Tourism students’ motivational orientations: the case of Vietnam

The availability of skilled labor and institutions of higher education that can contribute to human capacity building are prerequisites for tourism-dependent nations like Vietnam. The exploration of students’ motivations is one way in which the role of institutions of higher education in capacity building and tourism development can be further understood. This research explores students’ motivational orientations related to enrollment in tourism degree programs in Vietnam. Three key categories emerged: enthusiasm for travel and tourism; employment; and contribution to national industry. The findings are linked to the basic psychological needs of self-determination theory, namely autonomy, competence, and relatedness.     

HOW DO YOU CAPTURE LIQUIDITY? A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON LOW-FREQUENCY STOCK LIQUIDITY

Researchers have various ways to measure liquidity but most of them come with both merits and demerits. This study provides a literature review of low-frequency liquidity measures with a primary focus on liquidity measurement as well as its implication on asset pricing. Based on the dimension it captures, a range of existing low-frequency measures are divided into four categories of liquidity proxies including transaction cost, volume, price impact, and multidimension-based measures. We review some well-established liquidity proxies, a new bid–ask spread estimator and price impact ratios proposed recently. Finally, we discuss how good low-frequency liquidity measures are at capturing standard liquidity benchmarks, which are constructed from high-frequency intraday data.     

How efficient is the banking system of Asia’s next economic dragon? Evidence from rolling DEA windows

Vietnam is now widely regarded as a rising economic star and the next economic dragon of Asia. Its banking system has played a key role in this stellar economic performance. Since 1990, Vietnam’s banking system has undergone significant changes which saw its composition transformed from being state banks only to now being both state as well as private banks, and has performed generally well in terms of growth, profitability and stability. But is it efficient? We conduct a dynamic analysis of the level and trend of the cost and profit efficiency of the Vietnamese banking sector over the period 1995 to 2011 taking into account the Asian and Global Financial crises. We use the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Windows Analysis approach and adjust for bank size in calculating the average efficiency score of the banking system. Our empirical findings show that the cost and profit efficiency of the Vietnamese banking system averaged around 0.90 and 0.75, respectively, with the state banks being more efficient than the private banks and with efficiency experiencing an upward trend over the analysis period. Moreover, we find that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) did not significantly affect the efficiency of the whole Vietnamese banking system.     

Financial distress and bankruptcy prediction: An appropriate model for listed firms in Vietnam

This paper aims to develop a comprehensive model, the first of its kind in Vietnam, for the purpose of predicting financial distress and bankruptcy at Vietnamese listed firms. The period 2003–2016 is used to study the likelihood of financial distress in different scenarios. Various factors are utilized, including (1) accounting factors in the emerging market score model; (2) market factors in the distance-to-default model; and (3) macroeconomic indicators. The area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUC) curve is used to compare the usefulness of various models that predict financial distress and bankruptcy. Empirical findings from this study show that accounting and market factors, together with macroeconomic fundamental factors, both affect financial distress when they are considered in isolation. However, in a comprehensive model, the effects from accounting factors appear to be more significant than those from market-based factors. The default prediction model, which includes accounting factors with macroeconomic indicators, appears to perform much better than the model comprising market-based factors with macroeconomic fundamentals.     

Modeling of the clinical and economic impact of a risk-sharing agreement supporting a treat-to-target strategy in the management of patients with rheumatoid arthritis in France

Objectives: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of a Treat-to-Target strategy with certolizumab pegol in patients with rheumatoid arthritis in the context of a pay-for-performance agreement in which medication costs are refunded in case of discontinuation during the first 3 months of treatment.

Methods: The Treat-to-Target strategy consisted of a systematic switch to second-line tumor necrosis factor (TNF)α inhibitor in case of an unmet ACR50 response at 3 months compared to current routine clinical practice. A reference cohort treated first-line with certolizumab pegol according to current practice without systematic switching was considered as the comparator. A decision-tree model was constructed to estimate clinical outcome (health assessment questionnaire-disability index or HAQ-DI score), time spent in ACR50 response (ACR 50), and direct costs of treatment over a 2-year period. HAQ scores were derived from American College of Rheumatology 50 (ACR50) responses. All TNFα inhibitors were assumed to have equivalent efficacy and tolerability. Costs were estimated at 2013 French retail prices (date of the pay-for-performance agreement).

Results: The mean duration of an ACR50 response was 1.23 years in the Treat-to-Target strategy certolizumab pegol cohort vs 0.98 years in the reference cohort, resulting in a mean gain in HAQ at 24 months of 0.117. The Treat-to-Target strategy with a mix of TNFα inhibitors as second-line therapy was more expensive than the reference strategy in absolute terms, but this difference was entirely offset by the pay-for-performance agreement. The Treat-to-Target strategy was, thus, cost-neutral over a 2-year period after the payback of CZP cost for patients not achieving the target at 3 months.

Conclusions: In the context of a pay-for-performance agreement, the management of patients with rheumatoid arthritis using a Treat-to-Target strategy with certolizumab pegol in first line is dominant compared to standard use of this drug in the French setting in 2013.     

Fiscal deficits and the socioeconomic consequences of rebalancing: Insights from a TVP-VAR with stochastic volatility

This article connects two salient economic features: (i) Fiscal shocks have asymmetric effects across business cycle phases (Gechert, Horn, & Paetz, 2019); (ii) the unemployment-output trade-off is time varying and may be unstable. The intertwined dynamic behaviour of fiscal deficit shocks and the unemployment-output trade-off is studied in this article using a time-varying parameter (TVP) vector autoregression (VAR) with stochastic volatility techniques applied to the analysis of data from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States of America. We confirm the trade-off heterogeneity across country, and its time-varying nature across time, showing in addition its fluctuation around a long-run reference value. We document significant short-run impacts of fiscal shocks on the unemployment-output trade-off which, based on the experience of the Global Financial Crisis, becomes larger in periods of economic turmoil. Policy-wise, the rebalancing of public finances may have unexpected adverse effects on job creation if implemented during slumps, precisely when the labour market sensitivity with respect to the performance of the product market is likely to be more acute. This message is particularly relevant in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.     

Monetary unit sampling: Improving estimation of the total audit error

In the practice of auditing, for cost concerns, auditors verify only a sample of accounts to estimate the error of the total population of accounts. The most common statistical method to select an audit sample is by monetary unit sampling (MUS). However, common MUS estimation practice does not explicitly recognize the multiple distributions within the population of account errors. This often leads to excessive conservatism in auditors' judgment of population error. In this paper, we review the common MUS estimation practice, and introduce our own method which uses the Zero-Inflation Poisson (ZIP) distribution to consider zero versus non-zero errors explicitly. We argue that our method is better suited to handle the real populations of account errors, and show that our ZIP upper bound is both reliable and efficient for MUS estimation of accounting data.     

Measuring Confucian values among East Asian consumers: a four country study

This study aims to make a conceptual and empirical contribution by developing and operationalizing suitable scales to capture certain Confucian values (face saving, humility, group orientation, hierarchy and reciprocity) that can influence East Asian consumers. Based on the pertinent literature, focus group discussions with extended East Asian families and East Asian scholar interviews, we develop and validate our measures on data from over 400 respondents across four East Asian cities (Tokyo, Hanoi, Beijing and Singapore). Despite some variance, our findings signal that East Asians are highly influenced by such traditional values. Several implications are extracted and future research directions suggested.