Beer Uses and Attitudes in the Craft Era

Abstract

This article aims to address the shifts in uses and attitudes in the era of craft beer’s growth in the United States, where brand loyalty has diminished in importance; whereas the need for exploration and trial has increased in importance. These changes have implored a need for craft beer marketers to change tactics in regards to how customers learn about new beers to try, the most trusted sources and influencers of beer choice, and how to build loyalty in an increasingly brand dis-loyal customer. The gap in research being addressed is seeking to find the pathway from how traditional beer marketers have grown brands and loyal customers to where we are today, where the customer is increasingly fickle, enjoys the newness that comes from shifting loyalties, and tends to reject brands that become too strong in this arena.     

Financial development and top income shares in OECD countries

We examine the causal impact of financial development (FD) on top income shares for a panel of 14 OECD countries—five Anglo‐Saxon countries, eight continental European countries, and Japan—over a 110‐year period. In our main General Method of Moments estimates, we find that a 1‐percentage‐point change in FD increases the top 1% income share by 0.2%. In distribution terms, a 1‐SD incr=ease in FD increases the top 1% income share by around 0.4 of an SD. The effects are robust to various measures of top income shares and FD and alternative estimation techniques, including nonparametric estimation. FD is typically viewed in positive terms in that it makes it easier to access credit and facilitates economic growth. Our results are important because they contribute to understanding of the potential negative effects of FD.     

Charitable bequest importance among donors to different types of charities

This paper explores differences in the self‐rated importance of charitable estate giving depending upon the type of charitable cause a person donates to during life. One theoretical motivation for lifetime giving is to personally enjoy benefits from improving a shared collective good. However, this motivation is not possible for bequests. Bequest transfers and resulting improvements occur after personal enjoyment of benefits is no longer possible. This paper hypothesizes that among donors to high personal benefit causes (those typically creating shared goods benefitting donors), interest in a charitable bequest (which offers no opportunity for receiving such benefits) will be relatively less than among donors to low personal benefit causes. In order to explore this, each charity type is categorized as providing high, low, or mixed personal benefits from shared collective goods. This hypothesis receives mixed support. Donors to international relief organizations, a low personal benefit charity type, do place a higher importance on charitable bequests than do donors to shared‐goods type causes such as neighborhood associations, service clubs, sports leagues, or “other” charities, including those focused on local public safety and crime. However, donors to arts organizations—a classic example of donors creating a shared good—have a relatively high interest in charitable bequests. One important exception to the exclusion of postmortem personal benefits could come from religious belief. Accordingly, donors to religious causes do place a higher importance on charitable bequests.     

The intersection of entrepreneurship and selling: An interdisciplinary review,framework, and future research agenda

Selling is integral to entrepreneurship, yet it has rarely been a focal topic of analysis for entrepreneurship scholars. To address this, we undertake a broad-ranging systematic literature review of research that in some way explores selling within entrepreneurial contexts. We inductively develop a framework that orders extant research into selling antecedents, activities, contexts, and outcomes. Then, drawing on these entrepreneurship-selling intersections, we suggest opportunity theory can be extended by integrating critical insights from selling literatures. In particular, we address ego-centric views of entrepreneurship which prioritize entrepreneurial agency, and advocate for the incorporation of customer agency into synchronized processes of opportunity identification, refinement, and exploitation. The article concludes that a promising avenue for future theory development resides in the study of situated sales interactions, which can serve as an empirical vista to the underexplored entrepreneur-customer nexus.     

Minority owned banks and efficiency revisited

U.S. Government support for minority owned banks (MOBs) dates to the late 1960s. Evidence through the early 1990s suggested these banks are relatively inefficient. This study updates that research, using Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and panel data from 2003 to 2014 on minority owned banks and other banks. It is, as far as we know, the first such study to exclude outliers in SFA estimation, while recovering the outliers for efficiency estimation. Initial results identify a disruption in cost efficiency during 2008, with statistically distinct regimes for 2003–2007 and 2009–2014. Including recovered observations alters the patterns of MOB efficiency in significant ways, and leads us to conclude that current MOB inefficiency is mainly limited to Asian American owned and Multi-racial and minority serving banks. Tests for the effects of government deposits under a U.S. Treasury program suggest these did not adversely effect efficiency among covered MOBs, but may have improved survival rates for those MOBs subsequent to the financial collapse.     

