Can firms' location decisions counteract the Balassa-Samuelson effect?

This paper examines the determinants of relative prices in a model combining a Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) mechanism and an endogenous location of traded good producers. Besides the standard HBS effect, asymmetric productivity improvements in the traded good sector push new firms to enter the market. This benefits local consumers who save on trade costs and exerts an upward pressure on relative wages. As a consequence, relative prices in the traded good sector either increase or fall in general equilibrium. In a panel cointegration framework, the wage effect is shown to dominate. This means the HBS effect is strengthened by the relocation of traded good producers.     

Transformative travel as a sustainable market niche for protected areas: a new development,marketing and conservation model

Many protected areas worldwide are mandated to provide visitor enjoyment and sustainable heritage conservation but face growing challenges and competition. To satisfy modern aspirational markets, parks must design meaningful experiences delivering long-lasting participant benefits that cultivate visitation rates and a conservation constituency. Transformative travel can deliver such benefits through participants’ psycho-physiological transformation but market insights critical for experience development in parks are lacking. Our systematic quantitative review of 126 transformative travel articles provides those insights, linking experiential characteristics, participant traits and motivations to experience outcomes according to five transformative travel typologies pertinent to parks: health and wellness, nature-based physical activity, spiritual, cultural and volunteering travel. We identified 35 travel motivations, 14 participant traits and 23 experience characteristics linked to transformation and 28 purposefully or incidentally realised benefits. Transformative travel improved participants’ psychological, physiological, social, economic and environmental conditions, as well as satisfaction with and destination loyalty towards parks. Socio-demographic characteristics and propensity for independent versus social travel shaped choice of travel experience. Our results are uniquely conceptualised in a transformative travel framework and transformative market niche model which we apply to sustainable experience development and marketing in parks. We identify implementation possibilities and areas for future research and monitoring.     

Are family firms really superior performers?

Although international evidence suggests that families may be unhelpful to firm performance, recent analyses of U.S. public companies indicate that family firms outperform. This study probes these contrasting findings by investigating more fine-grained measures of family business in the U.S. Specifically, it makes a fundamental but neglected distinction between lone founder businesses in which no relatives of a founder are involved, and true family businesses that do include multiple family members as major owners or managers. The research also seeks to overcome issues of endogeneity and selection bias by examining both Fortune 1000 firms and a random sample of 100 much smaller public companies. The results show that findings are indeed highly sensitive both to the way in which family businesses are defined and to the nature of the sample. Fortune 1000 firms that include relatives as owners or managers never outperform in market valuation, even during the first generation. Only businesses with a lone founder outperform. Moreover neither lone founder nor family firms exhibited superior valuations within a randomly drawn sample of companies. Our results confirm the difficulty of attributing superior performance to a particular governance variable.     

Productive efficiency of French grain producers: A latent variable model

In this article we propose to implement a covariance structure analysis to deal with the estimation of a stochastic frontier production function on panel data and the measurement of a time-varying technical efficiency. First, this method solves the potential problem of correlations between input quantities and individual effects. Second, individual effects and efficiency measures can be recovered as a byproduct of the analysis through the so-called factor scores. We implement this approach by fitting to a balanced panel of French grain producers, a parsimonious version of the Cornwell, Schmidt, and Sickles [1990]'s model where technical efficiencies are individual-specific linear functions of time. A specification search shows that this model is preferred to the traditional production function. Results shed light on the temporal pattern of efficiency in the French grain production sector.The authors thank Jacques Mairesse, Quang Vuong, two referees, the editor, and session participants at the Econometric Society European Meeting, Cambridge, September 1991, at the Second European Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis, Louvain-la-Neuve, October 1991, at the Conference on Current Issues in Productivity, Newark, December 1991, and at the ENSAE-EHESS seminar, Paris, March 1992, for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Regulated Firms with Transboundary Pollution: Does International Competition Improve Efficiency?

We consider a model of strategic trade and environmental policies with transboundary pollution. A regulated monopoly produces in each country and emits pollution. Under complete information, opening borders leads to a reallocation of the production from the large country to the small one. Total production increases, leading to an increase in the total level of pollution. The creation of a common market sometimes leads to a deterioration of total welfare. Under asymmetric information, the international competition generated by the common market decreases the informational rents of the firms, thereby reinforcing the potential gain to open markets to international competition.     

Consumption dynamics and demographics of Canadian wine consumers: Retailing insights from the tasting room channel

This study facilitates a better understanding of the socio-demographics and consumption dynamics of wine consumers using the retailing ‘platform’ of the winery tasting room with them as visitors to it in a wine region environment. The overall aim was to gain some insights on gender and age generation-related consumer behaviour, wine type preferences, and their link to retail channel behaviour. Systematic random sampling yielded a total of 659 useable surveys collected at various tasting rooms in the Niagara Peninsula Wine Region in Ontario, Canada. Specific differences exist in the wine consumption behaviour and wine type preferences of males and females and between generational cohorts, specifically Millennial and older consumers. Whereas females and males do not differ much in quantity consumed and spend on wine, they do differ greatly in wine type consumption with females drinking significantly more white and males more red wine. Wine type consumption was shown to be moderated by not only classical demographic variables, but also by the retail outlets preferred for wine purchase. Females buy more of their wine from foodservice on-trade retail outlets such as restaurants, while Millennials frequent the tasting room channel much less than older consumers. There are strong indications that the higher the wine tourism activity level, the higher the wine consumption (usage) level of the consumers. It is possible to direct marketing strategies at wine consumers in accordance with their gender and lifecycle stage as far as certain behavioural and sensory aspects of the product is concerned. The winery tasting room is the most obvious retail channel vehicle to reach people with high tourism activity factor levels who also happen to be the high usage consumers in the wine market.     

Advertising and older consumers: image and ageism

Despite a growing population of older people, traditional prejudices against age continue to flourish in society. The media in particular are often guilty of ageism, persistently focusing upon the 'youth market', and advertisers are particular offenders. By ignoring older people, or using them as caricatures, the advertising industry not only violates its ethical responsibilities to this group within the community, but also overlooks the commercial opportunity presented by the new generation of older consumers. The article presents research into UK print media which shows that older people tend not to be featured in advertisements in mainstream publications, but are prominent in advertisements in publications for the over-fifties. The issues this raises in terms of the duty of advertisers to respect the rights of older people are discussed, along with the commercial imperative to provide more appropriate images of older people in UK advertising.     

Adolescent consumption autonomy: A cross-cultural examination

Adolescents are an important market segment globally not only for their spending power as adolescents but also for their future spending power as adults. One variable that impacts current and future spending power is the degree to which adolescents are autonomous consumers. This study reports on depth interviews conducted with adolescent girls in France and the United States for the purpose of identifying dimensions of adolescent consumption autonomy based on adolescents' perceptions. Four dimensions of adolescent consumption autonomy are identified, including attitudinal, emotional, functional and financial. Similarities and differences between the two cultures are discussed, and implications for marketing and future research are identified.     

性别失衡与人口流动视角下的男男性行为:来自中国城市地区的证据

利用"城市地区流动大龄男性生殖健康和家庭生活调查"数据,通过与同年龄段已婚男性的对比,探究了性别失衡背景下流动大龄未婚男性的男男性行为。同性性行为发生率受到相关态度、婚姻状况等的显著影响。性别失衡所带来的"婚姻挤压"迫使流动大龄未婚男性"被动失婚",缺乏正常稳定的性伴侣,从而导致男男性行为发生率有增加的可能性;流动大龄未婚男性的男男性行为具有高风险特征,而对于艾滋病、性病知识的缺乏是高风险性行为发生的重要影响因素。