Improving Estimates of Inequality and Poverty from Urban China's Household Income and Expenditure Survey

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit respondents, compromising the sample. This article uses monthly expenditure data from two urban areas of China to see if data collection short-cuts, such as extrapolating to annual totals from expenditure reports in only some months of the year, would harm the accuracy of annual expenditure, inequality and poverty estimates. Replacing 12-month diaries with simple extrapolations from either one, two, four or six months would cause a sharp increase in estimates of annual inequality and poverty. This undermines international comparisons of inequality statistics because no country other than China uses such comprehensive 12-month expenditure records. But a corrected form of extrapolation, based on correlations between the same household's expenditures in different months of the year, gives much smaller errors in estimates of inequality and poverty.     

Constructing meaning in the service of power: An analysis of the typical modes of ideology in accounting textbooks

This paper provides an analysis of the typical modes of ideology in introductory financial accounting textbooks and training materials. Drawing on Thompson's [Thompson JB. Ideology and modern culture: critical social theory in the era of mass communication. Cambridge: Polity Press; 1990] schema concerning the typical linguistic modes through which ideology operates, this research suggests that the operation of ideology is apparent within educational accounting texts, with particular strategies being more evident than others: in particular, the strategies of universalization, narrativization, rationalization and naturalization. Given the predominantly technical nature of introductory financial accounting textbooks and training manuals, the modes of ideology identified in the texts were often quite subtle; more specifically, the ideological characteristics displayed in each of the six texts analyzed were often expressions of implicit or taken for granted assumptions.     

Measuring the Contributions of Brand to Shareholder Value (and How to Maintain or Increase Them)

Since 1993 Young & Rubicam has invested over $130 million in collecting and interpreting data on consumers' perceptions of some 44,000 product and service brands in over 50 countries. At the core of Y&R's research effort is the Brand‐Asset® Valuator (or “BAV”), a model that converts the firm's hoard of data on global consumer perceptions and behavior patterns into assessments of brand strength and value. When combined with the findings of independent research by academics in marketing and finance (using Compustat data on corporate operating and stock‐price performance), the BAV's assessments of brand values can be used to quantify the contributions of brands to both corporate earnings and market values. One of the main findings of this research is that brands contribute to the market value of companies by increasing not only current earnings, but the price‐to‐earnings (P/E) multiples that investors assign to current earnings. Such increases in P/E multiples in turn reflect investors' expectations for lower risk, higher growth or both. At the same time, more recent consumer surveys (conducted in 2005‐2007) provided indications of brand “erosion” even as the markets were pushing up share prices, presumably with the expectation that intangibles like brand would continue to drive operating earnings in the future. For the leaders of consumer‐related corporations, the resulting “disconnect” between stock prices and brand values points to a continuing challenge for brand management. Building brand value is important for both finance professionals trying to increase shareholder value and marketers trying to build brand strength and increase sales and margin. The aim of the authors' research is to bring these two groups—finance and marketing— closer together by demonstrating the role of marketing strategy and brand equity in driving shareholder value.     

Shareholder Value Maximization—Is There a Role for Corporate Social Responsibility?

Although often viewed as inconsistent with the corporate goal of value maximization, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement can add value by helping companies develop and maintain their reputations for fair dealing with each of their important non-investor stakeholder groups, including employees, suppliers, and local communities. Such reputational capital in turn helps reinforce the commitment of those stakeholders through what amount to informal or implicit contracts—contracts that are often critical to a company's long-run success.
Nevertheless, the importance and difficulty of balancing stakeholder interests against the overarching goal of efficiency and value maximization cannot be overstated. As with any corporate investment, each dollar of investment in a corporate stakeholder group should be justified by at least a dollar of expected return over a finite time horizon. By practicing this kind of enlightened value maximization, to borrow Michael Jensen's phrase, management is likely to end up increasing not only its returns to shareholders, but the size of the corporate pie that is divided among all its stakeholders. Viewed in this light, CSR and value maximization have the potential to be complementary undertakings that result in a virtuous circle in which doing good helps companies do well, and doing well provides the wherewithal to do more good.     

Spillovers in Space: Does Geography Matter?

Using U.S. firm level panel data we simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three potential sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technological, and product market (“horizontal”). To do so, we construct new measures of geographic proximity based on the distribution of a firm's inventor locations as well as its headquarters. We find that geographic location is important for productivity, as are technology (but not product) spillovers, and that both intra and inter–regional (counties) spillovers matter. The geographic location of a firm's researchers is more important than its headquarters. These benefits may be the reason why local policy makers compete so hard for the location of local R&D labs and high tech workers.     

Daily short interest,idiosyncratic risk,and stock returns

This paper examines the relation between short selling and returns and the impact of arbitrage costs on short sellers’ behavior. Using daily UK short selling data, we find that stocks with low short interest levels experience significant positive returns on both an equal- and value-weighted basis. Economic theory predicts that short sellers avoid establishing positions in stocks with high idiosyncratic risk. Our results indicate a negative relation between short interest and returns among high idiosyncratic risk stocks and that short selling activity is mostly concentrated in low idiosyncratic risk stocks where it is less costly to arbitrage fundamental risk.     

The impact of the internet upon fundraising

Through research on a sample of the top 2000 charities, the Voluntary Organisations Internet Server (VOIS) revealed the potential for a major initiative to provide the opportunity for voluntary organisations to create a quality brand of information on the Internet by coming together on a collective site. The Internet is an ideal medium for voluntary organisations to get their message across, build relationships and raise funds. VOIS has been designed specifically to facilitate these activities and provide the means to a collective presence. While it is mainly large organisations that are using it at the moment, the Internet represents the opportunity for smaller organisations to have a substantial presence because of its democratic nature. VOIS has utilised the principle of economies of scale in order that all organisations can afford to have a useful presence on the Internet. This paper will examine fundraising activities that are already occurring on the Internet, analyse the strengths of the Internet as a marketing tool, explain how marketers can utilise these strengths and explain how VOIS has tried to facilitate these strengths within the features of its standardised site.