Hedging of Asian options under exponential Lévy models: computation and performance

In this paper we consider the problem of hedging an arithmetic Asian option with discrete monitoring in an exponential Lévy model by deriving backward recursive integrals for the price sensitivities of the option. The procedure is applied to the analysis of the performance of the delta and delta–gamma hedges in an incomplete market; particular attention is paid to the hedging error and the impact of model error on the quality of the chosen hedging strategy. The numerical analysis shows the impact of jump risk on the hedging error of the option position, and the importance of including traded options in the hedging portfolio for the reduction of this risk.     

Eye-tracking evidence that happy faces impair verbal message comprehension: the case of health warnings in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical television commercials

Risk warning or disclosure information in advertising is only effective in correcting consumers’ judgments if enough cognitive capacity is available to process that information. Hence, comprehension of verbal warnings in TV commercials may suffer if accompanied by positive visual elements. This research addresses this concern about cross-modality interference in the context of direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical commercials in the United States by experimentally testing whether positive facial expressions reduce consumers’ understanding of the mandated health warning. A content analysis of a sample of DTC commercials reveals that positive facial expressions are more prevalent during the verbal warning act of the commercials than during the other acts. An eye-tracking experiment conducted with specially produced DTC commercials, which vary the valence of characters’ facial expressions during the health warning, provides evidence that happy faces reduce objective comprehension of the warning.     

How does a Change in the Excise Tax on Beer Impact Beer Retail Prices in South Africa?

This article uses price data, collected by Statistics South Africa, to estimate the effect of a change in the excise tax on the retail price of beer. We find strong evidence that the excise tax on beer is overshifted to consumers. The pass‐through coefficient is estimated at 4.83 (95% CI: 4.02; 5.64) for lager, and at 4.77 (95% CI: 4.04; 5.50) for all beer (which includes dark beer). This implies that for every R1/unit increase in the excise tax, the retail price increases by about R4.80/unit. Of the 23 brand‐packaging combinations considered, the pass‐through coefficients vary between 2.39 and 10.05 (median = 5.30). The majority of the price change in response to a tax change occurs immediately, and prices have fully adjusted two months after the excise tax increase becomes effective. Pass‐through differs substantially across packaging types. The pass‐through coefficient on 750 ml bottles is substantially lower than that of 330 ml (or 340 ml) cans and 6 × 330 ml (or 6 × 340 ml) “six‐packs.” The overshifting of the excise tax has positive implications for public health policy, since they increase the effectiveness of alcohol taxes as a tool to reduce the (excessive) consumption of beer.     

Spinoffs and clustering

Geographic clustering of innovative industries is associated with the entry and success of spinoff firms. We develop a model to explain the multiple empirical patterns regarding cluster growth and spinoff formation and performance, without relying on agglomeration externalities. Clustering naturally follows from spinoffs locating near their parents. In our model, firms grow and spinoffs form through the discovery of new submarkets based on innovation. Rapid and successful innovation creates more opportunities for spinoff entry and drives a region's growth. Our model provides baseline estimates of levels of agglomeration that can be attributed to this process of innovation and spinoff formation.     

Taking a Second Look in a Warped Crystal Ball: Explaining the Accuracy of Revised Forecasts

The fundamental questions we address are whether firms with a higher initial forecasting ability are able to accurately revise the exit forecasts of their investments; and how co‐investment partners and value‐adding commitment with their investment influence the main effect. We explore these questions with novel and unique data collected via mixed research methods on venture capital firms’ forecasts of 114 portfolio companies. We find that venture capital firms that are better at making initial forecasts are less effective in revising their forecasts. In addition, while the number of co‐investment partners positively moderate this relationship, venture capital firms’ value‐adding commitment moderates it negatively. Our findings contribute to the literature on organizational forecasting as well as inter‐organizational knowledge transfer and knowledge creation. They also provide novel insights into venture capital literature and practice.