A moral basis for corporate philanthropy

The authors argue that corporate philanthropy is far too important as a social instrument for good to depend on ethical egoism for its support. They claim that rule utilitarianism provides a more compelling, though not exclusive, moral foundation. The authors cite empirical and legal evidence as additional support for their claim.Bill Shaw is the Woodson Centennial Professor in Business Administration at The University of Texas at Austin. He teaches courses in business ethics and in legal environment of business. Professor Shaw's articles have appeared in law and ethics journals, and he is co-author, with Art Wolfe, ofStructure of the Legal Environment (1991).Frederick R. Post is Assistant Professor of Business Law and Management at the College of Business Administration, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio. Professor Post teaches business law and labor policy courses. His research interests include business ethics and labor management relations. His publications have appeared inThe Journal of Business Ethics, The Mid-American Journal of Business andThe Journal of Legal Studies Education.     

Time series momentum and moving average trading rules

We compare and contrast time series momentum (TSMOM) and moving average (MA) trading rules so as to better understand the sources of their profitability. These rules are closely related; however, there are important differences. TSMOM signals occur at points that coincide with a MA direction change, whereas MA buy (sell) signals only require price to move above (below) a MA. Our empirical results show MA rules frequently give earlier signals leading to meaningful return gains. Both rules perform best outside of large stock series which may explain the puzzle of their popularity with investors, yet lack of supportive evidence in academic studies.     

Contrarian Investment in the Dutch Stock Market

The efficient markets hypothesis states that at any times security prices fully reflect all available information. Contrarian investment strategies do not recognize the efficiency of capital markets. They call for buying undervalued stocks, i.e. stocks with a low price relative to their fundamentals. The idea behind such a strategy is to take advantage of the extrapolation behaviour of naive investors. Using a fresh and extensive data set from the Dutch stock market, we found that these strategies yield an outperformance without a higher risk. Our results make it hard to maintain the efficient market hypothesis.     

Effects of ethnic advertising on consumers of minority and majority groups: the moderating effect of humor

The effects of portrayals of ethnic endorsers in advertising are ambiguous. These portrayals strengthen the ethnic identity of ethnic minority groups, thus leading to positive responses toward the ad. They can lead to negative responses, because these portrayals can be perceived as stereotyped. Humor is a tool that can increase positive effects of identity-building and reduce negative effects of stereotyping. In this study, we investigate how humor moderates the effects of ethnic advertising on consumers from ethnic minority and majority groups. We find that humor supports the effects of traditional portrayals for both groups. Moreover, the effect of traditional portrayals combined with humor is strongest for the minority group. These findings provide evidence for the positive effects of humor in ethnic advertising and thus provide new insights to the stereotyping, ethnic advertising, and humor literature. The findings have practical implications for advertising using ethnic endorsers, humor, or targeted at ethnic minority groups.     

Tourism and social change reply to Romsa

While most state socialist societies attempt to attract large scale foreign tourism, the Albanians continue to constrain the numbers and movements of foreign tourists permitted onto their soil. Within the framework of three “contexts”—the organizational, the environmental, and the perceptual—this paper briefly looks at the individuality of the Albanian approach to foreign tourism: implicitly, as a possible model for other small, less developed societies. Finally, questions are raised as to the future of tourism in Albania given an imminent change —after forty years—in the country's dogmatic leadership.     

Settlement procedures and stock market efficiency

This study examines why most derivatives markets that settle on the day following expiration choose the opening rather than the closing price as the final settlement price (FSP), whereas most markets that settle on the expiration day select an average rather than a single price as the FSP. Four exogenous changes in the Taiwan Futures Exchange settlement procedures provide an experimental basis for studying the settlement procedures’ impact on underlying assets. Greatest market efficiency is observed when the FSP is determined by a single rather than an average price and hypothesize that manipulation is prevented at the expense of market quality.     

Local Intergovernmental Competition and the Law of 1/n

This article proposes an empirical framework based on a synthesis of the seminal “Law of 1/n” and “Leviathan” theories, which models the relationship between government spending and the number of jurisdictions in a federal system as determined by the interplay of the costs related to centralized government (which fall as the number of jurisdictions increases) and the costs of distributive politics (which rise as the number of jurisdictions increases). Using a panel of U.S. state and local government spending data, empirical tests based on this combined framework show that the effect of intergovernmental competition predicted by the Leviathan model is partially offset by the Law of 1/n. This result helps explain the inconsistent findings in the previous empirical literature.