Marking your trade: Cultural factors in the prolongation of trademarks

Trademarks protecting the brand name and associations are crucial in a brand's strategy, but little is known about the factors that determine a trademark's prolongation. To explain the prolongation of trademarks, the research estimated a multilevel hazard model accounting for trademark characteristics, firm's characteristics, and firm's country of origin national culture. The dataset comprises a census of 2911 trademarks in the US software security industry across an eight-year period, belonging to firms originating from 11 countries. The results indicate that a firm's culture of origin has a systematic effect on the types of trademark the firm is more likely to prolong and on the length of the prolongation. The age of the trademark, the number of categories where a particular trademark is present, and the age of the firm increase the likelihood of a trademark's prolongation. Larger and more innovative firms tend to terminate their trademarks earlier.     

The dynamic of financial crises and its non-monotonic effects on earnings quality

Despite the wealth of research examining earnings quality and earnings management, we still have much to learn about the effects of macroeconomic factors on accounting discretion’s decisions; the recent financial crises may be one of such factors. Nevertheless, the extant literature is inconclusive about the direction of the relationship between earnings quality and economic downturn. In this study, we focus on the extent to which organizational survival may be an objective of earnings management. In this manner, we add to research considering earnings target as an objective of earnings manipulation. Furthermore, our results suggest that these objectives likely change as crisis becomes worse. Consequently, we argue that the relationship between financial crises and earnings management is non-monotonic. Earnings management decreases when the intensity of the crisis is low, while it increases when the crisis is acute.     

User,Use & Utility Research

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy. BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage. The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed. In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy. The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.     

Perception of Malaysian Food Manufacturers Toward Halal Logistics

This article measures the perception of Malaysian food manufacturers toward halal logistics through an industry survey conducted in Malaysia. Based on a survey with 44 food manufacturers in Malaysia, results indicate that the responsibility of halal logistics according to the manufacturer is a shared responsibility in the halal food supply chain and value chain. Second, the study confirms that a dedicated storage and transportation is required. The manufacturer recognizes that for cold chain products a dedicated halal sea/airport complex is required, whereas for ambient products, no mixing of halal and nonhalal products in the same section is sufficient. The manufacturer thinks that no mixing of halal and nonhalal products in the same zone of the supermarket provides sufficient assurance for the Muslim consumer. Third, 52.3% of the manufacturers are willing to pay more for a halal logistics system, whereas small and large companies show a higher willingness to pay than medium-size companies. Halal logistics is an important component of the manufacturer's halal promise but will require pressure from the government through regulations to make halal logistics a requirement for halal certification of food manufacturers.     

THE EFFECT OF PARENTAL EMPLOYMENT ON CHILD SCHOOLING

This paper presents a model that provides conditions under which a causal interpretation can be given to the association between childhood parental employment and subsequent educational attainments of children. The key parameter comes from theconditional demand function for children's future earning capacity. Its identification rests on having data on siblings and assumptions about the timing of parents' knowledge of their children's endowments. In addition to sibling differences, the useof a fixed‐effects instrumental‐variables estimator identifies the parameter under weaker conditions. Empirical analysis informed by the model reveals a negative and significant effect on the child's educational attainment of the months of the mother's full‐time employment when the child was aged 0–5. The effect of the mother's part‐time employment is smaller and less well determined, but again negative. These results suggest that the substitution effect of the mother's employment dominates the income effects. Stronger adverse effects are found for children of less‐educated mothers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Financial dollarization and systemic risks: New empirical evidence

This paper explores the persistence of financial dollarization in a group of 79 economies with different levels of development. Our main hypothesis is that a high level of domestic debt combined with default risk explains this persistence, even after a decline in inflation rates. Using the generalized method of moments (GMM) in a panel data analysis, our results show that inflation risks caused by increasing probability of default account for financial dollarization more than inflation rate itself. After the decrease in inflation rates, the foreign currency-denominated deposits remain large because of the high debt-to-GDP ratios, particularly in speculative-grade economies. High public indebtedness leads to expectations of default. Dollarization is a rational response to the future inflation associated with investors' expectations of default observed in highly indebted economies.     

The animal spirits hypothesis and the Benhabib–Farmer condition for indeterminacy

This paper provides a self-contained review of the introduction of the animal spirits hypothesis into the infinite horizon optimal‐growth model. The analysis begins with an economic discussion of Pontryagin's maximum principles. Thereafter, I develop a version of the increasing-returns Benhabib–Farmer model by showing the possible sub-optimality of the central planner solution and deriving the bifurcation condition for indeterminacy. Moreover, I give some insights on how to model intrinsic and extrinsic uncertainty. Finally, analyzing the equilibrium condition of the labor market, I provide an intuitive rationale for the mechanism that in this model might lead prophecies to be self-fulfilling.     

The Minimal Entropy Martingale Measure and the Valuation Problem in Incomplete Markets

Let χ be a family of stochastic processes on a given filtered probability space (Ω, F, (F_t)_t∈T, P) with T?R₊. Under the assumption that the set M_e of equivalent martingale measures for χ is not empty, we give sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique equivalent martingale measure that minimizes the relative entropy, with respect to P, in the class of martingale measures. We then provide the characterization of the density of the minimal entropy martingale measure, which suggests the equivalence between the maximization of expected exponential utility and the minimization of the relative entropy.