Drivers of Customer–Brand Relationship Quality: A Case of Mainland Chinese Hotel Loyalty Program Members

Hotel chains should understand the effectiveness of the benefits offered by their programs and the influence of customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives of individual hotels because of the high operating costs of loyalty programs and the risk of creating an affinity to the rewards they offer rather than to the brand itself. This study determines the effect of the satisfaction of hotel loyalty program members on the benefits they receive, and the CRM efforts of individual hotels on the quality of their relationship with the brand. The sample was drawn from mainland Chinese customers because of the growing importance of the Chinese tourism market. Results reveal that program benefits have no significant effect on the quality of the relationship of the member with the hotel brand. The communication of the program to its members and the customer orientation of individual hotels are the key determinants of relationship quality.     

On the Role of Imports in Enhancing Manufacturing Exports

Making use of a large panel data set on Italian manufacturing firms, we provide evidence on the effect of imports on the firm's export performance. We distinguish imports of intermediates according to their origin, and we find that inputs sourced from low labour cost countries promote the firm's export activity. Imports from high‐income countries do not significantly contribute to the export orientation of firms, especially when both persistence in export and the possible endogeneity of the import measures are accounted for via system generalised method of moments (GMM) estimation of a linear probability model. Our evidence suggests that the impact of imports on the firms’ export activity works through the cost‐saving channel rather than the technology channel.     

Evidence on the dynamic relationship between international trade and the stock market

This study uses vector autoregressive analysis to examine the dynamic interactions of monthly real stock returns, return volatility, exchange rates, export growth and import growth for Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan for the period 1975–91. We find that exports and imports have significant interactions. The results also indicate that stock returns in Hong Kong and Singapore Granger-cause trade flows. Return volatility is found to react strongly to trade news in all four countries, a result supporting the efficient-market hypothesis.     

How Do Ownership Concentration and Family Control Affect R&D Investments? New Evidence from Taiwan

This study finds a nonlinear relationship between ownership concentration and R&D investments. Specifically, ownership concentration is positively related to R&D investments at a low level of ownership concentration; the relationship becomes negative when ownership concentration is at a high level. However, the impact of ownership concentration on R&D investments is lessened in family‐controlled firms; that is, family control moderates the relationship between ownership concentration and R&D investments. Overall, this study suggests that the ownership concentration's nonlinear impact on R&D investments differs between family‐controlled firms and nonfamily‐controlled firms.     

Extensive Form Games with Uncertainty Averse Players

Nash equilibrium presumes that the beliefs of a player are represented by a probability measure. Motivated by the Ellsberg Paradox and relevant experimental findings demonstrating that this representation of beliefs may be unrealistic, this paper generalizes Nash equilibrium in finite extensive form games to allow for preferences conforming to the multiple priors model developed by Gilboa and Schmeidler [Journal of Mathematical Economics, 18 (1989), 141–153]. The implications of this generalization for strategy choices and welfare are studied. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D81.     

Effects of Islamic religiosity on bilateral trust in trade: The case of Turkish exports

Using a rich firm level data set for Turkish manufacturing, we test whether sharing similar religious beliefs with potential contracting parties drives a firm’s first time entry into export markets. We exploit variation in the practice of Islam across Turkish NUTS3 regions and we find that firms located in regions characterised by stronger religiousness are more likely to enter export destinations with a higher share of Muslims among their population. This result is robust to the control for past trade, common language, cultural and migration ties as well as for selective trade policy in favour of politically connected religious business groups. In particular, religious proximity eases export entry for producers of “trust intensive” goods, it favours subsequent foreign market entries and reduces the export exit probability. All in all, our evidence supports an export enhancing effect of religious proximity working through export sunk costs reduction rather than through similarity in preferences.     

Does Choosing a Section of the Stock Exchange Matter in the IPO of SMEs? The French Case

The empirical study presented in this article is localized in between two major fields of research in finance: underpricing of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) and financial markets integration or segmentation.This empirical work proves that the institutional and political intention, translated in a segmentation of financial markets dedicated to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises has an impact on the financial environment of SMEs and consequently on the level with which IPOs are underpriced. The differences between companies listed on both parts devoted to SMEs correspond to the ambition of the French Stock Exchange. And these differences result in surprising pricing: a lower profile in risk does not mean a better valuation. At least, our study on IPOs of SMEs could help managers to choose the appropriate section for their firm.     

Accounting Restatements and External Financing Choices*

There is little research on how accounting information quality affects a firm’s external financing choices. In this paper, we use the occurrence of accounting restatements as a proxy for the reduced credibility of accounting information and investigate how restatements affect a firm’s external financing choices. We find that for firms that obtain external financing after restatements, they rely more on debt financing, especially private debt financing, and less on equity financing. The increase in debt financing is more pronounced for firms with more severe information problems and less pronounced for firms with prompt CEO or CFO turnover and auditor dismissal. Our evidence indicates that accounting information quality affects capital providers’ resource allocation and that debt holders help alleviate information problems after accounting restatements.     

Reforms,Finance, and Current Accounts

We analyze the implications of labor market reforms for an open economy's human capital investment and future production. A stylized model shows that labor market deregulation can imply more positive current‐account balances if financial markets are imperfect and labor market institutions not only distort labor allocation, but also smooth income. Empirically, in Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) country‐level panel data, we find that labor market deregulation has been positively related to current‐account surpluses on average and more strongly so when and where financial market access was more limited. These results are robust to inclusion of standard determinants of current‐account imbalances, and do not appear to be driven by cyclical phenomena.     

WELFARE AS EQUITY EQUIVALENTS

Equity (or, its counterpart, inequity) plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in different dimensions. In this paper, we revisit the concept of inequity – in the sense of unequal distributions – across individuals, time, and states of the world using a unified framework that generalizes the standard expected discounted utilitarianism approach. We propose a general measure of welfare as equity equivalents and a corresponding inequity index. We show that allowing for different attitudes toward inequity across different dimensions covers a scope of possible inequity preferences with different interpretations. We then prove that the order of aggregation across the different dimensions matters for welfare evaluations. Finally, we show that many of the welfare-theoretical approaches recently developed in the literature can be interpreted as special cases of this general framework.