Impact of Market Concentration on Employment and Wages: a Look at the Insurance Industry

Atlantic Economic Journal - The falling share of labor in national income is a global concern. This study examined the impact of changes in market concentration ratios in the insurance industry on...     

Measuring personal cultural orientations: scale development and validation

Cross-cultural studies using Hofstede’s national scores to operationalize his five cultural factors at an individual level suffer from ecological fallacy, and those using self-report scales treat cultural factors as unidimensional constructs and provide little or no evidence of the construct validity and measurement equivalence of these scales. This paper reconceptualizes Hofstede’s five cultural factors as ten personal cultural orientations and develops a new 40-item scale to measure them. It also establishes the validity, reliability, and cross-cultural measurement equivalence of the new scale, and discusses its advantages over other scales.     

Leveraging the social welfare chain to provide resilience during disaster

Due to the rampant increase in disasters globally, resilience in supply chain and logistics is receiving greater research attention in various parts of the world. This paper considers the role and contribution of social welfare supply chains in providing resilience. This is a causal phenomenon which has been studied through an exploratory research by building a framework from extant literature, a case study on an Indian non-governmental organization and tested through a social network analysis. We show how in the wake of a disaster, these social welfare supply chains become enablers. The paper provides an inkling into how to improve community resilience in times of disaster. Further, we show how these supply chains use social cohesion embedded in the structure to provide efficiency, diversity and adaptability, thereby bringing resilience into the supply system. Another contribution of this study is the use of visualisation and analysis of social media representation tools for social network analysis in operations.     

The antecedents and consequences of customer-centric marketing

As we enter the twenty-first century, the marketing function remains concerned with serving customers and consumers effectively. The authors propose that just as the marketing function gradually shifted from mass marketing to segmented marketing in the twentieth century, it will increasingly move toward customer-centric marketing in the next century. In the practice of customer-centric marketing, the marketing function seeks to fulfill the needs and wants of each individual customer. The antecedents of customer-centric marketing are the increasing pressure on firms to improve marketing productivity, increasing market diversity in household and business markets, and technology applicability. On the basis of the shift toward customer-centric marketing, the authors expect increased importance of marketing as a “supply management” function, customer outsourcing, cocreation marketing, fixedcost marketing, and customer-centric organizations. This article highlights the implications of customer-centric marketing as well as the boundary conditions that will affect its adoption. Jagdish N. Sheth is the Kellstadt Professor of Marketing in the Gouizeta Business School at Emory University. He has published 26 books and more than 200 articles in marketing and other business disciplines. His book,The Theory of Buyer Behavior (with John A. Howard), is a classic in the field of consumer behavior and is one of the most cited works in marketing. His other books includeMarketing Theory: Evolution and Evaluation (with David Gardner and Dennis Garrett) andConsumption Values and Market Choices: Theory and Applications (with Bruce Newman and Barbara Gross). Rajendra S. Sisodia is Trustee Professor of Marketing at Bentley College. Previously, he was an associate professor of marketing and director of executive programs at George Mason University and an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University. He has a Ph.D. in marketing from Columbia University. He has published more than 40 articles in journals such asHarvard Business Review, Journal of Business Strategy, Marketing Letters, andMarketing Management. He has also authored about two dozen cases, primarily on strategic and marketing issues in the telecommunications industry, as well as a number of telecommunications industry and company analyses. Arun Sharma is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Miami. He has published more than 30 articles in marketing and his interests are in the area of market and marketing evolution.     

International Variation in Accounting Measurement Rules and Analysts' Earnings Forecast Errors

We theorize that accounting systems affect analysts' forecast accuracy through changes in earnings variability. We argue that the matching and historical cost principles reduce earnings variability, and hence, reduce analysts' earnings forecast errors. We also argue that restricting the choice of accounting methods can result in larger forecast errors. We argue that more informative disclosure environments should reduce forecast errors. We test whether variation in these factors across countries explain variation in analysts' earnings forecast bias and accuracy. Our results indicate that these characteristics of financial accounting systems are complements, and that they affect financial analysts' earnings forecast errors.     

Credit Default Swaps: Risk Hedge or Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction?

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are contracts between buyers and sellers of protection against default. They are a form of debt insurance, or more precisely derivatives contracts that investors buy to either insure against or profit from a default. In this way CDS contracts act as a form of debt insurance in that they provide a means of protection against credit risk. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the CDS earned the reputation of a ‘financial weapon of mass destruction’. Why? Is this charge justified? This paper shows that the reality is more complex: CDSs carry benefit as well as costs, and the risks associated with them can be mitigated through prudent supervision.     

A Note on Modelling Money Demand in Growing Economies

A prominent feature of US data is the lack of cointegration between nominal interest rates and M1 velocity. Yet, most general‐equilibrium monetary models that have been used for empirical analysis have imposed cointegration between these two series. This paper presents as an alternative a money‐in‐the‐utility function model which does not imply cointegration even though a well‐defined stationary monetary equilibrium exists.     

ESTIMATING PERSON‐CENTERED TREATMENT (PeT) EFFECTS USING INSTRUMENTAL VARIABLES: AN APPLICATION TO EVALUATING PROSTATE CANCER TREATMENTS

This paper builds on the methods of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to estimate person‐centered treatment (PeT) effects that are conditioned on the person's observed characteristics and averaged over the potential conditional distribution of unobserved characteristics that lead them to their observed treatment choices. PeT effects are more individualized than conditional treatment effects from a randomized setting with the same observed characteristics. PeT effects can be easily aggregated to construct any of the mean treatment effect parameters and, more importantly, are well suited to comprehend individual‐level treatment effect heterogeneity. The paper presents the theory behind PeT effects, and applies it to study the variation in individual‐level comparative effects of prostate cancer treatments on overall survival and costs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.