Learning to fail: resilience and the empty promise of financial literacy education

The requirement to build economic resilience in people has become a concern for the UK Government, regulators, and the financial services industry. Transposed to the realm of financial literacy education (FLE), the resilience doctrine performs particular effects in relation to the naturalisation and individualisation of financial market relations. At the same time, it tends to speak of the inevitability of market failures and crashes. I argue that based on these features, the effect of the resilience doctrine is to mask the “empty promise” of FLE programmes: the irreconcilable gap between the empowerment discourse surrounding what such agendas are meant to achieve for ordinary people and the latter's actual success in securing their security and well-being through financial markets. The paradoxical element of resilience talk is that it at once serves to further legitimise financial education attempts, while providing an opportune reason for failures judged even on its own terms.     

Public transit and air pollution: Evidence from Canadian transit strikes

Little is known about the causal impacts of public transit on local air pollution. Exploiting variation in transit availability resulting from transit strikes in 18 Canadian cities between 1974 and 2011, this study identifies the short-run effect of public transit on air pollution. Our findings indicate that transit leads to a 3.5 part per billion increase in nitrogen oxides while having no statistically significant effect on carbon monoxide or PM_2.5. Estimates are robust to a series of specification tests and magnitudes are consistent with a calibrated simulation model. Overall, the results suggest that expanding the current configuration of public transit in North American cities is unlikely to yield improvements in local air quality.     

Testing the effectiveness of the proposed UK ‘competition test’

An ongoing inquiry by the UK Competition Commission (CC) – the Groceries Inquiry – has covered supplier relationships, landholdings and, controversially, the topic of planning regulations. The latter lies within the remit of the Department for Communities and Local Government. Accordingly, Competition issues now intrude directly into planning since the identity – fascia – of a proposed retailer taking a new development had previously been disregarded. The CC has produced a set of guidelines to show how a proposed fascia test might be operationalised. Applying them to hypothesised store locations we find that most pass the test: an outcome that carries interesting political ramifications.     

'One brand,three ways to shop': situational variables and multichannel consumer behaviour

To counter the growth in online retailing, high street retailers are increasingly adopting multichannel distribution strategies, seeking to target individual consumers via both physical and electronic channels as multiple routes to purchase. In order to develop successful marketing strategies within this environment, however, an understanding of consumer selection between available purchase channels is clearly needed. This paper explores the issue of shopping mode selection from an environmental psychology perspective, applying a traditional Belkian analysis of situational variables in a longitudinal study of consumer channel selection decisions. Preliminary findings from an empirical study of consumers of a leading UK fashion retailer are reported which reveal significant differences in the prevalence of different Belkian variables between shopping modes, suggesting a major role for situational influence during the channel selection process.     

Effect of Event Service Quality and Satisfaction on Happiness Among Runners of a Recurring Sport Event

The consumption of sport events through direct participation can influence participants’ perception of happiness with that experiential purchase given the time and resources invested in that experience. The purpose of the study was to examine how sport event service quality aspects operationalized through the physical environment, interaction, and outcome factors influence overall satisfaction with the event and experiential happiness. Data were collected from 300 runners who participated in 5k and 10k races. Structural equation modeling analysis revealed the positive effect of outcome and physical environment factors on satisfaction with the event and the positive influence of event satisfaction and outcome quality on experiential happiness. The overall expectations on the quality of the event experience can be a focus for event managers aiming to achieve social marketing goals related to positive psychology from the event participation.     

New Evidence on Psychology and Stock Returns

This article provides econometric evidence on the importance of psychological considerations for aggregate stock price fluctuations. To this end, a novel measure of stock market sentiment, dubbed the Net Psychology Index (NPI), based on information contained in Bloomberg News's end-of-the-day stock market reports, is confronted with a battery of multivariate empirical analyses. Results suggest that NPI is statistically different from popular sentiment proxies within the literature. NPI exhibits predictive power, increasing stock returns in the short run with this impact dissipating in the medium term. NPI does not exhibit asymmetric effects on returns for size- and momentum-related portfolios. A trading strategy based on NPI generates a statistically significant positive monthly return. Recursive out-of-sample fit analyses report a lower standard deviation of forecasting errors for NPI-based returns models versus competing accounts.