Organizational attraction toward a company that adopts a smoke-free policy

The current study investigated Korean smokers’ and non-smokers’ evaluations of an organization implementing a policy which either mandated or recommended that employees quit smoking. Undergraduates (n = 268) were randomly assigned to one of 2 (high vs. low severity of smoke-free policy implementation) × 2 (high vs. low organizational assistance) conditions and indicated their attraction to a hypothetical organization, posing as job applicants. The findings showed that non-smoking individuals’ perception of organizational support was more strongly and positively related to organizational attraction when they were more likely to endorse employers’ right to control employee smoking behaviors. Ex-smokers indicated greater attraction toward the organization when it was described as implementing a high severity policy than a low severity policy. Non-smokers indicated greater attraction toward the organization when it was described as offering a high level of assistance than a low level of assistance for smokers’ cessation efforts. These and other findings concerning individuals’ perception of severity, perception of organizational support, smoking sensitivity, and employer control are presented in detail, and the implications thereof are discussed.     

The influence of service orientation and interaction orientation on consumer identification

A service orientation aims to provide professional and comprehensive service items to consumers in a sale or a non-sale situation, while an interaction orientation has the goal of creating good interaction ability with individual customers in order to maintain long-term, profitable customer relationships, and in the process obtaining valuable information about individual customers. These orientations build customer-centric operations and develop competitive advantages, thus enhancing firm performance and customer value. The main purpose of this study was to examine the relative and collective contributions of different strategic orientations on a firm's performance, with a focus on consumer–company identification. The structural equation model results indicate that (1) both service orientation and interaction orientation positively influence consumer–company identification and (2) interaction orientation results in higher perceived consumer identification.     

Tariff evasion in global trade data

ABSTRACT

We find evidence of pervasive tariff evasion in the global data on trade from 1988 to 2015. Using over 35 million observations of data on import and export flows at the HS6 product category level, we find evidence of substantial underreporting of imports relative to export data on average and particularly when tariffs on product categories are high. These effects are stronger in more corrupt destination countries, as measured by the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators [World Bank. 2016. Worldwide Governance Indicators. September 25, 2016]. In addition, evidence of tariff evasion increases significantly in economic downturns. We document these patterns in the global data and explore the welfare effects of this evasion by (1) putting a lower bound on the extent to which there are revenue losses from tariff evasion, and by (2) estimating the effects of corruption as measured by this indicator on global trade in a simple gravity model. We estimate that in total, revenue losses from tariff evasion are currently likely to exceed 400 to 670 million USD globally per year, and find that the effects of corruption on trade flows are ambiguous overall but change from weakly positive (‘grease the wheels’) to largely negative over the years in our sample.     

Beijing meeting puts China on the tourist map

In Beijing from 28 February–4 March 1983. 1000 delegates from 45 countries came together for the first China International Tourism Conference. Sponsored jointly by the China National Tourism Adminis- tration and the Civil Aviation Administration of China, this conference marked an important point in the development of the tourist industry of that country. Chuck Y. Gee, Dean of the School of Travel Industry Management at the University of Hawaii, and author of an article on the tourist industry in China in this issue, attended the conference.     

Analysing clusters of skills in R&D — core competencies, metaphors, visualization, and the role of IT

Though it is now universally accepted that companies should try to align their R&D activities with their business objectives, achieving this alignment is notoriously difficult in practice. The rise of the core competence framework has been very helpful in creating, and legitimizing, a language in which issues of technical competence and R&D strengths can be followed through to their consequences for competitive advantage. Companies are starting to express their R&D priorities explicitly in terms of core competencies.
Without effective IT support, core competence concepts are often applied arbitrarily. This has led to accusations that core competence theory can become yet another battlefield upon which companies play out their internal political battles. Computer-based techniques can help counteract this danger by enabling large volumes of relatively objective data to be collected, then making it possible to analyse and draw out patterns from this data, and finally enabling the data to be represented effectively.
It is in this last area of data representation that information technology is now of particular benefit. In order to make the core competence approach sufficiently robust as a basis for decision making, it is necessary to collect and process large volumes of data. However, this data is normally difficult to represent in such a way that managers can assimilate it. In our recent experience, we have come to realize the particular importance of effective representations and metaphors, and have started to shift our own emphasis towards these areas in addition to analysis per se .
The paper shows how core competence approaches can support R&D management decision making by exploring the roles of data collection, analysis and representation. Information technology is an integral part of these approaches, and we draw out some generalized lessons for the successful use of IT in decision support.     

Empirical evidence of a positive inflation premium being incorporated into stock prices

This study demonstrates that in contrast to prior research findings on short-term stock returns, long-term stock returns are positively correlated with inflation. In addition, within the context of a more complete explanatory model, long-term stock returns are found to be negatively related to changes in long-term interest rates and negatively related to beginning price to earnings ratios. The significance of these variables in explaining almost all the time series variation in long-term stock returns demonstrates that changes in stock values are well explained by theory.     

USING BAYESIAN BETAS TO ESTIMATE RISK RETURN PARAMETERS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

Since its original development by Sharpe (1964), the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has been the focus of great interest, practical usage, modifications, testing, and controversy. The basic hypothesis of the CAPM is that the minimum expected return required by investors on any asset will equal the risk-free rate plus a premium for the asset's contribution to the variance risk of a diversified portfolio as measured by the asset's beta. The model is often utilized by investors to calculate the relevant risk and required return on an asset, while corporate officers widely employ the theory to compute the appropriate discount rate to use in estimating the net present value of capital budgeting projects when evaluating spending decisions (Gitman and Mercurio, 1982).     

USING THE CAPM AS A GENERAL FRAMEWORK FOR ASSET PRICING ANALYSIS

In this paper a model of asset pricing is derived that relaxes the restrictive assumptions of standard theories. The model leads to a tractable capital asset pricing model framework that can be used to test empirical hypotheses and draw important insights on capital market equilibrium.