Influence of institutional environment on entrepreneurial intention: a comparative study of two countries university students

Institutional environment influences the perceptions of desirability and feasibility, society’s social and cultural environment, such as beliefs, values and attitudes, conditions behaviour and decisions made by individuals. This research evaluates the influence of institutional environment on entrepreneurial intention using a comparative analysis of different attitudes among university students in two countries: Portugal and Spain. In particular, this study aims to examine the perceptions of desirability, feasibility and intention toward the creation of one’s own business and how that variables influence the entrepreneurial intention as compared these two different institutional contexts. Results revealed difference among attitudes toward entrepreneurship in both countries. With respect to the perception of feasibility, the majority of students in Extremadura (Spain) consider that it is easier to create a business in nowadays than it was several decades ago. However, from the students of Beira Interior (Portugal) consider that it is more difficult. Furthermore, in Extremadura, the entrepreneurial intention is higher than in Beira Interior.     

Information and Investor Behavior Surrounding Earnings Announcements

The goal of this paper is to analyze the impact of annual earnings announcements on the market through the order flow data in addition to the usual transaction data. In this respect, examining order flow data can potentially reveal valuable information that is not available from transaction data. In fact, the data allow us to test hypotheses about asymmetric information and investor behavior and to test if the behavior varies with investor sophistication. In addition, the paper tries to identify the determinants of the impact on a firm's value using assumptions about investor behavior.     

THE HARROD–BALASSA–SAMUELSON HYPOTHESIS: REAL EXCHANGE RATES AND THEIR LONG‐RUN EQUILIBRIUM*

Frictions and perturbations may influence currency values in the short run, but it is generally acknowledged that real‐exchange rates eventually settle toward equilibrium. The puzzle then is how gradually this parity is reached given the fluidity in foreign exchange markets. Persistent differences in the relative productivity of countries—a broad characterization of the Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson hypothesis—may help explain this puzzle. This article introduces methods to estimate equilibrium adjustment paths semiparametrically, and then sort how each of these components influences the dynamics of exchange rates. This is done in a dynamic panel setting by introducing novel local projections methods for cointegrated systems. Productivity shocks affect dynamics, and after adjusting for these factors, adjustment toward equilibrium is relatively rapid.     

Political pressures and the credibility of regulation: can profit sharing mitigate regulatory risk?

When price-cap rules determine the structure of prices for a long period, they suffer a credibility problem and introduce an element of risk especially if a firm’s profits are “too large”. Profit sharing may be seen as a device to pre-determine price adjustments and thus to decrease regulatory risk. We analyse the effects of profit sharing on the incentives to invest, using a real option approach. Absent credibility issues, a well designed profit sharing system may be neutral relative to a pure price cap. With regulatory risk, profit sharing is preferable to a pure price-cap one, if it intervenes for high enough profit levels.

The formation and interplay of social capital in crowdfunded social ventures

The multi-levelled processes taking place in Crowdfunding (CF), when tapping a large heterogeneous crowd for resources, and the often fundamentally different intentions of individual crowd members in the case of highly desirable social ventures with little prospect for economic gains, may lead to a different logic and approach to how entrepreneurship develops. Using this under-institutionalized sphere as both, context and subject, the author seeks evidence and a new understanding of entrepreneurial routes by using the sociological perspectives of Bourdieus' four forms of capital as a lens on 36 cases of social ventures. In the cases, opportunity recognition, formation and exploitation could not be distinguished as separate processes. CF and sourcing help form the actual opportunity and disperse information at the same time. In addition, the ‘nexus’ of opportunity and entrepreneur is breached in CF of social causes through the constant exchange of ideas with the crowd, leading to norm-value pairs between the funders and the entrepreneurs. Issues of identification and control are thus not based upon any formal relationship but based on perceived legitimization and offered democratic participation leading to the transformation of social capital (SC) into economic capital (EC). Success is based upon the SC of the entrepreneurial teams, yet the actual resource exchange and transformation into EC is highly moderated by cultural and symbolic capital that is being built up through the process.     

Humorous coping scales and their fit to a stress and coping framework

The focus of this study is on the fit between the item content of scales measuring humorous coping and basic concepts of stress and coping theory. To investigate this fit 81 items from seven currently available humorous coping scales have been subjected to a facet analysis, using the tool of a mapping sentence. Three facets derived from stress and coping theory were part of this mapping sentence: external demands, humorous responses and coping aims. Because of the claim that humorous coping may be related to physical health dimensions, special attention has been paid to two health-related coping aims: cognitive reappraisal and response-focused coping responses. Five raters categorized the facets and their respective categories. Some humorous coping scales showed an underrepresentation of “external demands” and “humorous responses” and only a few scales covered the “aims” facet adequately. Reliability and agreement parameters varied considerably among scales, both on facet level and on category level. The Waterloo University Humor Inventory (WUHI) was a positive exception to this pattern. Findings are discussed in the light of specific characteristics of the scales included. Possible improvements of humorous coping measurement in health-related research are proposed, as well as adaptations to the rating procedures.     

