Three types of organizational boundary spanning: Predicting CSR policy extensiveness among global consumer products companies

As part of the rise of a worldwide corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement, companies have increasingly incorporated social and environmental concerns into their policies. This paper examines the extensiveness of these policies, proposing that an underappreciated contributor is the degree of organizational boundary spanning. The paper is novel in integrating multiple types of boundary spanning into a single empirical framework, including product, sub‐unit, and national boundary spanning. The paper adds complexity to the literature by theorizing that different types of boundary spanning associate with CSR policy extensiveness in different issue areas. The results show that product spanning associates with CSR policy extensiveness in the area of consumers, sub‐unit spanning in the areas of workers, and nation‐state spanning in all issue areas. A unique, comprehensive, and global data set of 2,714 prominent consumer goods companies in the GoodGuide database underpins these findings.     

The stabilization role of police spending in a neo-Keynesian economy with credit market imperfections

Motivated by a seemingly persistent “twin-high” phenomenon in Latin America, we present a novel theoretical framework that has linkages between three institutions (education, criminal justice, and credit) to study policy-pertinent research questions with regards to whether police spending has the potential to serve as an unconventional policy tool for macroeconomic management. Based on a stylized parameterization, we find formal and illegal human capital to share common cyclical properties, which can be "decoupled" under a rule-based regime to police spending. This nonetheless comes at a cost of a greater propagation of the credit friction-induced financial accelerator effect.     

Investors' evaluations of price-increase preannouncements

Several firms preannounce their price increases with the expectation that such announcements will be evaluated favorably by investors. However, little is known about the actual effect they have on shareholder value. Accordingly, the authors present the first systematic empirical examination of investors' evaluations of 274 price-increase preannouncements (PIPs). Results show that whereas the average increase in abnormal returns following a PIP is 0.51%, almost 41% of the PIPs result in negative abnormal returns. To explore this heterogeneity, the authors propose a conceptual framework that focuses on three key pieces of information that investors can use when evaluating a PIP: information on the nature (time to implementation and magnitude) of the preannounced price increase, the stated attribution for the preannounced price increase (demand and/or cost based), and information on prior PIP occurrences by the firm and its competitors. Results indicate that PIPs with greater time to implementation, higher own precedence and greater competitive precedence result in lower abnormal returns, while PIPs with higher magnitude and PIPs with an explicit demand attribution result in greater abnormal returns.     

Strategic brand management for higher education institutions with graduate degree programs: empirical insights from the higher education marketing mix

ABSTRACT

Intense competition for student enrollment has created a strong need for higher education institutions, especially those that offer graduate degree programs, to differentiate themselves. This article introduces the concept of strategic brand management as an avenue for higher education differentiation and discusses how higher education institutions with graduate degree programs can strategically manage their brands (i.e. corporate and product) through the higher education marketing mix (i.e. prominence, prospectus, program, price, people, premium, and promotion). Using a closed-ended survey and partial least squares structural equation modeling of a sample of students enrolled in a graduate degree program (e.g. MBA), the study finds that the utilitarian elements (i.e. prominence, prospectus, program, and price) of the higher education marketing mix have a positive direct impact on the product brand (e.g. MBA brand) and an indirect impact on the corporate brand (e.g. university brand) of these types of higher education institutions. However, hedonic elements (i.e. people, premium, and promotion) of the higher education marketing mix do not produce any significant impact on either the corporate or product brands of these institutions. Implications from these findings to theory, practice, and future research avenues conclude.     

