Foreign Institutional Investment,Ownership, and Liquidity: Real and Informational Frictions

The literature widely documents the negative liquidity impact of foreign participation in firms that permit high foreign institutional ownership. This paper employs a unique setting for the limited participation of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIIs) in China's A-share market and examines how this impacts on stock liquidity in emerging markets. Contrary to the findings in the literature, foreign investor participation helps enhance the liquidity of affected stocks by promoting trade activities and price discovery. The improvement in liquidity does not occur through the information friction channel, but rather the real friction channel. Our results are robust to endogeneity issue and the possible influence of the global financial crisis, industry effects and the stock exchange. Further, the liquidity improving effects of QFII are even stronger when the analysis is performed on a subsample of QFII firms.     

Price Knowledge During Grocery Shopping: What We Learn and What We Forget

Past research on consumer price knowledge has varied considerably partly due to differences in how and when price knowledge is measured. This paper applies a multi-point, multi-measure approach to reconcile differences in past price knowledge research by examining systematic relationships between time of measurement and type of measures applied. Examination of consumer price knowledge before, during, and after store visit sheds light on what is measured at the individual points in time: episodic price knowledge and/or reference prices? With a between-subjects design interviewing 1,204 respondents, the authors investigate three price knowledge measures (price recall, price recognition, and deal spotting) demonstrating that these are hierarchically related. Results suggest that reference prices dominate before store visit, but also that episodic price knowledge, surprisingly, is still accessible at the store exit. These findings enable the authors to reconcile diverging results from past research, showing how consumer price knowledge evolves and suggesting that the vast majority of consumers learn about prices, whether consciously or unconsciously, during grocery shopping. Thus, when applying a multi-point, multi-measure approach, consumers appear to know more about prices than suggested by past research. Determinants of price knowledge are also examined and the results indicate that price knowledge builds up not only because of active search but also due to accidental exposure to prices and with low degrees of conscious processing. Implications for managers are discussed.     

Born globals: Propositions to help advance the theory

Although born globals (BGs) have now been studied for over a decade, theory and practice are still evolving. This article was written to clarify the definition of a Born Global (BG) firm and to describe the three phases—introductory, growth and resource accumulation, and break-out to independent growth as a major player—through which BGs progress. Drawing from empirical evidence, it was found that the risks, resource development, channels/networks and organisational learning of BGs develop during the three phases through which successful BGs pass. However, this process deviates considerably from that followed by traditional internationalising small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Born Global entrepreneurs and academics can learn much by studying the causes of these differences.     

Über mechanische Ausgleichung

Wenn die Meinungen der Mathernatiker über den Wert uad die Anwendbarkeit der mechanischen Ausgleichung immer noch so sehr auseinandergehen wie es wirklich der Fall zu sein scheint, so dürfte dies wohl zum grossen Teil darauf zurückzuführen sein, dass die ganze Frage Vom rein theoretischen Staridpunkte aus trotz allem vielleicht immer noch nicht genügend beleuchtet worden ist.     

Occupational assignment,hiring discrimination,and the gender pay gap

An identified, structural demand-wage equation is estimated using endogenous indicators for working part-time and occupational assignment. The wage equation is estimated by two-stage and ordinary least squares, and the pay gap is decomposed into explained and residual parts. Measures of gender-based wage discrimination are estimated after making adjustments to account for hiring discrimination and occupational preferences. The evidence indicates that gender differences in preferences for occupation explain much of the gap, yet there is still evidence of hiring discrimination. As a percentage of male wages, the discriminatory gap adjusted for hiring discrimination lies between 10.5 and 13.5 percent when estimated by ordinary least squares, and between 2.2 and 5.4 percent when estimated by two-stage least squares.     

An integrative conceptual framework for analyzing customer satisfaction with shopping trip experiences in grocery retailing

Grocery retailers aim to satisfy customers, and because grocery shopping trips are frequently recurring, they must do so continuously. Surprisingly, little research has addressed satisfaction with individual grocery shopping trips. This article therefore develops a conceptual framework for analyzing customer satisfaction with individual grocery shopping trip experiences within an overall ‘disconfirmation of expectations model’ of customer satisfaction. The contribution of the framework is twofold. First, by focusing on satisfaction with individual grocery shopping trips, previous research on satisfaction is extended to a context marked by frequently recurring, often tedious and routine activities. Understanding what causes satisfaction/dissatisfaction with individual shopping trips is required to explain overall, cumulative satisfaction with a retailer, which has been the focus of prior research on satisfaction in the retailing literature. Second, the framework synthesizes and integrates multiple central concepts from different research streams into a common framework for analyzing shopping trip satisfaction. Propositions are derived regarding the relationships among the different concepts in the framework and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Human resource management in action. Changing culture through ceremony: An example from GM

This paper examines the impact of a joint GM/UAW ceremony on changes in the traditional labor-management culture. Ceremonies can help change corporate culture when the actual event is transformed into an organizational story. Stories help motivate change because they provide purpose and clues to new behavior patterns.     

Consumers’ multifaceted deal knowledge in a grocery retail setting

Despite its relevance to retailers, studies of consumers’ deal knowledge have been few. This study explores consumers’ deal knowledge before, during, and after the store visit applying a between-subjects field-study design with 1204 respondents. In particular, the authors investigate perception of deal price status, typical deal price knowledge, and deal-spotting ability. Results show reasonably stable knowledge of typical deal prices, while knowledge of deal price status and deal-spotting ability improves significantly during grocery shopping. Surprisingly, consumers’ deal knowledge is not conditional on purchasing a special thus indicating that most consumers, consciously or unconsciously, scan for promotion signals when shopping groceries. In addition, the results suggest consumers are not easily fooled, as the vast majority is able to spot ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deals, while also possessing typical deal price knowledge. Furthermore, the findings suggest that consumers store internal reference deal prices. Retailers are therefore well advised to consider mixed depth and creative discount patterns to prevent ‘perfect’ perceptions of typical deal prices.     

Quantifying Central Hypotheses on Environmental Kuznets Curves for a Rich Economy: A Computable General Equilibrium Study

We investigate whether the future relationships between several pollutants and per capita income in rich countries may assume the inverted U‐forms of Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC). The emission‐augmenting effect of scaling up aggregate economic activity can be counteracted by greener composition of production and consumption, technological progress, and increased demand for environmental quality and policy. To quantify the importance of these central hypotheses, we use a CGE model with endogenous policy for Norway. Our results suggest significant future effects of all these three counteracting mechanisms. For most local and regional pollutants, they may be strong enough to prolong the falling emission trends. However, we cannot rely on reductions in emissions of climate gases and some transport‐related local pollutants. Our results also indicate that pollution leakages abroad are likely to take place.     

Brand loyalty and user skills

The paper develops the idea that brand loyalty is a rational thing for a consumer to have. The reason is that a consumer's experience with a brand creates user skills which make that brand more useful to the consumer than other brands, even though these, given the same experience, would be equally useful. In a brand switching model this implies that the consumer will switch brands only if there is an adequately large price differential and that the required price differential increases with user skills. The theory is related to standard search theory and it is shown that user skills and search costs have similar effects in the sense that either can support price dispersion in a market.