Microfinance and gender inequality: cross-country evidence

Microfinance enables poor women to engage in income-generating activities, which helps them become financially independent, strengthening their decision-making power within the household and society. Consequently, microfinance has the potential to reduce gender inequality (GI). Case-study evidence from across the developing world both supports and contradicts this hypothesis. We therefore revisit this issue using macroeconomic cross-country panel data for 64 developing economies over the period 2003–2014. We find that women’s participation in microfinance is associated with a reduction in GI. However, regional interactions reveal that cultural factors are likely to influence the GI–microfinance nexus.     

Market Power and Patent Strategies: Evidence from Renaissance Venice

This paper exploits the introduction of the first regularized patent system, which appeared in the Venetian Republic in 1474, to examine the factors shaping inventors’ propensity to use a new form of intellectual property. We combine detailed information on craft guilds and patents in Renaissance Venice and show a negative association between patenting activity and guild statutory norms that strongly restricted entry and price competition. Our analysis shows that the heterogeneity in patenting activity documented by the industrial organization literature is not a special feature of modern technologies, but is rather a persistent phenomenon affected by market power.     

Identifying micro-destinations and providing statistical information: a pilot study in the Canary Islands

Municipalities and regions are often used as an object of tourism analysis at the subnational level. This occurs because administrative borders are used to implement tourism policies and collect statistical information. However, administrative boundaries may not always be suitable for studying tourism destinations at a local level. Sometimes, particularly in high-density tourism destinations, several differentiated tourism areas occupy a single municipality; tourism areas may, and often do, extend beyond municipal boundaries and tourism destinations may not occupy the whole of the municipal area. As such, a new level of analysis is often required: the micro-destination. There are few tourism concepts as imprecise as that of the destination. Therefore, the process of identifying and establishing the boundaries of a micro-destination is by no means a straightforward one. This paper presents six criteria for establishing the boundaries of this type of tourism area. Of these six, the two primary criteria used are: the concentration of tourism establishments; and tourism typologies and supply characteristics. These criteria have been applied as part of a pilot study in the Canary Islands. Statistical information for nine micro-destinations is generated using the geolocation of tourism establishments together with information obtained from both supply-side and demand-side surveys.     

Entry,trade costs,and international business cycles

Are firm entry and fixed exporting costs relevant for understanding the international transmission of business cycles? We revisit this question using a model that includes entry, selection to exporting activity, physical capital accumulation and endogenous labor supply. We determine that once the stochastic process for exogenous productivity is calibrated to consider the endogenous dynamics in TFP created by the number of firms and the time series volatility of entry is calibrated to the data, our model yields minimal departures from the Backus et al. (1992) benchmark. The richer model shares all of the successes of the previous model in terms of the volatilities of aggregate quantities, as well as its failures, in terms of replicating patterns of international co-movement and the volatility of international relative prices.     

Building internal business scenarios based on real data from a performance measurement system

This paper presents a new methodology to build internal business scenarios from the data gathered by some key performance indicators (KPIs) defined within a performance measurement system. The application of the principal components analysis technique leads to the identification of latent relationships between KPIs that underlies some important business aspects. Further, this methodology allows to represent not only the temporal evolution of the organisation as a function of these business aspects but also the definition and determination of internal business scenarios, being therefore the source of meaningful managerial information. At the end of the paper, results of a practical application are presented and discussed, as well as their importance for the organisation from a decision making point of view.     

Mexico's private toll road program reconsidered

Mexico's private toll road program of 1989–1994 is famous both as one of the first and the most ambitious highway privatization programs among the developing countries and as one of the most dramatic failures. In just five years Mexico awarded 52 concessions totaling over 5300 km of toll roads, but as early as 1993 many of the concessions had to be renegotiated and in 1997 the government was forced to takeover 23 of them at an immediate financial cost of billions of dollars. This paper reconsiders the Mexican program and, with the benefit of hindsight, argues that it does not deserve its bad reputation. Although Mexico made some important mistakes in the design of the concessions, many of the highways turned out to be socially worthwhile investments. Moreover, the restructuring of the concessions in 1993–1997 converted many of them into financially profitable projects over the long-term, while the 1997 bailout ended up costing the government little in budget terms.     

Prepayment and future cross-buying: an exploratory analysis

Recent research has provided important insights on consumers’ preferences for prepayment mechanisms and on its impact on consumption of a given product or service. However, little is known about how prepayment influences future purchases of goods and services. We consider this question in a contractual setting within the services industry, involving different purchasing decisions over time. Based on a large-scale empirical test, we find that prepay customers make fewer changes to their cross-buying levels (i.e., the number of different services they buy from the company) from one contractual period to another, and that this effect is more salient for the firm's new customers. We propose possible explanatory mechanisms for this effect. For instance, based on mental budgeting theory, we suggest that prepayment customers may set mental budgets and track expenditures against this budget leading them to resist further investments. Alternatively, prepayment customers may be more certain about their consumption behavior leading to fewer changes over time.

     

An Empirical Analysis of Synthesizing the Effects of Festival Quality,Emotion, Festival Image and Festival Satisfaction on Festival Loyalty: A Case Study of Macau Food Festival

This study aims to examine the interrelationships among the festival quality dimensions, festival quality, emotion, festival image, festival satisfaction and festival loyalty. Analysis of data from 454 attendees in the 12^th Macau Food Festival indicates that the proposed model fits the data. The result of this study will assist festival management in developing and implementing market‐orientated service strategies to increase quality and image, and enhance the emotion and satisfaction of attendees in order to attain their loyalty toward food festivals. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The demand for and the supply of distribution services: A basis for the analysis of customer satisfaction in retailing

This paper brings together two bodies of literature. One of them is a literature on the special role of the consumer in retailing. The other one is the literature on customer satisfaction. This joining of literatures is accomplished by identifying distribution services as outputs of retail firms and fixed inputs into the production functions of consumers and relaxing the standard assumption that the demand for these services is always equal to the supply of these services. The result is a new conceptual framework for the analysis of customer satisfaction in retailing. This framework extends the basic ideas on customer satisfaction developed for manufacturing in a homogeneous single product setting to the heterogeneous multi-product setting relevant for many retailers. The paper illustrates one approach to the implementation of this framework with data for a set of supermarkets in Pamplona, Spain, that measure distribution services by asking consumers questions explicitly identifying these services. The five main categories of distribution services identified by the conceptual framework and measured in the data are economically important and statistically robust determinants of customer satisfaction with supermarkets. These results are obtained controlling for other variables typical of the customer satisfaction literature and measuring customer satisfaction in a manner consistent with that literature. The results are robust to corrections for sample selection and alternative estimation methods. Perhaps our most interesting novel result is that the effect of the determinants of customer satisfaction on future purchase intentions in the supermarket case is different when measured directly in a one stage process than when measured indirectly in a two stage process through the attributes/satisfaction/ purchase intentions chain.