economically developed countries, we find that where deposit insurance has an effect, it is large and varies depending on the level of economic freedom, rule of law and corruption in the bank’s home country. As in prior papers, we show that during stable economic periods, increases in deposit insurance are associated with higher bank risk, both problem loans and leverage. In most, but not all, cases stronger institutions temper these effects. The institutions’ effects are substantial. For example, average changes in the rule of law double the impact of a change in deposit insurance on bank leverage. We contribute to the substantial literature in this area by showing that the institutional effects are significant even across a set of countries with comparable institutions; by conducting a careful calibration of the economic significance of the effects; by providing evidence that during stable periods changes in deposit insurance only affect bank risk and not other measures of performance; and finally by showing that the effects of both deposit insurance and institutions vary across stable and crisis economic periods. The stable period results are consistent with the moral hazard effects of deposit insurance, while the crisis period results are consistent with endogeneity concerns that poor bank performance could drive changes in regulations.     

Timing and diversification: A state-dependent asset allocation approach

Abstract

The influence of changing economic environment leads the distribution of stock market returns to be time-varying. A conditionally optimal investment hence requires a dynamic adjustment of asset allocation. In this context, this paper examines the improvement in portfolio performance by simulating portfolio strategies that are conditioned on the Markov regime switching behaviour of stock market returns. Including a memory effect eliminates the empirical shortcoming of discrete state models, namely that they produce a standard and an extreme state in stock returns. So far, this has prevented the regimes from being used as a valuable conditioning variable. Based on a discrete state indicator variable, is presented evidence of considerable performance improvement relative to the static model due to optimal shifting between aggressive and well diversified portfolio structures.