Intra‐household bargaining power and household expenditure allocation: Evidence from Iran

This article examines the role of intra‐household bargaining power on household expenditure patterns in Iran to see whether women’s empowerment can achieve similar results in Iran as we have seen it achieve in other countries of the world. This study is insightful because it tells us whether Iranian women, who have experienced both economic and noneconomic constraints over many years, can utilize increased power toward economic development. The bargaining power is measured by the sex ratio in the marriage market. Using the Household Income and Expenditure Survey in Iran, we find that greater bargaining power of women contributes significantly toward greater provision of education and health expenditure within the household, creating a potential for an increase in welfare for the next generation.     

Value instantiation: how to overcome the value conflict in promoting luxury brands with CSR initiatives

Marketing Letters - When luxury brands (exuding self-enhancement values) incorporate CSR (eliciting self-transcendence values) in their brand platform, they are blending opposing values into their...     

Factor Copula Approaches for Assessing Spatially Dependent High-Dimensional Risks

In this article, we propose an innovative approach for modeling spatial dependence among losses from various geographical locations. The proposed model converts the challenging task of modeling complex spatial dependence structures into a relatively easier task of estimating a continuous function, of which the arguments can be the coordinates of the locations. The approach is based on factor copula models, which can capture various linear and nonlinear dependence. We use radial basis functions as the kernel smoother for estimating the key function that models all the spatial dependence structures. A case study on a thunderstorm wind loss dataset demonstrates the analysis and the usefulness of the proposed approach. Extensions to spatiotemporal models and to models for discrete data are briefly introduced, with an example given for modeling loss frequency with excess zeros.     

Too Small to Regulate

The paper argues that to achieve compliance of firms with regulations such as product quality or environmental or health standards it is better to have industries with a few large corporations than numerous small firms. We construct a model to show that limited liability constraints bind more easily in competitive industries, making it harder to impose sufficiently severe penalties and costlier to send sufficient monitors. Having large corporations allows the government effectively to delegate some of its monitoring functions to the managers of the corporation. The tradeoff between this issue and the usual argument in favor of competition is considered.

     

NEGATIVE CORRELATION BETWEEN STOCK AND FUTURES RETURNS: AN UNEXPLOITED HEDGING OPPORTUNITY?

The negative correlation between equity and commodity futures returns is widely perceived by investors as an unexploited hedging opportunity. A Lucas (1982) asset‐pricing model is adapted to analyse the fundamentals driving equity and commodity futures returns. Using the model we argue that such a negative correlation could arise as an equilibrium relationship which reflects traders' perceptions about the shocks driving the fundamentals such as energy and consumables, and does not necessarily indicate any hedging opportunity.     

Towards understanding who makes corporate venture capital investments and why

This study examines when established firms participate in corporate venture capital (CVC). We build on the resource-based view of interfirm collaboration and emphasize the strategic flexibility of CVC relationships. We use longitudinal data on 477 firms from 1990 to 2000 to test our hypotheses. We find that firms in industries with rapid technological change, high competitive intensity and weak appropriability engage in greater CVC activity. We also show that firms that possess strong technological and marketing resources and resources developed from diverse venturing experience engage in greater CVC activity. Finally, we find that these firm resources moderate the influence of the observed industry effects in paradoxical ways.     

Eco-Labeling and Stages of Development

The paper examines the effectiveness of eco-labeling in providing a market-based solution to the under-consumption of eco-friendly products in developing and developed countries. The authors show that whether labeling is an effective device in solving the problem of asymmetric information between sellers and buyers, or whether false labeling severs the link between willingness to pay and environmental conscious production choices, depends crucially on how monitoring intensities respond endogenously to economic growth, openness to trade, and technology transfers. In particular, by accounting for endogenous policy responses to economic growth, it is shown that an inverted-U relationship exists between consumer spending on eco-unfriendly products and national income. In addition, while international trade unambiguously benefits the environment in the presence of eco-labeling with perfect enforcement, trade openness may nevertheless delay the turning point of the growth and environment relationship, when the cost of enforcement falls disproportionately on developing countries, and when environmental policies are employed to reap terms-of-trade gains.