China and the Exports of Other Asian Countries

We analyze the impact of China’s growth on the exports of other Asian countries, distinguishing China’s demand for imports from its penetration of export markets. We account for the endogeneity of Chinese exports by applying instrumental variables in a gravity model with country-pair fixed-effects. We find that China’s crowding-out effect is felt mainly in markets for consumer goods and hence by less-developed Asian countries, not in markets for capital goods or by the more advanced Asian economies. Meanwhile, China has been sucking in imports from its Asian neighbors, but this effect is mainly felt in markets for capital goods. Hence, more and less developed Asian countries are being affected very differently by China’s rise. JEL no. E5, F4     

Home-based telecommuting and commuting behavior

The existing spatial models for home-based telecommuting assume that all the jobs are located at the central business district. At the same time, they do not duly treat the conflicting interests of the employer and the employee in adopting the telecommuting as an alternative work mode. The first objective of the paper is to present a spatial equilibrium model overcoming some of these important modeling drawbacks. The second objective is substantive. In the city where telecommuting is adopted, the conventional commuting pattern may no longer prevail: one may commute more to distant workplace than to the nearby workplace. Using the concept of relocation and substitution effects, I show how these two effects are interacting in their impacts on the household's time allocation and the vehicle distance traveled (VDT). It is shown that most of the commute time saved is again put for more work and no more time could be allocated to leisure hours. In addition, when people put a high value on the work on site, the VDT may even increase.     

RESTORING THE PRINCIPLE OF MINIMUM DIFFERENTIATION IN PRODUCT POSITIONING

Most research on product positioning supports the idea of differentiation. Product standardization (i.e., minimum differentiation) occurs only under very limiting assumptions. Yet, similar products are often observed in the marketplace. We attempt to restore the case for standardization by using more realistic assumptions than in previous work. We assume that consumers consider not only observable attributes in brand choice, but also attributes that are unobservable by the firms. We find that standardization is an equilibrium when consumers exhibit sufficient heterogeneity along the unobservable attributes under both positioning with exogenously given prices and price competition, We also show that, under insufficient heterogeneity along the unobservable attribute, our results coincide with past research that argues in favor of differentiation.     

Foreign exchange market efficiency under recent crises: Asia-Pacific focus

The Asia-Pacific region’s currency markets are generally efficient within-country when tested using the 30 and 31 cointegration technique whereas market efficiency fails to hold when tested using Fama’s (1984) conventional regression. Using the Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model, we reconcile these conflicting findings. The Pilbeam and Olmo (2011) model confirms within-country market efficiency. It further confirms that free-float currency markets are more resilient than managed-float currency markets among 12 Asia-Pacific economies. From the across-country perspective, the foreign exchange markets are mostly efficient and the results show that the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis was a more disturbing event than the 2008–2009 global financial crisis in the region.     

THE BROKERAGE FIRM EFFECT IN HERDING: EVIDENCE FROM INDONESIA

We examine herding behavior of domestic and foreign investors in the Indonesian stock market. We document that both domestic and foreign investors from a particular brokerage firm tend to herd. The foreign investors exhibit a greater propensity to herd than domestic investors. However, when examining investor trading across brokerage firms, we find only weak evidence of herding by domestic investors and no herding by foreign investors. Our overall findings suggest a strong brokerage firm effect on herding but a weak marketwide effect. Moreover, we find evidence that the strong brokerage effect on herding is likely driven by acting on common information.     

Allocation problems among sharing groups

We deal with allocation problems among sharing groups. There are n agents. The agents are divided into several sharing groups. A homogeneous good is allocated among sharing groups rather than among the agents. The good is a private good for sharing groups, and a public good for the members of each sharing group. That is, all of them in the same sharing group can consume it without rivalry. We introduce some allocation rules and axioms. The utilitarian allocation rule and the egalitarian allocation rule are characterized by some axioms.     

Public service quality and customer satisfaction: exploring the attributes of service quality in the public sector

Beyond the existing SERVQUAL-based research, the authors develop an alternative model of public service quality. The various sources of public service quality are explored and a new classification scheme formulated by using critical incidents technique. Four main qualities of public service are identified: process quality, outcome quality, design quality, and relationship quality. The findings suggest that the critical attributes of public service quality for customer satisfaction differ according to the types of customers in the public sector. Final customers (beneficiaries) give priority to the process and outcome qualities, whereas intermediary customers (social workers) have high regard for the design and relationship qualities.