Enhancing Stock Market Return with New Product Preannouncements: The Role of Information Quality and Innovativeness

To advance development and application of signaling theory in the new product preannouncement literature while seeking to resolve ambiguity regarding the influence of innovativeness on stock market return, the role of information quality is examined. Specifically, this study investigates the effect of innovativeness across low and high levels of information quality. The results, ascertained using event study methodology on a sample of 243 new product preannouncements collected over a nine‐year period, indicate that higher information quality increases the strength of the positive relationship between innovativeness and stock market return. The findings offer managers insight into what role information quality plays in new product preannouncements that can help their firms generate higher stock market return.     

Do Conspicuous Consumers Pay Higher Housing Premiums? Spatial and Temporal Variation in the United States

This study is the first to examine the relationship between conspicuous demand and housing price dynamics. We hypothesize that conspicuous consumers would want high‐end homes to signal their wealth and this housing consumption behavior would induce greater deviations from fundamental house prices. We test this by using a unique dataset that matches the consumers’ appetite for nonhousing luxury goods from Google Insights for Search to housing premiums that they pay for high‐end houses in U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) during 2004–2011. The estimation results demonstrate that controlling for a wide range of MSA demographic and economic characteristics, conspicuous demand has a significant, positive relationship with housing premiums. This relationship varies spatially and temporally. Conspicuous demand has a stronger relationship with a price increase in high‐end homes in MSAs with a steady, higher housing premium than in MSAs with a volatile, lower premium during the boom period. In MSAs with a steady, higher housing premium, the relationship remains significant even during the bust period, potentially contributing to maintaining higher housing premiums.     

From plan to market: financial statements and economic transition in the East German enterprise

This article examines the changing role of financial accounting in the former East Germany as that country underwent the transition from a centrally planned to a market-driven economy. The German government's insistence on a sales model of privatization in preference to some form of mass privatization, combined with legal requirements to make up equity shortfalls in eastern German enterprises, resulted in a highly centralized and interventionist approach to accounting change. The article reviews and analyses the historical, technical, economic and political aspects of this change process.     

The impact of SARS on China's human resources: implications for the labour market and level of unemployment in the service sector in Beijing,Guangzhou and Shanghai

In this paper, we examine the effects of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) on China's human resources, its labour-market and its level of employment and unemployment, looking specifically at what was one of its economically most vulnerable points, the hotel industry. The paper hypothesizes that the greatest impact would be on human resources in the service-industries and on particular sub-sectors, such as employment in hotels, located in three main cities in the PRC, in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, catering to both overseas as well as domestic tourism. It tentatively concludes that the almost dramatic demand and supply ‘shocks’ may have directly affected both the demand for and the supply of labour in the sub-sector, with discernable employment consequences.     

The welfare costs of monopoly are larger than you think

We show that monopoly is the parent of monopsony when an industry employs specialized resources. This means that the welfare loss from monopoly and monopolization is larger than commonly portrayed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modeling an HR shared services center: Experience of an MNC in the United Kingdom

An increasing number of large and multinational organizations are moving to shared services models in delivering the human resource function. It is commonly believed that the adoption of an HR shared services model can transform the role of HR by enabling the HR function to be more strategic at the corporate level and more cost‐effective at the operational level. However, few academic studies have been carried out to investigate challenges to implementing an HR services center successfully and the impact of adopting an HR shared services model on different groups of employees. Through a case study of a multinational corporation, this article reveals that there remains a significant gap between literature espousing the efficacy and utility of HR shared services and the extent to which the adoption of such a model is successful. The financial and emotional cost of moving to a shared services model can outweigh the tangible cost savings predicted by firms. The idea of separating the HR function into strategic, operational, and administrative components may prove to be too simplistic, although it underpins the initiative of HR shared services. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

What If Immigrants Had Not Migrated?

A bstract .   Despite strong theoretical arguments and models about international migration, very few empirical studies rigorously test these arguments and models. The purpose of the present study is to analyze determinants and consequences for international migration, focusing particularly on the returns to post-hoc international migration. The present study compares residential well-being of Korean international migrants in the United States with that of their hypothetical well-being if they had not migrated. Our suggested models of the selectivity corrected returns to various characteristics for immigrants and nonimmigrants enable us to estimate the "opportunity well-being" of individuals and households; that is, the well-being of immigrants-had-they-stayed and of nonimmigrants-if-they-had-immigrated. The data for our analyses are drawn from the 1990 Korea Census Data and the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1990 U.S. Census. In either case of migrants-had-they-stayed or of nonimmigrants-had-they-migrated, international migration to the United States has a significant and positive effect on the probability of homeownership, especially for women. The results show that the predicted probability of homeownership attainment increases as a result of migration by 15 percent to 16 percent for women and by 8 percent for men. The study concludes that migrating to the United States offers better opportunities for homeownership than staying in Korea does, particularly for women.     

Vacaciones y licencias en países desarrollados: los Estados Unidos a la zaga en cuanto a equilibrio entre vida profesional y vida familiar

Los autores comparan las normativas sobre vacaciones y licencias susceptibles de facilitar el equilibrio entre vida profesional y familiar de Australia, Canadá, República de Corea, Estados Unidos, Europa occidental y Japón utilizando un índice compuesto para clasificarlas. Los Estados Unidos figuran en último lugar: la concesión de vacaciones anuales al trabajador no es obligatoria y las licencias por motivos familiares se limitan a 12 semanas al año. Este bajo nivel de reglamentación podría deberse, según los autores, a una concepción mercantilista del empleo sumada a la creencia de que empleador y trabajadores tienen idéntica capacidad de negociación, visión no compartida por las demás democracias industrializadas.