Antecedents of private label attitude and national brand promotion attitude: similarities and differences

A model that addresses the similarities and differences in conceptual antecedents of attitudes toward private label grocery products and national brand promotions is proposed and tested. The proposed model is tested using a sample of 300 consumers who were recruited from grocery stores, provided behavioral data from sales receipts of their shopping trip, and responded to a survey that contained multi-item construct measures. We predict and find in the study that both price and nonprice related constructs impact both private label attitude and national brand promotion attitude, but the directionality and strength of several of these relationships differ. Implications of these findings for retailers and national manufacturers are discussed.     

Technological and financial approaches to risk management in agriculture: an integrated approach*

In the present paper, risk‐management problems where farmers manage risk both through production decisions and through the use of market‐based and informal risk‐management mechanisms are considered. It is shown that many of these problems share a common structure, and that a unified and informative treatment of a broad spectrum of risk‐management tools is possible within a cost‐minimisation framework, under minimal conditions on their objective functions. Fundamental results are derived that apply regardless of the producer's preference towards risks, using only the no‐arbitrage condition that agricultural producers never forego any opportunity to lower costs without lowering returns.     

External Sources of Innovative Capabilities: The Preferences for Strategic Alliances or Mergers and Acquisitions

This paper explores the preferences that companies have as they use alternative (quasi) external sources of innovative competencies such as strategic technology alliances, mergers and acquisitions, or a mix of these. These alternatives are studied in the context of distinct industrial, technological and international settings during the first half of the 1990s. Different strategies followed by companies and the role played by routinized sets of preferences are also taken into consideration. The analysis demonstrates that these options are influenced by both different environmental conditions and firm specific circumstances, such as those related to protecting core businesses.     

A Dynamic Analysis of Fixed- and Adjustable-Rate Mortgage Terminations

This paper provides a side-by-side comparison of loan-level statistical models for fixed- and adjustable-rate mortgages. Multinomial logit models for quarterly conditional probabilities of default and prepayment are estimated. We find that the estimated impacts of embedded option values for prepayment and default are generally quite similar across both FRM and ARM loans, providing additional empirical support for the basic predictions of the options theory. We also find that differences in estimates of conditional probabilities of prepayment and default associated with mortgage age, origination period, original LTV, and relative loan size, indicate the continued significance of these other economic and demographic factors for empirical models of mortgage terminations.     

Regulatory Control of the Track Access Charges of Railtrack plc

Railtrack plc, floated in 1996, was the private sector owner of Britain's railway track, signals and stations. Its major source of revenue came from track access charges, which individual train operating companies (TOCs) paid for use of the infrastructure. Since many of these TOCs received substantial subsidies to assist in paying their track access charges, Railtrack was in effect being heavily subsidised. In October 2001, the Government decided that these arrangements were no longer viable and placed Railtrack into administration. This article explains how the level of indirect subsidies to Railtrack had become excessive, and raises crucial questions that need to be addressed in settling the future shape of the railway industry.     

The political economy of quality measurement: a case study of the USA slaughter cattle market

As agricultural products move from being economic commodities to quality–differentiated goods, price dispersion within specific markets increases and implicit subsidies from high quality producers to low quality producers are removed. The present paper examines how these distributional effects can influence patterns of support and opposition to changes in marketing arrangements. The simple model developed is calibrated using data from the USA slaughter cattle market. Estimates of the impact on prices of measuring quality more accurately are found to be similar in size to previous estimates of market power price suppression in the market.     

Explaining the Cross‐Section of Stock Returns in Japan: Factors or Characteristics?

Japanese stock returns are even more closely related to their book-to-market ratios than are their U.S. counterparts, and thus provide a good setting for testing whether the return premia associated with these characteristics arise because the characteristics are proxies for covariance with priced factors. Our tests, which replicate the Daniel and Titman (1997) tests on a Japanese sample, reject the Fama and French (1993) three-factor model, but fail to reject the characteristic model.     

Some 'real' problems of 'virtual' organisation

This paper presents an ethnographic study of organisational change in a retail bank considering issues surrounding the supposed emergence of the 'virtual organisation'. It outlines emerging problems in organisational work as a consequence of the shift toward 'virtuality' and questions the explanatory value of such theoretical stances.     

Optimal Lending Contracts and Firm Dynamics

We develop a general model of lending in the presence of endogenous borrowing constraints. Borrowing constraints arise because borrowers face limited liability and debt repayment cannot be perfectly enforced. In the model, the dynamics of debt are closely linked with the dynamics of borrowing constraints. In fact, borrowing constraints must satisfy a dynamic consistency requirement: the value of outstanding debt restricts current access to short-term capital, but is itself determined by future access to credit. This dynamic consistency is not guaranteed in models of exogenous borrowing constraints, where the ability to raise short-term capital is limited by some prespecified function of debt. We characterize the optimal default-free contract—which minimizes borrowing constraints at all histories—and derive implications for firm growth, survival, leverage and debt maturity. The model is qualitatively consistent with stylized facts on the growth and survival of firms. Comparative statics with respect to technology and default constraints are derived.