An Empirical Investigation of Trade Credit Demand

This paper investigates the motivations for a firm's demand for trade credit. Demand for credit is modelled as a function of transaction costs motivations, financing motivations, operational considerations, seller compliance issues and supplier marketing, whilst controlling for the firm's business environment and for firm characteristics such as size and industry. This paper builds on previous studies by considering a wider range of factors that can affect trade credit demand holistically on a single sample. It appears that the use of trade credit is widespread, and that it is generally perceived as an important short term financing option, although the availability of trade credit is not a major influence on supplier choice. The level of a firm's trade credit demand is found to be significantly influenced by transaction costs, financing, operational issues, marketing activities by suppliers, the firm's investment in trade debtors and firm size.     

Delineating Publicly Listed Family and Nonfamily Controlled Firms: An Approach for Capital Market Research in Australia*

Recent capital market research evidence suggests that a large proportion of public companies worldwide are characterized by controlling stockholders who are more often families, usually the founder(s) or their descendants. There has been considerable debate on whether “family” firms can indeed be accurately delineated from nonfamily firms given the diversity and abundance of family business definitions in the literature. This paper provides a robust definition of family business for the purposes of capital market research. Using an accounting‐based definition of family business, the paper outlines a four‐step procedure that provides validation for identifying family controlled companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. A significant feature of the research methodology was reliance on data collected from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Having access to the corporate regulator's restricted data enabled the researchers to establish important links between directors and their private related entities.     

Conceptual underpinnings for transformative research in a service ecosystems context to resolve social issues – framework foundations and extensions

ABSTRACT

A number of services within society are designed to improve the well-being of its members and transform lives. Some services focus on the protection and support of vulnerable members of society, for example, those suffering the effects of drug use, mental health conditions, violence or poverty. Clients of such social services may also come from minority or marginalised cultural backgrounds. Typically, social services aim to reduce disparities and enhance individual and population well-being. A major challenge for social policy-makers and social service providers is to establish and maintain constructive engagement between the social services and those they are intended to serve. Some of these vulnerable clients are deemed ‘hard-to-reach’ (HTR) by policy-makers and service providers. Yet, the transformation of lives requires the involvement of the focal actor (client) and their service or activity system, as well as the engagement of other actors, such as the social worker embedded in their service or activity system. This paper aims to further unpack a novel approach, called integrative transformative service framework. This contribution extends its conceptualisation which fuses mainly three different approaches, namely Transformative Service Research (TSR), (Cultural-Historical) Activity Theory (CHAT) and (Regulatory) Engagement Theory (RET).     

Salt or Sludge? Exploring Preferences for Potable Water Sources

Decision makers often use information about public preferences to guide public policy. Several disciplines gather information on preferences through surveys by asking respondents to make hypothetical choices over potential policies. However the context of the choice question differs between approaches, with some failing to make the full consequences of the respondent’s choice explicit in the question. In this study we investigate whether question context matters, by exploring whether economic and psychology approaches yield a similar understanding of community preferences towards a large-scale recycled wastewater scheme. We find that stated preferences differ depending on whether the preference question is contextualised using economic incentives. The findings provide insight into the implications of inappropriately contextualised preference questions, methodological considerations in attitude identification and estimation, and the diversity of values and public attitudes towards recycled wastewater.     

Hypothetical Bias Reconsidered: Payment and Provision Uncertainties in a Threshold Provision Mechanism

We extend research on the consequentiality of stated preference choices to a threshold provision mechanism for public goods. We develop a simple theoretical model of option price to analyze how option price varies with payment and provision uncertainty. We explore whether threshold provision contributions are similarly influenced by payment and provision uncertainty using an induced value contribution experiment. Results suggest that: (1) the probability of payment has a negative effect on contributions; (2) the probability of provision has a positive effect on contributions. We offer subjective beliefs regarding payment and provision as a plausible systematic explanation for hypothetical bias.     

Comovement in GDP trends and cycles among trading partners

It has long been recognized that business cycle comovement is greater between countries that trade more intensively with one another. However, nations face shocks to both the cyclical and trend components of their GDP series. Contrary to the result for cyclical fluctuations, we find comovement of shocks to the trend component of real GDP is weaker among countries that trade more intensively with one another. We simulate changes in ten-year output growth correlations corresponding to the estimated effects of trade and show that the impact of trade on trend comovement is quantitatively more important than its effect on cyclical comovement.