Land,Structure and Depreciation

We introduce a hedonic price model that enables us to disentangle the value of a property into the value of land and the value of structure. For given reconstruction costs, we are able to estimate the impact of physical deterioration, functional obsolescence and vintage effects on the structure and the impact of time on sale (and external obsolescence) on the land value simultaneously. Our findings show that maintenance has a substantial impact on the rate of physical deterioration. After 50 years of not or barely maintaining a home, a typical structure has lost around 43% of its value. In contrast, maintaining a home very well results in virtually no physical deterioration in the long run.     

Board‐Level Employee Representation (BLER) and Firms’ Responses to Crisis

Short: We hypothesize that companies with board‐level employee representation (BLER) experience a lower probability of crisis‐induced dismissals than other firms. Theoretically, we link this effect to the employee directors’ ability to reduce the information asymmetry and moral hazard in employee–employer contracting, thereby facilitating the implementation of labor‐cost adjustments that are an alternative to workforce dismissals. We confirm our hypotheses by analyzing the behavior of Scandinavian public corporations with/without employee directors during the Great Recession.     

Know the name,forget the exposure: Brand familiarity versus memory of exposure context

This research shows that a single auditory exposure to fictitious brand names may create the impression, one day later, that these brand names actually exist. It appears that the judgment that the brands are known is based on brand familiarity coupled with a failure to remember the exposure context. This demonstration, inspired by the false fame effect, is interpreted as the product of an implicit memory process. The result implies that measurement of explicit memory of an ad or other marketing communication may misrepresent (in this case, understate) the influence of that communication. However, the effect was obtained only when attention to the fictitious brand names was deliberate (as opposed to incidental). This suggests that there are lower attentional limits to the influence of one exposure to a brand name on creating familiarity without memory of the exposure context. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Corporate groups,liquidity, and overinvestment by Belgian firms quoted on the Brussels stock exchange

For a sample of large Belgian non-financial firms quoted on the Brussels stock exchange, it is found that investment of firms borrowing on an internal capital market is not determined by internal cash flow, while cash flow has a significant effect on investment for the other firms in the sample. Further analysis indicates that the cash flow effect is caused by overinvestment, not by financing constraints. No evidence is found that firms borrowing on an internal capital market in turn transfer surpluses of funds to other group members by investing in financial fixed assets. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The use of latent classes to identify individual differences in the importance of landscape dimensions for aesthetic preference

Most literature in landscape perception and preference has focused on aesthetic preference by (groups of) people. Factors that could influence the aesthetic preference, such as landscape dimensions and observer's background characteristics, are far less examined. This may be due to the increasing complexity of the dataset, when variation both in landscape attributes and respondents’ characteristics is to be included in the models. The complex multivariate analysis models that emerge require more sophisticated statistical analysis. Also, the conclusions that result from the traditional analysis sound like, e.g. experts show lower preferences than nonexperts, which is rather deterministic and leaves no room for fuzziness. Latent class analysis provides an opportunity to include fuzziness, by only probabilistically assigning respondents in a latent class in function of the respondent's characteristics. The present paper explores the use of latent class analysis to determine individual differences in the importance appended to several landscape dimensions for landscape aesthetic preference. A questionnaire survey was executed in a spatially stratified sample amongst inhabitants of the city of Ghent (Flanders, Belgium). Latent preference classes are identified of which the cases vary in the level of importance attached to landscape characteristics for aesthetic preference. Care and disturbance appear to have larger effect on preference than naturalness and urbanisation. The effect of care and disturbance on landscape aesthetic preference also most significantly distinguishes between the latent preference classes. The importance of openness for aesthetics is small and not significantly dependent on the individual background of the observer. Respondents’ characteristics that affect the probability of belonging to a latent preference class are environmental behaviour and attitude, actual living environment, age class, education level, and organisation membership. Understanding the basis for differences in landscape preference may respond to tastes and aspirations of the general public, putting landscape planning in the broader context of society.     

Corporate Governance in China: A Meta‐Analysis

How has the impact of ‘good corporate governance’ principles on firm performance changed over time in China? Amassing a database of 84 studies, 684 effect sizes, and 547,622 firm observations, we explore this important question by conducting a meta‐analysis on the corporate governance literature on China. The weight of evidence demonstrates that two major ‘good corporate governance’ principles advocating board independence and managerial incentives are indeed associated with better firm performance. However, we cannot find strong support for the criticisms against CEO duality. In addition, we go beyond a static perspective (such as certain governance mechanisms are effective or ineffective) by investigating the temporal hypotheses. We reveal that over time, with the improvement in the quality of market institutions and development of financial markets, the monitoring mechanisms of the board and state ownership become more strongly related to firm performance, whereas the incentive mechanisms lose their significance. Overall, our findings advance a dynamic institution‐based view by substantiating the case that institutional transitions matter for the relationship between governance mechanisms and firm performance in the second largest economy in the world.     

Consumers and Biotechnology: A Synopsis of Survey and Focus Group Research

The Office of Consumer Affairs of Industry Canada, in conjunction with other federal departments, has undertaken preliminary work to identify concerns and highlight consumer issues with respect to biotechnology and its applications. This has included conducting a number of surveys and focus groups to identify what consumers know about biotechnology; where there are information gaps; and how information impacts upon consumers' purchasing decisions.This paper is structured into five sections. First, it provides an overview of some background information on biotechnology. The second section summarises consumers' knowledge of, and reactions to, biotechnology. Next, the paper highlights factors that influence consumers' attitudes towards biotechnology. The fourth section examines two ways of overcoming marketplace barriers contrasting increased consumer awareness with more traditional legislative mechanisms. The concluding section outlines questions that need to be answered in order to determine how the marketplace can best address issues related to biotechnological products.     

Selecting credit rating models: a cross-validation-based comparison of discriminatory power

In commercial banking, various statistical models for corporate credit rating have been theoretically promoted and applied to bank-specific credit portfolios. In this paper, we empirically compare and test the performance of a wide range of parametric and nonparametric credit rating model approaches in a statistically coherent way, based on a ‘real-world’ data set. We repetitively (k times) split a large sample of industrial firms’ default data into disjoint training and validation subsamples. For all model types, we estimate k out-of-sample discriminatory power measures, allowing us to compare the models coherently. We observe that more complex and nonparametric approaches, such as random forest, neural networks, and generalized additive models, perform best in-sample. However, comparing k out-of-sample cross-validation results, these models overfit and lose some of their predictive power. Rather than improving discriminatory power, we perceive their major contribution to be their usefulness as diagnostic tools for the selection of rating factors and the development of simpler, parametric models.