Mutual fund characteristics, managerial attributes, and fund performance

This study provides a comprehensive examination of recent mutual fund performance by analyzing a large set of both mutual funds and fund attributes in an effort to link performance to fund-specific characteristics. The results indicate that the hypothesized relationships between performance and the explanatory variables are generally upheld. After taking into consideration general market conditions and fund investment objective, the characteristic variables that relate to fund popularity, growth, cost, and management also explain performance. Finally, after controlling for survivorship and benchmark error as well as fund-specific factors, the results refute the performance persistence phenomenon.     

The evolution of the seven steps of selling

The traditional seven steps of selling is perhaps the oldest paradigm in the sales discipline. The seven steps model has served as a basic framework in sales training, personal selling textbooks, and teaching personal selling classes. Very little has changed in this framework since the turn of the 20th century. This article reviews the traditional seven steps of selling, examines transformative factors that have led to changes in each step, and presents an evolved seven steps process. While the traditional seven steps reflected a selling orientation on the part of a firm, the evolved selling process reflects more of a customer orientation in that the focus is on relationship selling—that is, securing, building, and maintaining long-term relationships with profitable customers.     

Market Orientation and the New Product Paradox

The extant literature shows that the strength of the market orientation–performance relationship decays as the terminal measure of performance shifts from new product success to profitability to market share. As Day (1999) concluded, a broader nomological inquiry is needed to more fully understand the nature and limits of market orientation's effects. This suggests that a broader nomological inquiry is needed to fully understand the nature and limits of market orientation's effects.
Utilizing a national sample of marketing executives, the present study's purpose is to build a fuller understanding of the effects of market orientation on firm performance. Its structural equations model includes measures of new product success, profitability, and market share.
The research reinforces a strong positive relationship between market orientation and new product success. The expanded nomological network under study, however, implies barriers to market orientation's effectiveness. First, market-orientation-inspired increases in the priority firms place on "breakthrough" learning without commensurate increases in the priority placed on "breakthrough" innovation capabilities can boomerang and negatively impact new product success. Second, market-orientation-inspired new product development programs that are unable to increase market share can negatively impact profitability. These gatekeepers to the success of market orientation underscore the need for firms to coordinate a strong market orientation with resources and capabilities that increase the effectiveness of the marketing function. Without such coordination, the positive effect of market orientation on new product success may be limited to incremental innovations, and the overall effect of successful new products on profitability may be limited.     

The Discriminating Beta: Prices and Capacity with Correlated Demands

Uniform customer‐class pricing can do much of the work of congestion‐based or time‐of‐day pricing in communication or wireless networks. A monopolist exploits differences in the stochastic characteristics of demands. If demands are correlated and the firm faces a capacity constraint, then it can set prices to reduce the variability of aggregate demand, thereby reducing the probability of excess demand and the associated service quality deterioration. Demands that covary negatively with aggregate demand are valuable to the firm in much the same way that securities that covary negatively with the market are valuable in a stock portfolio. Customer classes that exhibit low covariance with aggregate demand realize lower optimal prices. Optimal capacity is also affected by these covariances. As long as demands are not perfectly positively correlated, expected costs of joint production are less than expected costs of serving demands separately.     

Tax avoidance and ex ante cost of capital

This study examines the association between tax avoidance and ex ante cost of equity capital. Based on prior research, we develop two proxies for investors’ expectations of tax avoidance and explore whether deviations from those expectations result in higher ex ante cost of equity capital. We find that the ex ante cost of equity capital increases with tax avoidance that is either below or above investor expectations and that the increase is larger for tax avoidance that exceeds investors’ expectations. We then examine whether firms that alter their future tax avoidance exhibit a lowering of their ex ante cost of equity capital and find that tax avoidance decreases (increases) from the prior year for firms that were above (below) investors’ expectations in the prior year. These results are consistent with the trade‐off suggested by the Scholes and Wolfson framework and reinforce the notion that balancing tax benefits and non‐tax costs is an important feature of firms’ tax planning.     

Forecasting technology diffusion: a new generalisation of the logistic model

The present research proposes a new generalisation of the logistic model aiming at technology diffusion forecasting. Regarding criticisms and failures reported in the literature to apply logistic function for long-term forecasting, in our work we focused on short-term accuracy of forecast. To formulate the model, based on mathematical approximation, at first the differential equation governing the diffusion process is found and then by solving the derived differential equation, the forecast function is obtained. In all steps, mathematical tools from numerical analysis are used. We compared the New Generalized Logistic Model with eight of the most renowned models in the literature. The model led to more accurate fits and forecasts than those obtained from other models we applied for comparison.     

Readability of accountants’ communications with small business—Some Australian evidence

This paper explores the readability of a new and non-corporate narrative area, accountants’ communications with small business. The distinctive motivations, agendas and interests of small business managers are considered. The findings are informed by rationales from Shearer's (2002) thesis on the influence of neoclassical economics on accounting discourse. The study finds low readability accentuated by potentially low reader interest with accounting documents composed according to conventional accounting's rules and statutory requirements. Higher readability and document content which informs small business managers’ interests is evident when accountants are not compelled to author documents with reference to these professional rules and legislation.     

Assessing the Impact of District Primary Education Program in India

We examine the impact of India's District Primary Education Program (DPEP) introduced in the mid‐1990s. We exploit the fact that the DPEP was targeted towards primary school age children and was introduced in phases to different districts in India, and many of the districts never got the program to implement a difference‐in‐difference strategy to find the causal impact of the program on probability of attended primary school, probability of completed primary education and years of schooling. We find that the DPEP program increased the probability of attended primary school and completed primary school by about 2 percentage points. Similarly, the program increased the years of schooling by 0.16 years.     

Optimal Exchange-Rate Policy in a Model of Local-Currency Pricing with Vertical Production and Trade

In this paper, we examine optimal exchange-rate flexibility in a model of local-currency pricing with vertical production and trade. Following a large body of empirical evidence, we assume that final-goods prices are sticky, but intermediate-goods prices are flexible. We find that, unlike what is found in the literature, optimal nominal exchange rate is flexible under local-currency pricing. The key element in deriving our conclusion is the difference in expenditure shares between home and foreign households. The conclusion holds even if the degrees of home bias in production are identical between home and foreign final-goods producers, which contrasts with the findings in the literature.