Enlarging the EMU to the east: what effects on trade?

The purpose of this article is to assess the implications of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) accession of eight Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) on their share of EMU-12 imports. Overcoming biases related to endogeneity, omitted variables and sample selection, our results indicate that the common currency has boosted intra-EMU imports by 7%. Under the assumption that the same relationship between the explanatory variables and imports will hold for EMU-CEEC trade, we intend to predict the future impact of the Euro. Our findings suggest that except for the least integrated countries, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, all CEECs can expect increases in the EMU-12 import share.

Entry of painters in the Amsterdam market of the Golden Age

We analyze the evolution of the entry of painters and price of paintings in the XVII century Amsterdam art market. In line with evolutionary theory, demand-driven entry in the market was first associated with product innovations and a rapid increase in the number of painters. After reaching a peak, the number of painters started to decrease in parallel with a price decline and the introduction of process innovations. To test for the role of profitability in the art market as a determinant of endogenous entry of painters, we build a price index for the representative painting inventoried in Dutch houses. This is based on hedonic regressions controlling for characteristics of the paintings (size, genre, placement in the house), the owners (job, religion, value of the collection, size of the house) and the painters. After a peak at the beginning of the century, the real price of paintings decreased until the end of the century. We provide anecdotal evidence for which high initial prices attracted entry of innovators, and econometric evidence on the causal relation between price movements and entry.     

Keynes and Wagner on government expenditures and economic development: the case of a developing economy

This paper investigates the Keynesian view and the Wagner’s Law on the role of public expenditure on economic growth for Malaysia (1970–2004). The empirical results using the Auto-Regression Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and the ‘bounds test’ (Pesaran et al. in J Appl Econ 16:289–326, 2001) showed evidence of a long run relationship between total expenditures (including expenditures on defense, education, development and agriculture) and Gross National Product. The results also show that with the structural break in 1998, the long run causality is bi-directional for GNP and expenditures on administration and health, supporting both Keynes view and Wagner’s Law. For all other expenditure categories the long run causality runs from GNP to the expenditures, which supports Wagner’s Law. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Adoption of professional management in Chinese family business: A multilevel analysis of impetuses and impediments

Building upon the market, institutional, and cultural perspectives, this paper identifies the major impetuses and impediments that affect the professionalization of Chinese family business at the environment, firm, and owner levels. Our integrative framework projects that whether a family business owner will adopt professional managers is largely determined by the relative strength of impetus factors and impediment factors. We then discuss the possible governance choices under different configuration of impetuses and impediments. This theoretical framework is expected to help set the momentum for further conceptual exploration and empirical study in this area.

Office Construction in Singapore and Hong Kong: Testing Real Option Implications

We advance the real-option-based empirical analysis of commercial real estate investment in three respects. First, we test several real option implications for real estate construction that have not been examined in the commercial real estate investment literature. In particular and in line with the predictions of real option models, we show that the effects of real interest rate and the expected demand growth on hurdle rent become more negative when the market volatility is greater. Second, we use a cointegrating vector of office employment and office stock to provide a better control of the demand for new construction than traditional indicators based on real estate prices and vacancy rates. Third, whereas the existing studies focus on the U.S. commercial real estate markets, we study two major office markets in Asia, namely Singapore and Hong Kong. We rely on the local stock market in the two city states to derive forward-looking measures of office demand growth expectations.

Assessing financial distress dependencies in OTC markets: a new approach using trade repositories data

In this paper, we study the relationships among financial market sub-segments as a way to identify potential financial distress through increased co-movements among them. To study how sub-markets are mutually co-dependent, we combine granular data on over-the-counter derivatives by trade repositories and the joint probability of distress (JPoD) approach introduced by the International Monetary Fund. We define an indicator that combines several distress drivers and observe that results on co-dependencies are similar to those that would be expected: similarities between financial and contractual terms seem to be responsible for stronger co-movements among sub-markets. However, high values for JPoD even in correspondence of quite dissimilar sub-markets suggest the presence of other drivers that should be investigated in future research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study on systemic risk assessment based on micro-founded trade repositories’ data on interest rate swaps.     

Product market competition and cost stickiness

Extant literature on cost stickiness has focused on how firm-specific characteristics affect the asymmetric cost behavior. In this paper, we explore how a firm’s operating environment affects the firm’s cost stickiness. Specifically, we examine the effect of product market competition on cost stickiness since a firm’s investment and cost retention decisions partly depend on how the firm interacts with its rival firms in the product markets. Using two firm-level text-based product market competition measures extracted from management disclosures in firms’ 10-K filings (Li et al. in J Account Res 51(2):399–436, 2013; Hoberg and Phillips in Rev Financ Stud 23(10):3773–3811, 2010; J Polit Econ, 2015), we find strong evidence consistent with cost asymmetry increasing in competition after controlling for known economic determinants of cost stickiness. In additional analyses, we also find that the effect of product market competition on the degree of cost stickiness increases in firms’ financial strength, likely because management in financially stronger firms has more resources for investment expenditures in spite of a sales fall. We also find that cost stickiness is increasing in competition if management is optimistic about future demand, whereas competition is not associated with cost asymmetry if management is pessimistic about future demand. Finally, we find that the relationship between competition and cost stickiness, although statistically insignificant at conventional levels, is more pronounced for single-segment firms relative to multi-segment firms.     

Examination of the effects of the relationship marketing orientation on the company performance

The research objective is to examine empirically the relationship marketing and its successful implementation in Turkish Beverage Companies. Three scales were used to generate the data. Relationship marketing scale, environmental factors scale and company performance scale. Some of the variables in questionnaire used as control variables that reflect company-specific characters namely, company size, business type and sales volume. First the main effect of relationship marketing orientation on company performance was assessed, and then the moderating effect of environmental factors on the relationship between relationship marketing orientation and company performance was estimated by using multivariate techniques.     

Ranked set sampling and randomized response procedures for estimating the mean of a sensitive quantitative character

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the estimation of the mean of a sensitive variable. The use of a randomized response (RR) procedure gives confidence to the interviewed that his privacy is protected. We consider that a simple random sampling with replacement design is used for selecting a sample. The behavior of the RR procedure, when ranked set sampling is the design used, is developed under three different ranking criteria. The usual gain in accuracy associated with the use of ranked set sampling is exhibited only by one of the designs. The behavior of the models is illustrated using data provided by a study of samples of persons infected with AIDS.     

Criterion-robust optimal product designs for discrimination between nested response surface models

Consider the problem of discriminating between two rival response surface models and estimating parameters in the identified model. To construct designs serving for both model discrimination and parameter estimation, the M _γ-optimality criterion, which puts weight γ (0≤γ≤1) for model discrimination and 1 − γ for parameter estimation, is adopted. The corresponding M _γ-optimal product design is explicitly derived in terms of canonical moments. With the application of the maximin principle on the M _γ-efficiency of any M _γ'-optimal product design, a criterion-robust optimal product design is proposed.