Nothing Tastes as Local: Jordanians’ Perceptions of Buying Domestic Olive Oil

To date, little is known about how consumers perceive local and foreign olive oil. This study was conducted with the intention of exploring key trends in Jordanian consumers’ perceptions toward local olive oil and to examine whether they are ethnocentric toward purchasing their local olive oil in the era of the Arab Spring. The research design is a combination of quantitative with a qualitative technique to support and expand on the research findings. Data were collected from a total number of 196 Jordanians who live in Amman city. The results revealed that Jordanians are loyal to their country’s olive oil; they expressed strong ethnocentric tendencies toward purchasing it, and their purchasing tendencies are influenced by nationalism. Jordanians ranked their local olive oil as the best worldwide. This article provides original insights into the development and marketing strategies for local and global olive oil producers in the Jordan market and other Arab country markets.     

Intertemporal substitution in the Spanish economy: Evidence from regional data

This paper studies the intertemporal substitution in consumption and leisure for the Spanish economy by estimating the first‐order conditions of an individual optimization model with regional and aggregate data. While first‐order conditions determining intertemporal substitution in consumption show a good econometric fit, and the value we obtain for the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is similar to previously available results, the econometric fit of the intertemporal condition in leisure indicates that the behaviour of the Spanish labour supply over the cycle is more complex than can be explained by the canonical intertemporal choice model.     

物流上市公司系统风险与财务变量关系的实证分析

本文以33家中国物流上市公司1997年至2005年的年报资料为样本,采用多元回归方法,对中国物流行业系统风险和7个会计变量之间的关系进行了实证分析。研究结果表明:经营效率和盈利水平与系统风险负相关,而流动性、财务杠杆、公司规模和成长性与系统风险没有显著的相关性。     

CHAID分析在抽油烟机产品市场细分中的应用

市场细分是企业战略营销的重要组成部分。根据一些调查数据显示,把抽油烟机市场细分变量区分为广度细分变量和深度细分变量,如果与传统市场细分方法进行对比,可了解到CHAID细分方法的优越性,方能用该方法对抽油烟机整体市场和潜在市场做以细分。     

Discrepant Values and Measures of Negotiator Performance

The thesis of the paper is that measuring negotiator performance correctly is difficult because the values that those of us who measure negotiator performance think negotiators are maximizing may differ from the values negotiators are actually maximizing. When such discrepant values exist, using performance measures that do not account for them can lead easily to incorrect conclusions about negotiator performance. Indeed, good performance may be judged poor, and vice-versa. This paper explores several related literatures, including the experimental-bargaining, behavioral-decision-making, and procedural-justice literatures, to demonstrate that discrepant values exist. It then demonstrates that whenever performance measures are used as dependent variables in negotiation experiments, the existence of discrepant values can lead to both Type I and Type II construct-validity errors.     

Re-examination of wage, employment, and hours adjustments: what is crucial for differences in the adjustments?

Manufacturing wage, employment, and hours adjustments are significantly different among developed countries, typically between Japan and the US. The problem of explaining the differences is closely related to that of what effect the extent of wage flexibility has on labor market adjustments. However, prevailing theories are invalid or incomplete for explaining the differences. The differences in the adjustments cannot be unrelated with institutional features of the labor market. Indeed, the extent of wage flexibility depends on the differences in the institutional features. Using a new model with such an idea, this paper theoretically re-examines the cause of the differences in the adjustments. The crucial causes are the characteristics of wage flexibility as well as the differences of the institutional features. The characteristics are that wage adjustment is discontinuous, infrequent, and has a lower limit in comparison with changes in demand.     

Class Size,Teacher Hours and Educational Attainment*

We employ a regression‐discontinuity design to identify effects on educational attainment after compulsory school of class size and the number of pupils per weekly teacher hour using administrative rules as instruments. We use Danish administrative panel data. Average class size is 20, about the same as in the US and most European countries. Restricting the sample to observations close to the enrolment discontinuity points where the administrative rules have greatest predictive power, instrumental variables estimates are consistently negative. Estimates from the preferred specification are marginally significant and indicate modest effects in line with earlier studies. Estimates for subgroups are less precise, but they indicate larger effects for pupils from less advantaged backgrounds.     

试论阐述平衡常数存在的问题

本文指出了普通化学中阐述平衡常数存在的两个问题,论证其把经验平衡常数与标准平衡常数混为一谈而导致的概念混乱;以及因处理不妥而产生的错误。并且还提出了相应的修正方法。     

Do family farms really converge to a uniform size? The role of unobserved farm efficiency*

We analyse the growth of family farms in Israeli cooperative villages during a period of economic turmoil. We use instrumental variables to account for the endogeneity of initial farm size, and correct for selectivity as a result of farm survival. We also include a technical efficiency index, derived from the estimation of a stochastic frontier production model, as an explanatory variable. Our aim is to check whether ignoring efficiency could have been the reason for convergence results obtained elsewhere in the literature. We found that technical efficiency is an important determinant of farm growth, and that not controlling for technical efficiency could seriously bias the results. In particular, larger farms are found to grow faster over time, while without controlling for technical efficiency the farm growth process seemed to be independent of initial farm size. The increasing polarisation of farm sizes in Israel has ramifications for the inefficiencies induced by the historical quota system, for the political power of the farm sector and for the social stability of farm communities.