Brand-as-Person versus Brand-as-User: An Anthropomorphic Issue in Tourism-related Self-Congruity Studies

Tourism self-congruity studies use two facets to personify destinations, namely, brand-as-person and brand-as-user. These features have been considered synonymous in previous research, and thus the differences between these facets, which may demonstrate biased congruity, must be investigated. This study uses projective techniques to personify brand-as-person and brand-as-user for two tourist destinations. Both facets are distinct and must not be used interchangeably in tourism-related self-congruity studies.     

Surplus distribution and characteristics of social enterprises: Evidence from microfinance

The issue of surplus distribution has hardly been analyzed in the context of the social economy. This paper highlights the main drivers of distribution between various stakeholders of microfinance institutions (MFIs), which are an example of social enterprises. We focus on three major variables: size, governance structure and subsidies. Our results show that the size of the institution is the main indicator of the surplus that the organization keeps as a self-financial margin. Moreover, MFIs with a cooperative ownership structure allocate a larger part of their surplus to their employees, whereas non-profit organizations and shareholder-firm MFIs do not allocate their surplus in a significantly different way among their main stakeholders. Finally, we do not find any clear-cut effect of subsidies on the surplus allocation process.     

Effects of Tariffication: Tariffs and Quotas under Monopolistic Competition

Recent rounds of GATT and later WTO have advocated widespread tariffication, meaning that existing non-tariff barriers be converted into import equivalent tariffs. From an economic point of view, the effects of such tariffication are not entirely clear. The paper presents a trade model with monopolistic competition to examine the welfare effects of tariffication. The ranking of pre- and post-tariffication welfare crucially depends on the nature of the initial trade barrier and the tariff tool applied. Tariffication using a specific (ad valorem) tariff results in the same (reduced) welfare level compared to an initial sold quota, whereas welfare is increased (the same) compared to an initial shared quota.     

The Euro-area Financial System: Structure, Integration, and Policy Initiatives

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper providesan overview of the current structure and integration of theeuro-area financial systems and related policy initiatives.We first compare the euro-area financial structure with thoseof the United States and Japan. Using new and comprehensivefinancial account data, we also describe how the euro-area financialstructure has evolved since 1995. We document the progress towardsintegration of the major euro-area financial segments, namelymoney markets, bond markets, equity markets, and banking. Finally,we discuss recent policy initiatives aimed at further improvingEuropean financial integration.     

Inefficient entry order in preemption games

In a preemption game, players decide when to take an irreversible action. Delaying the action exogenously increases payoffs, but there is an early mover advantage. Riordan (1992) shows that in a preemption game with two asymmetric players, players act in decreasing order of efficiency. This provides a microfoundation to the assumption that entry in a market occurs in the order of profitability, commonly used in the empirical analysis of market entry. We provide a counterexample showing that with more than two players this intuitive result can be reversed. We present a preemption game of entry into a new market. The potential entrants are three asymmetric firms: one “efficient” firm with high post-entry profits, and two “inefficient firms”. We show that the set of parameters such that the equilibrium entry order does not reflect the efficiency ranking is nonempty, and analyse which changes in post-entry profits preserve this entry order.     

Poverty and Political Risk

The paper explains the negative correlation between developing countries' per capita incomes and measures of political risk by relating a government's decision to tax foreign investors to distributional interests in the host country's population. Using a dynamic general-equilibrium model in which agents make irreversible investments abroad to insure against country-specific technology shocks, it is shown that the political risk for foreign investors is prohibitive if the host country's initial per capita income is too low and if the benefits of international diversification are not high enough to generate a sufficiently strong opposition against discriminatory taxation.     

Can mutual funds time risk factors?

Using daily observations from 448 actively managed funds, we employ the methodology in Bollen and Busse (2001) in order to assess the ability of fund managers to time systematic risk factors. We first construct synthetic portfolios in order to obtain the empirical distribution of timing coefficients under the null hypothesis of no timing ability and then compare this distribution to that of the timing coefficients of the actual funds. Fund managers do not seem to be timing any of the risk factors. We interpret this result as evidence that factor timing ability does not persist over long time periods.     

Corporate Governance and Financial Performance of Companies in Poland

The research presented in the paper is aimed at examining the relationship between the level of corporate governance and the financial performance of listed companies in Poland. The corporate governance degree is expressed by the outcomes of a rating of 2003 performed by Polish Corporate Governance Forum. The attempted models are of ordered multinomial type. Endogenous variable represents the rating outcome (A−, B+, B, B−, and C+), while the exogenous variables include various financial indicators evaluated on the basis of the 2002 financial statements. The estimated ordered logit models show that the level of corporate governance of companies in Poland is associated with their ability to cope with the financial distress, as expressed by the degree of liquidity, profitability and the financial leverage variables.