Research notes and communications management and organizational change: A note on the railroad industry

Hypotheses which relate top-level managers' age, years of company and industry service, and education to strategic change are studied with a sample of 855 managers from 27 railroads. Results generally support hypotheses that younger managers and those with less experience are more likely to alter their strategies with changing environmental conditions.     

The perception of kosher as a third party certification claim in advertising for familiar and unfamiliar brands

This study was undertaken to investigate the inclusion of a kosher claim in an advertisement for a familiar and unfamiliar brand of breakfast cereal. Results showed that, as hypothesized, for the familiar brand a kosher third party endorsement led to significantly more kosher attribute-related thoughts, more favorable product attitude and greater purchase intention. For the unfamiliar brand, no significant impact upon these dependent measures was observed given a kosher endorsement. Findings are interpreted from a cognitive perspective regarding the salience of the kosher attribute in a product familiarity context. Managerial implications are discussed.     

Do Gold Market Returns Have Long Memory?

This study examines the long memory behavior in gold returns during the post-Bretton Woods period using a new rescaled range technique. Unlike the conventional rescaled range analysis, the new rescaled range analysis is robust to short-term dependence and conditional heteroscedasticity found in the gold data. Statistical results suggest that the long memory behavior in gold returns is rather unstable. When only few observations corresponding to major political events in the Middle East, together with the Hunts event, in late 1979 are omitted, little evidence of long memory can be found.     

Duration and the price behavior of fixed-rate level payment mortgages: An analytical investigation

In this research we use a continuous payment formula for duration to examine the price behavior of a fixed-rate level payment mortgage. In the case where the mortgage is held to maturity, duration increases monotonically as term-to-maturity increases, regardless of changes in the market rate of interest. In the case where the mortgage is prepaid prior to maturity, there exists a unique market interest rate below which duration is a monotonically increasing function of time of prepayment, but above which duration has a global maximum at some time of prepayment prior to the term-to-maturity.     

An empirical analysis of bank interest rate swaps

Considering the characteristics of banks that do and do not report interest rate swaps, the long-term interest rate exposure of a bank and the likelihood and extent of swap market participation are found to be positively related. Key to the finding is the inclusion of variables related to the provision of swap market intermediary services, which significantly explain both the likelihood of swap market participation and the notional value of outstanding swaps. The results suggest that the likelihood and extent of swap market participation by low-capitalized banks is less than for other banks.     

Adjustment costs and time-to-build in factor demand in the U.S. manufacturing industry

In order to explain cyclical behavior of factor demand, the static neoclassical model of the firm has been extended to include either adjustment costs (e.g. Lucas (1967)) or time-to-build considerations as in Kydland and Prescott (1982). This paper presents an intertemporal factor demand model which accounts for adjustment costs and gestation lags. The closed form solution of the model is a highly restricted vector ARMA-process that is estimated using quarterly data for the manufacturing industry in the U.S., 1960–1988. The main conclusion is that both sources of dynamics of factor demand are identifiable and found to be empirically of importance.     

Environmental uncertainty and environmental scanning activities of nigerian manufacturing executives: A comparative analysis

This study investigated the relationship between perception of environmental uncertainty (PEU) and environmental scanning behavior of Chief Executive Officers of 47 manufacturing firms in Nigeria. The results indicated that perceived uncertainty in the environment was significantly higher for the task environment sectors than for the remote environment sectors; and as perceived uncertainty increased in a sector of the environment, scanning frequency and scanning interests also increased. The results were compared with those of prior research in the area of environmental scanning. The results show both the economic and political legal sectors of the environment to be more salient for Nigerian manufacturing executives than for their American counterparts.     

Cultural influences on the design of incentive systems: The case of East Asia

Arguing that culture moderates the potency of various incentives in motivating employees, we propose a culture-contingent model of incentive system design in this article. Four nation-level determinants of culture are identified: historical events, economic/political structure, geographical location, and language characteristics. Based on evidence found in East Asia, specific propositions that either relate a national characteristic to some cultural attributes or predict how a cultural characteristic favours a particular type of incentive system are generated. The implications of this culture-contingent model for incentive system design in multinational firms are discussed.We would like to thank Donna Randall for her helpful comments on an earlier draft.