The flow-refueling location problem for alternative-fuel vehicles

Beginning with Hodgson (Geogr.Anal.22(1990) 270), several researchers have been developing a new kind of location-allocation model for “flow capturing.” Instead of locating central facilities to serve demand at fixed points in space, their models aim to serve demand consisting of origin-destination flows along their shortest paths. This paper extends flow-capturing models to optimal location of refueling facilities for alternative-fuel (alt-fuel) vehicles, such as hydrogen fuel cells or natural gas. Existing flow-capturing models assume that if a flow passes just one facility along its path, it is covered. This assumption does not carry over to vehicle refueling because of the limited range of vehicles. For refueling, it may be necessary to stop at more than one facility in order to successfully refuel the entire path, depending on the vehicle range, the path length, and the node spacing. The Flow Refueling Location Model (FRLM) optimally locates p refueling stations on a network so as to maximize the total flow volume refueled. This paper presents a mixed-integer programming formulation for the nodes-only version of the problem, as well as an algorithm for determining all combinations of nodes that can refuel a given path. A greedy-adding approach is demonstrated to be suboptimal, and the tradeoff curve between number of facilities and flow volume refueled is shown to be nonconvex.     

The valuation of multiple stock warrants

The issue of multiple series of stock purchase warrants by the same firm is an interesting financial structure not just in America, but is common in countries such as Switzerland, Malaysia, and Singapore. This paper derives valuation formulas for multiple series of outstanding warrants. The theoretical warrant prices from this model are compared against existing models. We report a subtle slippage effect and also a cross dilution effect that cause the existing models, such as Galai‐Schneller model, to be inappropriate for pricing such classes of multiple warrants. We also provide an example to illustrate the practicality of our model. The Greeks of the model are also derived in this paper. The complexity of multiple warrants could extend to other classes of contingent securities issued by the same firm but with differing expiry terms. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 23:517–534, 2003     

The Baby Boom and the Stock Market Boom*

This paper addresses two issues. The first is whether demographic change was plausibly responsible for the run‐up in stock prices over the last decade, and whether an attempt by the baby boom cohort to cash out of its investments in the period 2010–2030 might lead to an “asset meltdown”. The second issue is whether the rise in dependency that will accompany the retirement of the baby‐boom cohort calls for an increase in national saving. We analyze these issues using a forward‐looking macro‐demographic model, and show that they are related via the existence of installation costs for capital. If such costs are sufficiently large, then demographics do have the power to affect stock prices, but “saving for America's old age” is less optimal. However, conventional estimates of capital installation costs are not large enough to explain large stock price movements in response to actual demographic change.     

Conservative Reporting and the Incremental Effect of Mandatory Audit Firm Rotation Policy: A Comparative Analysis of Audit Partner Rotation vs Audit Firm Rotation in South Korea

In this paper, we take advantage of Korea's unique experiment with mandatory audit firm rotation (MAFR) and mandatory audit partner rotation (MAPR) to ascertain their influence on audit quality, proxied by conditional conservatism. Overall, we find that the implementation of MAFR did not have the desired effect. Firms that adopted MAFR demonstrate higher levels of conservatism in previous periods under MAPR (or compared to voluntary adopters). Furthermore, we find that audit tenure increases conservatism levels consistent with the auditor expertise hypothesis. However, whilst evidence suggests MAFR decreases audit quality on the whole, we find that firms that switch from non‐Big 4 to Big 4 auditors demonstrate higher conservatism because Big 4 auditors are more likely to demand conservative accounting practices, consistent with Big 4 audit firm knowledge superiority. Overall, the results suggest that MAFR's negative effect on audit quality can be mitigated by Big 4 auditor supervision.     

Improving road transport operations through lean thinking: a case study

Traditionally, logistics and transportation problems have been addressed through mathematical modelling, operations research, and simulation, but criticism has emerged about their effectiveness to actually address real-life problems. This paper documents a case study whereby the road transport operations of a leading Mexican brewery were improved through lean thinking and waste reduction. Two lean-based principles and tools were combined: the Seven Transportation Extended Wastes and Transportation Value Stream Mapping. Three systematic steps were proposed to facilitate the implementation of improvement. Feasibility studies conducted in this research suggested that lean thinking is an effective alternative for the improvement of road transport operations. The findings of this research could be used as guidance for transport managers to improve road transport operations. This paper also expands the limited evidence of the application of lean thinking in road transport logistics and highlights the research areas where its application has been concentrated in this sector.