Dynamic signaling and market breakdown

We consider the effects a public revelation of information (e.g. rating, grade) has on trading in a dynamic signaling model. Competing buyers offer prices to a privately informed seller who can reject them and delay trade. Delay is costly and the seller has no commitment to its duration. The external public information allows for signaling in equilibrium. More interestingly, we characterize the dynamics of trade and prices. If signals are noisy, no trade takes place just before the revelation of external information. If signals are fully revealing, then trade occurs even close to revelation, however, transaction prices are discontinuous.     

Diversification as a Public Good: Community Effects in Portfolio Choice

Within a rational general equilibrium model in which agents care only about personal consumption, we consider a setting in which, due to borrowing constraints, individuals endowed with local resources underparticipate in financial markets. As a result, investors compete for local resources through their portfolio choices. Even with complete financial markets and no aggregate risk, agents may herd into risky portfolios. This yields a Pareto‐dominated outcome as agents introduce “community” risk unrelated to fundamentals. Moreover, if some agents are behaviorally biased, or cannot completely diversify their holdings, rational agents may choose more extreme portfolios and amplify the effect.     

The Use of Franchising by U.S.-Based Retailers

The question of whether to franchise or to own has received much research interest in recent years. Two popular approaches used to explain the proportion of franchising (PF) in the franchisor's system are resource-scarcity and agency theories. This study combines both theories to explain the proportion of franchised outlets in the U.S. retailing sector between 1990 and 1997. The findings show mixed results with regard to both previous studies and hypothesized relationships. The study shows that the proportion of franchising used by retailers is positively related to size (number of outlets) and geographical scope, and negatively related to the rate of growth and the level of investment. Age and royalty rates are not found to be significant to the proportion of franchising.     

Religious freedom, religious diversity, and Japanese foreign direct investment

Research into the links between religion and foreign direct investment is scarce, partly because research on religion has not been the traditional domain of business and economics. Nevertheless, religion affects the economies, political structures, legal environments, and social behaviors of people around the world and is, therefore, an important element of the international business environments. Foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions are often made after an assessment of the international business environments. This article makes a singular contribution by focusing on the impact of religion – religious freedom and religious diversity – on the foreign direct investment of Japanese companies. We find that national income and religious diversity significantly influence Japanese decisions to invest.     

Inflation targeting in Brazil: constructing credibility under exchange rate volatility

This paper assesses the challenges faced by the inflation-targeting regime in Brazil. The inflation-targeting framework has played a critical role in macroeconomic stabilization. We stress two important challenges: construction of credibility and exchange rate volatility. The estimations indicate the following results: (i) the inflation targets have worked as an important coordinator of expectations; (ii) the Central Bank has reacted strongly to inflation expectations; (iii) there has been a reduction in the degree of inflation persistence; and (iv) the exchange rate pass-through for “administered or monitored” prices is two times higher than for “market” prices.     

Proactive Human Resource Management

This article presents a model for anticipating and responding to the human resource management needs of business. It presents methods for analyzing both external fit (Human Resource Management fits the development state of the organization) and internal fit (the organization components complementing and supporting each other) of human resource management. The model and its application result from research conducted in thirty organizations ranging in size from 2000 to 300,000 employees and varing in industry from financial services to consumer products. To develop and demonstrate the application of the model, we present in-depth case studies of four organizations. Implications of the model are discussed.     

Exploring the differences between franchisee entrepreneurs and nascent entrepreneurs

This paper is singular in its use of the PSED dataset for deriving a better understanding of the nature of nascent entrepreneurs as compared to franchisee entrepreneurs. We used previous studies on the differences between the two groups and developed variables divided into three dimensions: (1) prior experience, (2) growth objectives, and (3) motivation and risk. Jonckheere–Terpstra (J–T) tests, Chi-Square tests, F-tests and logistic regression models detected differences in all three dimensions. The conclusion is that franchisee entrepreneurs in the United States of America are distinctive in their characteristics. As compared to nascent entrepreneurs, franchisee entrepreneurs have less experience, less confidence in their skills, less capital, more aspirations for larger organizations, less confidence in their abilities to make the business a success, and more belief that their first-year incomes will be stable.

The minority ethic: Rethinking religious denominations,minority status,and educational achievement across the globe

We test whether major religious denominations correlate with education in a uniform way across the world and the extent to which minority status contributes to the correlation. Using individual data from the World Values Survey for 77 countries, we first find that no denomination is consistently associated with education and, in fact, for each denomination we study there are countries where its correlation with education is significantly positive, significantly negative, or statistically insignificant. To explain this unexpected result, we relate our first finding to minority status and find that denominations that are a minority in a given country positively correlate with the level of education of their followers in that country. Both findings uphold a series of robustness checks, including changing the definition of minority religions, excluding outliers, and changing the measure of education.     

Internationalization of Chinese Entrepreneurial Firms

This article uses the resource‐based and internationalization theories to explain the export behavior of Chinese entrepreneurial firms. Based on multiyear data on Chinese firms from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), we show that contextualized resource‐based theory can adequately explain some of the variation in export behavior among young Chinese firms. Exports by small Chinese firms are driven by the social and intellectual capital of the entrepreneur and their entrepreneurial proclivity, and the innovativeness/uniqueness of the product/offering. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Mediating touristic dangerscapes: the semiotics of state travel warnings issued to Israeli tourists

Official ‘travel warnings’ are recurrently published by the Counter-Terrorism Bureau in Israeli media, with the aim of informing potential tourists about the dangers of terrorism aimed at Israelis who travel abroad. These travel warnings, which juxtapose menacing warnings with tranquil visual representations of touristic vacationscapes, have recently gained a considerable public attention and have sprouted discussions around local tourism and identities. In this article, we offer a discursive and semiotic analysis of 55 travel warning articles, which appeared between 1998 and 2010 in printed and digital Hebrew press in Israel. We address visual and textual aspects of the articles and ask how they represent and mediate touristic vacationscapes. Following recent developments (‘turns’) in both tourism studies and media studies, we argue that these warnings articles construct multilayered spatial–visual representations of tourist destinations, which amount to a unique genre of tourism imagery in and of itself. Focussing on travel warnings addressing Israeli tourists who travel to the Eastern shores of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, we find that these combined or hybrid images and spaces present a convergence of two contemporary systems of representation, related to tourism and mass media, respectively, and construct a charged and mediated cultural space in Israeli collective imagination.