Narratives from a wetland: Sustainable management in Lukanga,Zambia

Wetlands are a key livelihood resource in southern Africa. Historically they have been managed using local knowledge systems, but these systems have in many instances been undermined by colonial and postcolonial legal requirements. The IUCN's Ramsar initiative, supported by organisations such as BirdLife International and the WWF, seeks to protect wetland resources. This qualitative study examined the political ecology of the Kapukupuku and Waya areas of the Lukanga wetlands in Zambia, designated a Ramsar site. This designation has given rise to competing ‘narratives’ by politicians and local community leaders over how Lukanga should be managed and used, and the resulting conflict is threatening its sustainability. The paper warns that the various parties' arguments are value-laden and that power asymmetry threatens to exclude poor local communities. Policy must take power interests into account to ensure that developments in the name of the poor really do benefit the poor.     

Influences on coastal tourism demand and substitution behaviors from climate change impacts and hazard recovery responses

Climate change impacts can negatively affect tourism demand and, subsequently, local economies by disrupting access and altering physical conditions, including those from adaptation and recovery efforts. Research is needed that helps destinations become more climate ready, including studies of decision factors that influence trip-taking behaviors. This paper presents findings from a discrete choice experiment to determine how physical and economic changes could affect visitation behaviors to a vulnerable coastal destination, the Outer Banks region of North Carolina, USA. We embedded our experiment within an on-site visitor survey to reveal thresholds of negative changes to coastal attributes that tourists are willing to tolerate, and also examined tourists’ willingness to substitute their future trips to the region. Transportation-related changes had the highest relative importance among the four selected attributes. The likelihood of three types of spatial substitution, spurred by not being able to access the destination, were consistently related to residency but less consistently related to place meanings, visitation history, and other demographic variables. Study results can inform climate change planning within coastal zones to minimize negative impacts to tourism demand, such as the need to develop creative revenue streams to maintain resilience in communities that rely on occupancy taxes.     

The Role of the Business Press in Creating and Disseminating Information around Earnings Announcements

This paper investigates the role of the business press in creating and disseminating information around earnings announcements by examining different motivations of trading volume. We find that press coverage is positively associated with trading activity motivated by differential interpretation and by differential belief revision, consistent with the press playing both an information creation and information dissemination role around earnings announcements. When we divide press coverage into full articles with additional editorial content and news flashes merely repeating verbatim of firm-disclosed press releases, we find that trading volume motivated by both differential interpretation and differential belief revision increases as coverage by full articles increases, and trading volume motivated by differential belief revision increases as coverage by news flashes increases. We also report that the differential interpretation effect of full articles is more pronounced when information users’ sophistication is high. Overall, we provide new evidence to the literature by showing that each type of press coverage plays an informational role in different motivations of trading activity.     

Barbarians at the Gates: State Control of Global Mergers and Acquisitions

Cross‐border mergers and acquisitions are a major and often politicised component of foreign direct investment. Using data on individual transactions between 1970 and 2006, we examine the restrictions countries place on mergers and acquisitions, whether they use these controls to discriminate against foreigners seeking to acquire domestic firms, and what factors may predict the propensity to block foreign entry by this method of direct investment. Drawing partly on the existing literature, we test hypotheses that state intervention can be explained by characteristics of the countries whose firms are targeted by acquirers, including per capita income, democracy, trade exposure, market size, government share of national income and industrial structure. Although democracy, trade exposure and high government expenditure are associated with more stringent merger control laws, none of these attributes cause states to discriminate against cross‐border mergers. Countries with high per capita incomes, large markets and strict merger control laws, do use those regulations to discourage foreign acquirers. A second set of tests, based on observations of individual deals, rather than national aggregates, reveal that governments are particularly averse to foreigners acquiring firms that are bankrupt or in the defence sector. Overall, governments do treat cross‐border mergers and acquisitions differently, and use their merger control laws to discriminate against foreign investors, particularly with respect to certain types of transactions.     

Effect of Restaurant Patrons' Regret and Disappointment on Dissatisfaction and Behavioral Intention

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship among regret/disappointment, dissatisfaction, and behavioral intention in service failure situations at a restaurant. Even though there is a consensus regarding the positive relationship between regret/disappointment and customer dissatisfaction, unclear results still exist regarding the relationship between regret/disappointment and different types of behavioral intention. Thus, the present study attempts to clarify these fuzzy relationships. Specifically, this study aims to enhance understanding of the influence of regret and disappointment on behavioral intention (switching/negative WOM). The findings suggest that both regret and disappointment are significant determinants of customer dissatisfaction and switching/negative WOM. Further, the study results indicate that regret is an important predictor of switching intention, whereas disappointment is an important determinant of negative WOM. Finally, based on these findings, managerial implications for restaurant managers are discussed.     

Towards a Custom-Made Whistleblowing Policy. Using Grid-Group Cultural Theory to Match Policy Measures to Different Styles of Peer Reporting

To be effective, whistleblowing policies should be adapted to the organisational culture. They need to be custom-made and not follow a one-size-fits-all logic, specifically when they are installed to stimulate responsible peer reporting, a highly sensitive and value-laden type of whistleblowing. This paper attempts to illustrate that grid-group cultural theory could help to construct a whistleblowing policy by linking reporting styles to the organisational culture. First, we will identify four types of policy measures that are hypothesized to be effective in four types of organisational culture. Second, we develop the hypothesis that certain organisational cultures can induce peer reporting that is harmful for the organisation. The whistleblowing policy can then be used as a catalyst for cultural change.     

Pricing basket and Asian options under the jump‐diffusion process

This study derives approximate valuation formulas for basket options and Asian options under the jump‐diffusion process. To obtain an approximation for options prices under the jump‐diffusion process, we extend the Taylor expansion method developed by Ju N. ( 2002 ) under the diffusion process. We show that the Taylor expansion method, suggested in this study, provides better pricing performance as compared to log‐normal or four‐moment methods. The performance improvement using the Taylor expansion method increases as the time to maturity increases. In addition, our numerical analysis shows that jump effects become significant when the expected jump sizes take large negative values. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 31:830–854, 2011     

Manufacturing or service? Market saturation and cycles of over-investment as a clue to future of service economies

Economy and industry need markets. The “tragedy” is that markets are being saturated. Not only are they being saturated, but there has also been a tendency for cyclical over-investment whenever there is a new market opportunity. These backdrops imply a critical question as to whether or not service sectors feature similar growth symptoms of market saturation and cyclical over-investment. To approach this question, this research, which considers data availability, focuses on the Korean service sectors as a critical case, and bears implications for other country cases. This research focuses on performance profiles of service sectors within Korean service industries data from 1999 to 2006. With the data, this research attempts to perform an exponential smoothing to forecast an overview of the service sectors. Judging from the findings, and using a little intuition, it is fair to argue that service sectors are not totally free from the ‘logic of market saturation,’ but whether service sectors are doomed to fall under the realm of overinvestment requires more attention for future research.     

Correction to: Voluntary disclosure when private information and disclosure costs are jointly determined

Review of Accounting Studies - A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-021-09623-7     

Divergence in credit ratings

During the recent credit crisis credit rating agencies (CRAs) became increasingly lax in their rating of structured products, yet increasingly stringent in their rating of corporate bonds. We examine a model in which a CRA operates in both the market for structured products and for corporate debt, and shares a common reputation across the two markets. We find that, as a CRA’s reputation becomes good enough, it can be optimal for it to inflate its ratings with probability one in the structured products market, but inflate its ratings with probability zero in the corporate bond market.