Measuring National Tourism Organization Abroad Office Competitiveness

Measuring national tourism organization (NTO) abroad office competitiveness is crucial because of the hypercompetitive international tourism market. This study used focus group interviews and snowball sampling techniques to identify and apply competitiveness measurement criteria. An analytic hierarchy process model was then used to evaluate the weights of the criteria. Finally, this study examined and identified the overall global‐competitiveness scores of different types of NTO abroad offices in Taiwan. The results contribute to a comprehensive and systematic framework of competitiveness measurement for different types of NTO abroad offices in an international, politically sensitive environment and their competitive performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Love and Satisfaction Drive Persistent Stickiness: Investigating International Tourist Hotel Brands

Switching resistance loyalty manifests in persistent stickiness to the incumbent brand as the sole choice in the presence of other attractive alternatives. Empirically, it is the crucial determinant of retaining customers for long duration. However, specific drivers of such loyalty in the hospitality and tourism brand categories are still unclear. The current study, integrating the brand love and customer satisfaction paradigms, addresses this issue with a focus on international tourist hotel brands. Brand love proves to be a powerful driver of switching resistance loyalty toward the hotel brand. Noteworthy, overall customer satisfaction serves to reinforce the loyalty‐driving effect of brand love. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Health Care Competition and Antibiotic Use in Taiwan

Antibiotic resistance, a negative externality of antibiotic use, is a growing threat to public health. Health care competition may encourage antibiotic use because receiving an antibiotic is a form of ‘quality’ for many patients. This paper examines the effect of market concentration on antibiotic use in a large, nationally‐representative data set from Taiwan. Moving from the 75th percentile to the 25th percentile of market concentration is associated with 6.6 per cent greater antibiotic use. We control for leading market‐level confounds, including population density and community health. We also show that the correlation is robust using fixed effects for patients, physicians and diagnoses. We document the correlation between antibiotic use and patient retention, which suggests a mechanism for this result. Finally, we show that strict regulation of antibiotics reduces but does not eliminate the effect of competition on antibiotic use.     

The contingent value of firm innovativeness for business performance under environmental turbulence

Drawing on the resource-based view and contingency theory, this study investigates how technological and market turbulence influence the effect of firm innovativeness on business performance. Using a survey-based sample of 452 Taiwanese manufacturing firms in a broad range of industries, we employ a hierarchical moderated regression analysis to test two-way interaction hypotheses. The results show that technological turbulence enhances the positive effect of firm innovativeness on business performance but that market turbulence does not. The post hoc analysis indicates that when technological turbulence is high, firm innovativeness has a more positive effect on business performance. An additional sub-group analysis reveals that the positive moderating influence of market turbulence manifests only in the high-technology sub-sample. Our findings suggest that managers of manufacturing firms should nurture high levels of innovativeness to help their firms to thrive under high technological turbulence. This study contributes to the firm innovativeness literature by clarifying the boundary conditions under which firm innovativeness enhances business performance. Contrasting with previous research, our research demonstrates that the performance effect of firm innovativeness is not equally positive but instead increases with the level of technological turbulence. We shed new light on the crucial role of firm innovativeness in an environmental of high technological turbulence.     

Investigating parental intention of using internet filter software

The objective of this study is to survey the usage of internet filter software for blocking inappropriate web contents in Taiwan, and also to investigate the precedent factors for adopting such a prevention tool. We surveyed 417 households with children/adolescents (aged below 16) and home internet access. Participants answered questions which were designed based on the framework of the decomposed theory of planned behavior. The structural equation model was implemented to find out the relationships among constructs. Results show that only one in seven families currently uses internet filter software for blocking inappropriate web contents in Taiwan. Furthermore, this study also shows that attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control are all key factors to affect parental intention of adopting internet filter software. More specifically, compatibility, peer’s influence, self-efficacy, and facilitating conditions are four major precedent variables to influence parental intention via attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control. Results obtained in this study suggest the urgency of prompting the use of filter software especially when no similar alternatives are available in the market. In addition, focusing on the promotion of product’s compatible features, the use of teachers’ opinions, and the establishment of supporting resources will highly increase parental intention of using internet filter software.     

