House Prices,Wealth and Consumption: New Evidence from Australia and Canada

Over the past two decades, a number of countries have experienced appreciation in house prices at the same time that aggregate consumption has increased. This paper tests alternative hypotheses for this phenomenon by using repeated household surveys from Australia and Canada to identify the transmission mechanism that links consumption and household wealth. The empirical analysis suggests that neither a direct wealth effect nor a common causal factor likely accounts for the observed correlation between wealth and consumption in these two countries. Rather, indirect factors such as collateral effects arising from relaxation of credit constraints are a more likely explanation.     

Impact of the Information Asymmetry Between Managers and Owners Under Oligopoly

We show, using a Hotelling (1929) model with Laffont and Tirole (1986) firms, that under duopoly, the information asymmetry caused by the separation of ownership and control has two effects on owners’ incentives to induce effort. Information asymmetry raises the marginal cost of inducing effort, which decreases efforts and increases prices. Since all firms’ prices increase, this leads to a change in the expected demand of each firm, and thus in the marginal benefit of inducing effort, which may amplify or mitigate the initial impact. As a consequence, information asymmetry may induce some firms to increase efforts and lower prices. More surprisingly, it may increase both ex post and ex ante social welfare.     

Entrepreneur location decisions across industries

In this paper we analyse whether entrepreneur location decisions differ across industries and identify the factors determining the choice of location between rural and urban environments. Firm location is based on a new taxonomy developed over the influential three dimensions of Hayter’s (1997) approach. The paper uses data from sample of one thousand Portuguese firms. We present a stylized theoretical model to determine how these new five dimensions influence firm’s location and test the model through a logistic regression. Our results show that that the location decisions depend on the sector of activity, type of area (urban vs. rural) and the characteristics of the entrepreneur. We find that companies engaged in knowledge intensive business services prefer to locate in urban areas. From an institutional point of view, firms prefer to locate in rural areas.     

The expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates: The Brazilian case revisited

This article tests the Expectations Hypothesis (EH) using Brazilian monthly data for bond yields spanning the 2000–2017 sample period and ranging in maturity from 3 months to 5 years. Three tests are examined: the first is based on interest rates spread and the other two are based on the forward rates. On balance our results suggest rejection of the EH throughout the maturity spectrum examined, and are broadly consistent with previous findings that a linear combination of forward rates provides a statistically significant prediction of bond excess returns.     

Stakeholders,the natural environment and the future of Caribbean cruise tourism

Given the sheer complexity of effectively managing the web of potential stakeholders in any tourism development it is argued that for the future of Caribbean cruise tourism, the task is compounded by several key issues that warrant discussion. These include the economic dependency of the Caribbean region on tourism, the inequity of power relations between the various stakeholder groups and the lack of proven collaboration within this fragmented region of culturally diverse islands. This paper addresses these issues, discussing the importance of collaboration and planning for development, highlighting the disparate needs of the different stakeholders involved and drawing attention to the continuing paradox between maximising the opportunities presented by Caribbean cruise tourism whilst effectively managing its sustained development. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley &Sons, Ltd.     

A Text Mining-Based Review of Cause-Related Marketing Literature

Social networking sites (SNS) have challenged ethical issues about users’ information security and privacy. SNS users are concerned about their privacy and need to control the information they share and its use. This paper examines the security of SNS by taking a look at the influence of users’ perceived control of information over their information-sharing behaviors. Employing an empirical study, this paper demonstrates the importance of perceived control in SNS users’ information-sharing behaviors. Specifically, perceived control has been found to be negatively related to perceived privacy risk and attitude toward information sharing, which in turn has an impact on their information-sharing behaviors. In addition, gender has been shown to be an important factor that moderates the influences of both perceived control and perceived privacy risk on SNS users’ attitudes toward information sharing. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Attributions of blame following a product-harm crisis depend on consumers’ attachment styles

This research examines consumers’ attachment styles as a predictor of attributions of blame following a product-harm crisis. Though the interpersonal attachment literature suggests that consumers with the secure attachment style should attribute the least amount of blame to the brand, we introduce a novel and seemingly contradictory hypothesis. Because of the unique nature of brand relationships, we hypothesize that consumers with the fearful attachment style will attribute the least amount of blame to the brand. In an experiment, we find support for both hypotheses. Further, we find that these effects occur via different mechanisms. Whereas the secure attachment style decreases attributions of controllability, the fearful attachment style decreases attributions of stability. Though many relationship tendencies have been transferred from the interpersonal domain to the consumer domain, our findings remind researchers that brands are a distinct type of relationship partner.     

Business Groups and Corporate Social Responsibility

We present an analysis of over 400 comments about complying with tax obligations extracted from online discussion forums for freelancers. While the topics investigated by much of the literature on taxpayer behaviour are theory driven, we aimed to explore the universe of online discussions about tax in order to extract those topics that are most relevant to taxpayers. The forum discussions were subjected to a qualitative thematic analysis, and we present a model of the ‘universe’ of tax as reflected in taxpayer discussions. The model comprises several main actors (tax laws, tax authority, tax practitioners, and the taxpayer’s social network) and describes the multiple ways in which they relate to taxpayers’ behaviour. We also conduct a more focused analysis to show that the majority of taxpayers seem unconcerned with many of the variables that have been the focus of tax behaviour research (e.g. audits, penalties, etc.), and that most people are motivated to be compliant and are more concerned with how to comply than whether to comply. Moreover, we discuss how these ‘real-world’ tax discussions question common assumptions in the study of tax behaviour and how they inform our understanding of business ethics more generally.     

Employee brand engagement on social media: Managing optimism and commonality

This article considers how employees engage with B2B firms on social media, a topic that is largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement on social media, we identify two key drivers of employee brand engagement using the content analysis tool DICTION—namely, optimism and commonality. Employees of top-ranked and -rated firms express higher levels of optimism and commonality in their reviews of their employers on social media than do their counterparts in bottom-ranked and -rated firms. This permits the construction of a 2 × 2 matrix that allows managers to diagnose strategies for increasing or improving employee brand engagement. This creates four different kinds of employee brand engagement situations, and offers human resources and marketing managers different strategies in each case. We demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can shed new light on the way stakeholders engage with brands.