Personal finance blogs: Helpful tool for consumers with low financial literacy or preaching to the choir?

Recent transitions from defined benefit to defined contribution plans assign greater individual responsibility to consumers to prepare for retirement and make consequential financial choices. However, many consumers are ill‐equipped to do so, considering overall low levels of financial literacy. At the same time, there is increasing controversy about the effectiveness of traditional financial education, such as high school financial education, counselling and seminars or workshops. Alternative sources of (just‐in‐time) financial training or advice may be needed to financially empower consumers and help them make important financial decisions. In the light of these developments, this study investigates if consumers perceive personal finance blogs as a helpful alternative in acquiring financial knowledge, and which factors influence perceived helpfulness of and intention to use personal finance blogs. Using Structural Equation Modelling to analyse data from a sample of U.S. consumers, the results of this study uncover that financial literacy and susceptibility to informational influence have a significant positive association with perceived helpfulness. Perceived financial uncertainty, which refers to uncertainty in terms of consumers’ perceived ability to accurately predict their future financial needs, has a significant negative association with perceived helpfulness of and intention to use personal finance blogs. Finally, perceived helpfulness of a personal finance blog is a significant positive predictor of consumers’ intention to use it. Overall, the findings suggest that personal finance blogs are preaching to the choir, since the consumers who are most likely to use personal finance blogs seem to need them the least given their higher levels of financial literacy and lower levels of perceived financial uncertainty. Taken together, the findings shed light on the potential users of personal finance blogs and underline the challenges of a ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ financial education. This study aids in assessing personal finance blogs as an online resource which is scarcely researched, but which has the potential to provide just‐in‐time financial education to consumers across the world.     

You can't ignore millennials: Needed changes and a new way forward in entitlement research

As millennials flood the workplace, both researchers and practitioners agree that entitlement is increasing. Given the increasing number of millennials in the workforce and their high levels of entitlement, HRM must find ways to capitalise on this phenomenon. However, the existing state of the field is problematic. Past entitlement research has overwhelmingly ignored millennials, used a limiting trait conceptualisation, and primarily investigated negative effects for the entitled individuals. This article seeks to provoke that HRM must address the millennial entitlement phenomenon by making needed changes and taking a new way forward in entitlement research. Specifically, we argue that HRM scholars must (a) adopt a new state conceptualisation of entitlement and (b) move beyond the sole focus on negative effects to look for positive effects for individuals, teams, organisations, and society. Millennial entitlement—for better or worse—is a pressing issue for HRM, and we believe it may be for the better.     

Team Decision Making in Virtual and Face-to-Face Environments

We conducted a laboratory study on 65 teams performing a decision-making task. The two experimental manipulations involved the use of different communication media and decision frames. The decision frame manipulation involved informing the team to choose the demonstrably correct solution versus the solution that seemed most likely. These factors interacted to reveal novel insights about their multiplicative effects on decision processes and team psychological states. Further, main effects of the communication medium were found for team psychological states and decision behavior. Results suggest that virtual teams were at a disadvantage when the task was framed as having a demonstrably correct solution. Conversely, face-to-face teams were more effective, particularly when told that the task had a demonstrably correct solution. Face-to-face teams were more effective on all decision behaviors. Media synchronicity theory serves as a unifying framework to contextualize this research in the literature.     

Shedding New Light on How Advertising Literacy Can Affect Children's Processing of Embedded Advertising Formats: A Future Research Agenda

Advertisers are continuously searching for new ways to persuade children; current methods include fully integrating commercial content into media content, actively engaging children with the commercial content, and increasing the number of commercial messages children are confronted with at one moment in time. This poses a challenge for how children cope with embedded advertising. This conceptual article aims to develop a theoretically grounded framework for investigating how children process embedded advertising. More precisely, it sheds light on previous research and conceptualizations of advertising literacy and provides suggestions for future research. The article examines conceptual and methodological issues and discusses the need for research on how to improve children's coping with embedded advertising by emphasizing the value of persuasive intent priming and implementation intentions. To conclude, future research directions are discussed regarding strategies to strengthen children's coping skills and their dispositional (i.e., associative network consisting of cognitive, moral, and affective beliefs related to advertising) and situational (i.e., actual recognition of and critical reflection on advertising) advertising literacy.     

The Long‐Run Impact of Foreign Aid in 36 African Countries: Insights from Multivariate Time Series Analysis*

We comprehensively analyse the long‐run effect of foreign aid (ODA) on key macroeconomic variables in 36 sub‐Saharan African countries from the mid‐1960s to 2007, using a well‐specified cointegrated VAR model as statistical benchmark. Results provide broad support for a positive long‐run impact of ODA flows on the macroeconomy. In contrast, we find little evidence supporting the thesis that aid has been harmful. From a methodological point of view we highlight the importance of transparency in reporting results, especially when the hypothesis being tested differs from theoretical expectations, and we identify reasons for econometrically inadequate results in the literature.     

Environmental scenarios and local-global level of community engagement: Environmental justice, jams, institutions and innovation

National climate change policy currently operates on a continuum from the local community to the supra-national level. These initiatives include local deliberative processes of low-carbon futures as well as local-global interactions in ‘eco-innovation jam’ dialogues carried out in a virtual space, but founded on communicating with local stakeholder groups. Experiences from national processes and international examples of these structured dialogues of community engagement raise important questions of environmental justice and deliberative processes that facilitate participation by some groups, but perhaps also neglect others. This is particularly relevant since the environmental justice discourse traditionally frames environmental concerns in a place-bound manner that includes local responses to environmental questions. In this paper we argue the importance of local and global forums and deliberative processes for community engagement in order to incorporate stakeholders’ perceptions of future options for low-carbon living, travelling and consuming services and products. Important policy transformations in planning for low-carbon societies are outlined and results from cases are discussed. We conclude with three remarks about the importance of citizen participation for understanding local conditions for change, processes of localized internationalization, and new roles for nation states facing the climate change challenge. We also recognise the importance of the local and global level of deliberative processes targeting sustainable urban futures.     

Maximum fee versus child benefit: a welfare analysis of Swedish child-care fee reform

The effects of a recent Swedish child-care fee reform are compared with those of an alternative reform, increased child benefits. The fee reform implied considerably decreased fees and was intended to increase both labor supply among parents and their economic well-being. We estimate labor supply effects using a discrete choice labor supply model, and simulate behavioral responses to the changes. We find positive, but small, effects on labor supply from reduced fees, while increased child benefits would make single mothers decrease their labor supply. On the other hand, increased child benefits would make income distribution more equal. We make a social welfare comparison and conclude that for plausible values of inequality aversion, the alternative reform would have been preferred to the implemented fee reform. The views expressed in the paper do not necessarily reflect those of the Swedish Ministry of Finance.     

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