Facts-up-front: should food companies follow the FDA or industry label format? The effects of combining virtue and vice information on consumer evaluations

This research examines consumers’ processing of Facts-up-front food labels as implemented by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA). Facts-up-front labels include both positive (virtues) and negative (vices) nutritional icons. The processing and relative efficacy of Facts-up-front labels are compared to the original FDA proposal of front-of-pack labels which only included vices. The results suggest heuristic processing of these labels, whereby consumers consider the nutritional icons on the front-of-pack labels similar to affective stimuli. The addition of virtues alongside vices on the label has a compensatory effect, i.e., the food item is evaluated as healthier when there are both virtues and vices on the label compared to when there are only vices. Such heuristic processing of Facts-up-front labels that allows nutritional virtues to compensate for nutritional vices has the potential for consumers evaluating harmful foods as relatively “healthy” thus compromising consumer well-being. These findings illustrate the importance of empirically testing changes to nutritional labels before large scale implementation. Since consumers process front-of-pack labels heuristically and not cognitively, it is not surprising that nutritional literacy does not moderate the effects of label design on healthiness evaluations. Furthermore, the order of the negative and positive information on Facts-up-front labels also has no effect.

     

Earnings Management by Non‐profit Organisations: Evidence from UK Charities

Informed by stakeholder theory and resource dependence theory, this paper investigates whether UK charities are engaged in earnings management practices. Based on a sample of 1414 charities over a five‐year period (2008–2012) the study firstly finds that UK charities use discretionary accruals to drive their financial results towards a zero surplus/deficit; this result also reveals that the distribution of reported earnings around zero is prevalent amongst UK charities. In addition, in contrast to prior findings, the empirical results point to a significant association between leverage and earnings management behaviour by charities. Lastly, this study finds that the practice of earnings management is influenced by non‐profit organisational size.     

A semantic similarity analysis of Internet of Things

ABSTRACT

Internet of Things (IoT) has gradually become one of the most popular topics among both academia and industry, and it is considered as a crucial part of future Internet. However, very few objective and systematic review was conducted to address high-value articles and summarize the intellectual components from journals for examination and identification of the intellectual core and structure of IoT. Therefore, this study conducted a co-citation analysis for IoT by using 68 high-value articles retrieved within 1457 source papers from Web of Science online database. By using factor analysis, ten critical factors were identified, which includes (1) frameworks and challenges of IoT; (2) current situation of IoT in different applications; (3) interactions of IoT; (4) security issues of IoT; (5) application domains of IoT; (6) data management of IoT; (7) IoT in product lifecycle management; (8) enabling technologies of IoT; (9) IoT in smart cities; (10) IoT in recommender systems. Hierarchical Custer Analysis and Multidimensional Scaling were used to graphically illustrate the intellectual elements of IoT. In the current findings, fundamental elements of IoT including architectural framework, enabling technologies, network communication, data management, and IoT interactions were discussed with a series of challenges for wider and deeper IoT applications.     

Does SEC FRR No. 48 disclosure communicate risk management effectiveness?

We hypothesize that the quality of market risk disclosure mandated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Financial Reporting Release No. 48 (FRR No. 48) provides useful information for assessing risk management effectiveness. Measuring risk disclosure quality as the degree of modification, we find that higher-than-expected disclosure modification is associated with lower future cash flow volatility. On average, an increase in risk disclosure modification from the lowest to the highest decile is associated with a 5.34 percent decrease in cash flow volatility. Given the significant impact of cash flow volatility on firm value and capital investment, our results highlight the importance of market risk disclosures and should be of interest to investors and analysts.     

Cross‐sectional determinants of post‐IPO stock performance: evidence from China

This paper examines the cross‐sectional determinants of post‐IPO long‐term stock returns in China. We document that the aftermarket P/E ratio has the most robust negative association with post‐IPO stock returns. The negative relation indicates that the market corrects the aftermarket overvaluation of IPO firms in the long run. Underwriter reputation has a positive effect on post‐IPO stock returns, while board size has a negative impact, consistent with the views that reputable underwriters mitigate the information asymmetry in IPO pricing and over‐sized boards reduce the effectiveness of corporate governance. However, we find little evidence indicating that the equity ownership structure is significantly associated with post‐IPO stock returns.     

Hedging with mismatched currencies

This article presents a model of a risk-averse multinational firm facing risk exposure to a foreign currency cash flow. Forward markets do not exist between the firm's own currency and the foreign currency, but do exist for a third currency. Because a triangular parity condition holds among these three currencies, the available forward markets, albeit incomplete, provide a useful avenue for the firm to indirectly hedge against its foreign exchange rate risk exposure. This article offers analytical insights into the optimal cross-hedging strategies of the firm. In particular, the results show that separate unbiasedness of the forward markets does not necessarily imply a perfect full hedge that eliminates the entire foreign exchange rate risk exposure of the firm. The optimal cross-hedging strategies depend largely on the firm's marginal utility function and on the correlation of the random spot exchange rates. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19:859–875, 1999     

浙江省城镇土地分等地域分界特征研究

城镇土地质量差异不仅存在于城镇内部。而且在城镇之间也有明显反映.本文以定量分析方法．探讨浙江省城镇土地分等地域分异规律。将浙江省城镇土地划分为五个等级、为政府制定有关地价宏观调控政策提供基础依据。     

Hedging and the competitive firm under correlated price and background risk

This paper examines the behavior of the competitive firm under correlated price and background risk when a futures market exists for hedging purposes. We show that imposing the background risk, be it additive or multiplicative, on the firm has no effect on the separation theorem. The full-hedging theorem, however, holds if the background risk is independent of the price risk. In the general case of the correlated price and background risk, we adopt the concept of expectation dependence to describe the bivariate dependence structure. When the background risk is additive, the firm finds it optimal to opt for an over-hedge or an under-hedge, depending on whether the price risk is positively or negatively expectation dependent on the background risk, respectively. When the background risk is multiplicative, both the concept of expectation dependence and the Arrow–Pratt measure of relative risk aversion are called for to determine the firm’s optimal futures position.