The regional character of Asian multinational enterprises

In recent issues of this Journal a debate has raged concerning the appropriate nature of academic research in the Asia Pacific region. While we support the desire for both rigor and regional relevance in this research, we wish to demonstrate a strong commonality between the performance of large Asian firms and others from Europe and North America. This prompts us to question the need for a new theory of the MNE based on the experience of Asian firms. Like their counterparts elsewhere, the large Asian firms mostly operate on an intra-regional basis. While in the literature it has been assumed that the path to success for Asian firms is globalization, we show that the data supporting this is confined to a handful of unrepresentative case studies. We also present a bibliometric analysis which shows an overwhelming case study sample selection bias in academic studies towards this small number of unrepresentative cases.

A Theory of Trading Volume

A theory of trading volume is developed based on assumptions that market agents frequently revise their demand prices and randomly encounter potential trading partners. The model describes two distinct ways informational events affect trading volume. One is consistent with conjectures made by empirical researchers that investor disagreement leads to increased trading. But the observation of abnormal trading volume does not necessarily imply disagreement, and volume can increase even if investors interpret the information identically, if they also have had divergent prior expectations. Simulation tests support the model and are used to contrast the random-pairing environment with costless market clearing. Volume is lower in the costly market, and volume increases caused by an informational event persist after the event period. This is consistent with existing empirical evidence and suggests that markets do not immediately clear all orders or that investors have demands to recontract.     

Karl Pearson and the Origin of Kurtosis

Although the kurtosis index proposed by Karl Pearson in 1905 is introduced in statistical textbooks at all levels, the measure is not easily interpreted and has been a subject of considerable debate. In this study, the theoretical development of kurtosis is surveyed from a historical perspective of Pearson's work on evolution. It surprisingly emerges that there was no emphasis in Pearson's papers on kurtosis as measuring (in part) tail heaviness. However, it is found that Pearson used to frequently adjust the formalisation of kurtosis depending on his changing needs. This complex development partly explains the confusion that would surround kurtosis in subsequent literature. Our conclusion is that most misunderstandings arise from improper use of the kurtosis coefficient outside the Pearson system of frequency curves.     

Overlapping operations in material requirements planning

Material requirements planning (MRP) is a planning and information system that has widespread application in discrete-parts manufacturing. The purpose of this article is to introduce ideas that can improve the flow of material through complex manufacturing systems operating under MRP, and that can increase the applicability of MRP within diverse manufacturing environments.MRP models the flow of material by assuming that items flow from work station to work station in the same batches that are used in production. That is, once work starts on a batch of a certain item at a certain work station, the entire batch will be produced before any part of the batch will be transported to the next work station on its routing plan. Clearly, efficiency can be increased if some parallelism can be introduced. The form of parallelism investigated here is overlapping operations.Overlapping operations occurs when the transportation of partial batches to a downstream work station is allowed while work proceeds to complete the batch at the upstream work station. The potential efficiencies to be gained are the following:

• Reduced work-in-process inventory

• Reduced floor space requirements

• Reduced size of transfer vehicles

Additional costs may accrue through additional cost of transportation of partial batches and through additional costs of control.Some MRP software vendors provide the data processing capability for overlapping operations. However, the user is given little or no guidance on overlapping percentages or amounts. It is our intent to provide a simple, robust technique to MRP users who would like to overlap operations and gain some or all of the above efficiencies.An optimal lot-sizing technique is derived by considering a generic two work station segment of a manufacturing system. Under the assumptions of constant demand and identical production rates, a cost function that considers setup costs, inventory holding costs and transportation costs is derived. This cost function is minimized subject to the constraint that the production batch is an integer multiple of the transfer batch. We solve for the optimal production batch, the optimal transfer batch, and the integer number relating them. Solutions are obtained as closed form, easy to-evaluate formulas.By introducing more parallelism, overlapping operations can reduce lead time. However, this will not happen without modification of MRP logic to accommodate such reduced lead time. We derive a formula that shows how a significant lead time compression can easily be obtained and implemented in MRP.We consider an example to illustrate the application of the technique on typical data from the electronics industry. The outcome showed a cost savings of approximately 22.5% over the standard MRP approach.Overlapping operations allows the applicability of MRP to an increasing number of situations that are not modeled faithfully by conventional MRP logic. Three such situations that occur often are the following:

• Limited size of transfer vehicles dictate that several transfers should be planned.

• Lead time requirements prohibit nonoverlapped operations.

Our analysis suggests how to accommodate these difficult practical situations into MRP.Overlapping operations in material requirements planning provides an enhancement that allows wider applicability, shortened lead times, and lower total costs. It may be applied selectively to any two work stations where it is deemed appropriate. Due to the structure of the cost function, it is possible to make the transfer lot-sizing decisions independent of the production lot-sizing decisions. Therefore, significant improvements can be made through overlapping with minimum disruption to the existing MRP system machinery. It is our conviction that overlapping operations is an important concept that can and will impact MRP. We suggest the approach presented here as a systematic way to implement overlapping.