Reputation versus information: The delegation policy when the principal has reputational concerns

We analyze the delegation policy when the principal has reputational concerns. Both the principal and the agent can be either good or biased; the good players prefer the correct decision, while the biased ones prefer a high action even though it may be wrong. An evaluator who forms the principal's reputation may or may not be able to observe who makes the decision. When the evaluator cannot observe the allocation of authority, the principal shares the credit and blame with the agent. Although delegation can improve the quality of decision making because the agent has better information, it may also hurt the good principal's reputation because the high action may be taken by the biased agent while the blame will be shared when it is wrong. Thus, the good principal has a tendency to keep too much authority to maintain her reputation. By contrast, when the evaluator can observe the allocation of authority, delegation becomes a signaling device for the good type of principal to differentiate herself from the biased one. This results in an excessive allocation of authority toward the agent.     

Mandatory Retirement and Older Worker Employment Decisions: Evidence from a Matched Difference‐in‐Differences Estimator

In 2008, the minimum age at which private‐sector workers in Taiwan could be forced by their employers to retire from their jobs was raised from 60 to 65 years. In this study, we evaluate the effects of the increase in the mandatory retirement age on the labour supply trend among the elderly using a nationally‐representative Taiwanese panel data set. Based upon the application of a combination of matching and difference‐in‐differences approaches, we find that postponing mandatory retirement has a significant effect, in terms of slowing down the withdrawal of the elderly from the labour force. Among elderly workers affected by the 2008 amendment, particularly those retiring from the public sector, the likelihood of re‐entering the labour market is found to be 3 to 4% higher than that for their counterparts who were not subject to such a constraint, a finding that clearly suggests that an increase in the mandatory retirement age helps to alleviate the problems associated with an aging population in countries where long‐term labour contracts are prevalent.     

New Evidence of Interest Rate Pass-through in Taiwan: A Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model

We adopt the newly developed nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model, advanced by Shin, Yu and Greenwood-Nimmo [(2014) Modelling asymmetric cointegration and dynamic multipliers in a nonlinear ARDL framework, in: Festschrift in Honor of Peter Schmidt, pp. 281–314 (New York: Springer)], to investigate the interest rate(IR) pass-through (IRPT) mechanism in Taiwan from 1971 M07 to 2014 M11. We find that the incomplete IRPT mechanism of deposit markets shows an asymmetric adjustment in the short run and symmetric adjustments in the long run. The deposit rate is rigid downward, which supports the customer reaction hypothesis. Moreover, we find that both the short-run and the long-run IRPT channels from the policy rate to the lending rate are also incomplete in the short run but not in the long run. The purpose of this paper is to provide accurate assessment criteria for the central bank to understand the nonlinear dynamics among the policy IR and the retail IR, thus leading to more efficient policy-making and forecasting for the Taiwanese government.     

Group heterogeneity and the economic effect of farmer organisation participation: Empirical evidence from Taiwan

We explore the effects of different farmer organisations on smallholder farmers' economic performance. The average treatment effect of switching between different farmer organisations is examined. In addition, based on the premise that a higher level of social capital is accumulated through participation in multiple farmer organisations, we also investigate how the economic consequences of farmer organisation membership vary with the intensity of participation. Our conceptual model explicitly includes social capital to provide a micro-foundation and a theoretical justification for the linkage between farmer organisation participation and the economic outcome. This indicates that participating in different types of farmer organisations is beneficial for farm households only when the returns from social capital investment outweigh the time cost of participation. Our empirical results suggest that membership of farmer organisations that are more homogeneous in terms of member specialty and similarity in production and marketing activities results in a significant increase in farm sales revenue and net returns. This result supports the view that technological proximity accentuates knowledge spillovers within the farmer organisations, and thus leads to better economic outcomes. In line with the prediction of the theoretical model, the average treatment effect of participation is found to increase with the number of organisations that farmers belong to. Moreover, results from the quantile regression provide empirical evidence supporting increasing returns to social capital accumulated through participation in several farmer organisations.     

Immigration and inequality: Analysis of Mainland Chinese spouses during the early stages of their time in Taiwan

In this study on Mainland Chinese women in Taiwan, I examined the effect of immigration-related disruption on the assimilation of these women into the Taiwanese labour market during 2005–2015. Accordingly, I used a unique dataset obtained by linking three administrative registers to measure the assimilation process. In addition, I employed the nearest-neighbour matching estimator to assess heterogeneous effects on each Mainland Chinese woman. The results indicated narrowing immigrant–native gaps in labour supply (full-time employment rates) and real monthly insured wages for their first traceable job in favour of Mainland Chinese women. In general, I found that Mainland Chinese women assimilated into the Taiwanese workforce at levels comparable with those of Taiwanese women.