An analysis of crop choice: Adapting to climate change in South American farms

This paper explores how South American farmers adapt to climate by changing crops. We develop a multinomial logit model of farmer's choice of crops. Estimating the model across 949 farmers in seven countries, we find that both temperature and precipitation affect the crops that South American farmers choose. Farmers choose fruits and vegetables in warmer locations and wheat and potatoes in cooler locations. Farms in wetter locations are more likely to grow rice, fruits, potatoes, and squash and in dryer locations maize and wheat. Global warming will cause South American farmers to switch away from maize, wheat, and potatoes towards squash, fruits and vegetables. Predictions of the impact of climate change on net revenue must reflect not only changes in yields per crop but also crop switching.     

Internationalization of Chinese and Korean firms

This article compares and contrasts the growth of Chinese and Korean multinational enterprises (MNEs). The article identifies the similarities and differences between Chinese and Korean MNEs in terms of motivations for internationalization, expansion strategies, and paths. The goal of this article is to contribute to the literature by shifting focus on host‐country conditions to home‐country conditions in explaining the drivers for firms' internationalization. We conclude that firms are motivated to expand abroad when faced with domestic competitive disadvantages resulting from absence or deficiency of one or more of Porter's Diamond attributes in their domestic market. Implications for further studies are also explored. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

What factors of early-stage innovative projects are likely to drive projects’ success? A longitudinal analysis of Korean entrepreneurial firms

Previous studies have identified the factors affecting successful technology commercialization as outcomes of R&D projects. However, most of them have used cross-sectional data, whereas there is a dearth of literature using longitudinal data analysis. Longitudinal analysis is essential for investigating the characteristics of early-stage innovative projects due to the inherent time lag between project evaluation and commercialization. Therefore, this study examines the early-stage project characteristics that can be used as meaningful evaluation criteria for predicting success, particularly in technology commercialization. We collected data on the ex-ante evaluation results and ex-post commercialization results of R&D projects pursued by entrepreneurial firms. We then conducted a logistic regression analysis and identified three market-related factors as significant in driving technology commercialization success in the early stages of technology development: market potential, commercialization plan, and market condition.     

PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: THE ROLE OF CALIBRATION,SHARPNESS, AND UNCERTAINTY

I evaluate the out‐of‐sample predictability of several major indicators for bull and bear markets in monthly S&P 500 series with three quadratic probability score components: calibration, sharpness, and uncertainty. I find that uncertainty limits the trend characterization and thus provides a new perspective from which to identify bull and bear markets. I also find that sharpness plays a key role in determining portfolio returns. Trading strategies that capitalize on sharpness generate higher Sharpe ratios and portfolio returns. The Aruoba–Diebold–Scotti business conditions index is the most profitable indicator for both medium‐ and long‐term trends.     

Effective Luxury-Brand Advertising: The ES–IF Matching (Entity–Symbolic Versus Incremental–Functional) Model

This study draws on the psychological tenets of implicit self-theories, which differentiate between individuals with entity versus incremental orientations, to deepen our understanding about how consumers evaluate luxury-brand advertising appeals. Our findings show that entity theorist consumers are more attracted to the symbolic value appeals of luxury brands, whereas incremental theorists are more attracted to functional value appeals. Furthermore, we show how consumers' implicit self-theories can be purposively primed by managers with the textual elements of a luxury-brand advertising message to increase its effectiveness, which provides useful implications for designing and executing effective luxury advertising.     

The Wage Penalty for Married Women of Career Interruptions: Evidence from the 1970s and the 1990s

The goal of this paper is to assess how the wage penalty for career interruptions by married women changed between the 1970s and the 1990s. We estimate the wage penalty for career interruptions using the work-history model and PSID data. We use several approaches to control for various forms of endogeneity and selection bias. Our empirical results suggest that (i) the wage penalty for married women's career interruptions increased from 40.4% to 73.7% over the period, (ii) the ratio of the wage penalty for married women to that of married men also increased, from 1.33 to 2.43, (iii) Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions show that changes in education- or occupation-specific wage penalties account for most of the wage penalty increase.     

Consistent Planning Under Uncertain Lifetime

This paper considers the problem of intertemporal planning when changing tastes result in inconsistent plans. This problem has been considered in the literature under the assumption of a lifetime certainty. Some of the solutions proposed in the literature exhibit certain undesirable properties such as incoherence and lack of Pareto-optimality. This paper proposes a procedure for solving the intertemporal dilemma when lifetime is uncertain. The proposed solution is coherent and Pareto-optimal, and is, in fact, valid for the case of certain as well as uncertain lifetime. [020]     

Dispersion in Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts and Market Efficiency

Recent studies show that firms with higher analysts’ earnings forecasts dispersion subsequently have lower returns than firms with lower forecasts dispersion. This paper evaluates alternative explanations for the dispersion–return relation using a stochastic dominance approach. We aim to discriminate between the hypothesis that some asset pricing models can explain the puzzling negative relation between dispersion and stock returns, and the alternative hypothesis that the dispersion effect is mainly driven by investor irrationality and thus is an evidence of a failure of efficient markets. We find that low dispersion stocks dominate high dispersion stocks by second‐ and third‐order stochastic dominance over the period from 1976 to 2012. Our results imply that any investor who is risk‐averse and prefers positive skewness would unambiguously prefer low dispersion stocks to high dispersion stocks. We conclude that the dispersion effect is more likely evidence of market inefficiency, rather than a result of omitted risk factors.     

Eliza in the uncanny valley: anthropomorphizing consumer robots increases their perceived warmth but decreases liking

Marketing Letters - Consumer robots are predicted to be employed in a variety of customer-facing situations. As these robots are designed to look and behave like humans, consumers attribute human...