Firm-hosted online brand communities and new product success

Many firms use online brand communities to support the launch of their new products. This study proposes a typology of firm-hosted online brand communities and examines whether such a classification system can improve predictions of new product success. A cross-industry analysis of 81 firm-hosted online brand communities shows that these communities reflect three archetypes. A subsequent survey of 170 community-hosting firms in the consumer durable goods industry reveals that the three types of communities are not equally important for new product success. Moreover, one archetype generally underperforms the other two as a new product support mechanism. Overall, the results demonstrate that firm-hosted online brand communities can be a predictor of new product success.     

The gains from variety in the European Union

Over the last decade, European Union members have experienced a steady increase in imports. This increase was accompanied by a strong growth in the number of imported goods and trading partners, suggesting positive welfare gains for consumers via an extended set of consumption possibilities, as pointed out in the ??New Trade Theory??. In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Feenstra (Am Econ Rev 84(1):157?C177, 1994) and Broda and Weinstein (Q J Econ 121(2):541?C585, 2006) to structurally estimate the gains from imported variety for the 27 countries of the European Union using highly disaggregated trade data at the CN-8 level from Eurostat for the period from 1999 to 2008. Our results show that, within the European Union, especially ??newer?? and smaller member states exhibit high gains from newly imported varieties. Furthermore, we find that the majority of the gains from variety for consumers stems from intra-European Union trade.     

Investor sentiment in the US-dollar: Longer-term,non-linear orientation on PPP

How is it possible that exchange rates move in the long run towards fundamentals, while professionals form consistently irrational exchange rate expectations? We look at this puzzle from a different perspective by analyzing investor sentiment in the US-dollar market. First, long-horizon regressions show that investor sentiment is connected with exchange rate returns at longer horizons, i.e. more than two years. Second, sentiment is cointegrated with fundamentals, whereas third, this relation becomes stronger, the larger exchange rate's misalignment from long-run PPP. In sum, investor sentiment's behavior in the US-dollar market closely matches with established facts of empirical exchange rate research.     

The market price of fiscal uncertainty

Recent fiscal interventions have raised concerns about US public debt, future distortionary tax pressure, and long-run growth potential. We explore the long-run implications of public financing policies aimed at short-run stabilization when: (i) agents are sensitive to model uncertainty, as in Hansen and Sargent (2007), and (ii) growth is endogenous, as in Romer (1990). We find that countercyclical deficit policies promoting short-run stabilization reduce the price of model uncertainty at the cost of significantly increasing the amount of long-run risk. Ultimately these tax policies depress innovation and long-run growth and may produce welfare losses.     

Whose trades convey information? Evidence from a cross-section of traders

This paper contributes empirically to our understanding of informed traders. It analyzes traders’ characteristics in a foreign exchange electronic limit order market via anonymous trader identities. We use six indicators of informed trading in a cross-sectional multivariate approach to identify traders with high price impact. More information is conveyed by those traders’ trades which—simultaneously—use medium-sized orders (practice stealth trading), have large trading volume, are located in a financial center, trade early in the trading session, at times of wide spreads and when the order book is thin.     

Implementing Fischer Black's Simple Discounting Rule

Corporate managers typically estimate the value of capital projects by discounting the project's expected future net cash flows at the cost of capital. The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is generally used to estimate that cost. But, as anyone who has worked on the finance or business development staff of a public company can attest, there are major challenges in applying the CAPM, including largely unresolved questions about what constitutes the “market portfolio,” how to estimate market risk premiums, and how to estimate the betas of projects. In a short article published in Financial Management in 1988, Fischer Black proposed a valuation “discounting rule” that avoids all these problems—one that involves discounting a relatively certain (as opposed to an expected or average) level of operating cash flows at the risk-free rate. But Black's article does not address the question of how to calculate these “certainty equivalent” or “conditional” cash flows. In this article, the authors propose a way of implementing Black's rule that involves estimating the “conditional” cash flows in a three-step procedure:

• • Find a benchmark security that correlates with the project's cash flows;
• • Estimate the percentiles of the distribution in which the benchmark return equals the risk-free rate over different investment horizons;
• • Use information from corporate managers to assess the cash flows that define the same percentiles in the cash flow distributions.

As the authors point out, the virtue of Black's rule is that it shifts the focus of the analyst away from the assessment of discount factors and puts it squarely on the more challenging, and arguably more relevant, problem of estimating the project's cash flows.     

Der antizyklische Kapitalpuffer: Reformoptionen

Wirtschaftsdienst - Der antizyklische Eigenkapitalpuffer, dessen Anforderung Kreditinstitute erfüllen müssen, soll die Widerstandskraft des Bankensystems stärken und dadurch die...     

Team formation processes in new ventures

While entrepreneurship research theorizing about the team formation in start-up ventures exists, such studies mostly focus on different outcomes of team formation, for example the number of employees. Questions about how team formation processes unfold and the factors, such as labor-market institutions, influencing their evolvement remain unanswered. To address this research gap, we analyze the venture creation processes of 344 ventures in Germany and the USA, offering particularly typical examples of countries with regulated and deregulated labor-market institutions respectively. Based on optimal matching techniques, we illustrate how team formation processes differ over time in terms of founder and employee involvement and the hiring of service providers. Furthermore, we use binary logistic regressions to identify the extent to which national labor-market institutions account for these differences.     

Der US-Dollar als Leitwährung – alternativlos?

The importance of the industrialized countries – including the USA – for world production has been declining for a long time. By contrast, China’s share in particular has increased significantly. Nevertheless, the US dollar has largely fulfilled the criteria for a leading currency function so far, even if this is increasingly criticised due to the protectionist rhetoric of the US. Accordingly, central banks worldwide hold their reserves primarily in US dollars and transactions are largely conducted in US currency. This position brings great advantages–such as making it easier for the US to monitor and enforce sanctions, among other things–and therefore great incentives for the US to maintain its position as the leading currency. Whether other currencies, especially the renminbi, will be able to fulfil the lead currency function is questionable. Similarly, it does not seem realistic that market participants will be able to engage in a global currency.     

Do the COVID-19 Crisis,Ageing and Climate Change Put Swiss Fiscal Sustainability at Risk?

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic crisis as well as demographic and climate change pose major challenges for public finances. This article deals with the implications of demographic trends in Switzerland, i.e. the progressive ageing of the population and its impact on the country’s public finances in the long run. As the analysis shows, the brunt of the demographic burden is borne by the old-age pension scheme, health and long-term care. This article also addresses the financial ramifications of the COVID-19 crisis and shows the need for economic policy action over the longer term to ensure the sustainability of public finances in Switzerland. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment of climate change is included, as it constitutes an additional major long-term challenge for public finances.