The development of integrated marketing communications at the British General Post Office, 1931–39

In the 1930s, the General Post Office (GPO) in Britain became one of the nation’s most innovative pioneers of marketing communication. Following criticism of the organisation in the 1920s for its conservative use of publicity, the GPO embarked upon a series of creative publicity campaigns that applied, amongst other methods, advertising, public relations, promotions, cinema, events and artistic posters. Through an overview of its publicity, and through a narrative of three case-studies, this article argues that one of the most important innovations of the GPO was its integration of marketing communication, both in terms of techniques used and in relation to its emphasis in promoting the organisation and the services it provided.     

Short-term forecasting of Japanese tourist inflow to South Korea using Google trends data

We utilize the Internet search data from Google Trends to provide short-term forecasts for the inflow of Japanese tourists to South Korea. We construct the Google variable in a systematic way by combining keywords to minimize mean squared or mean absolute forecasting errors. We augment the Google variable to the standard time-series forecasting models and compare their forecasting accuracies. We find that Google-augmented models perform much better than the standard time-series models in terms of short-term forecasting accuracy. In particular, Google models show better out-of-sample forecasting performance than in-sample forecasting.     

Analyzing the impact of intermodal-related risk to the design and management of biofuel supply chain

This study presents a mathematical model that designs a reliable multi-modal transportation network for a biofuel supply chain system, where intermodal hubs are subject to site-dependent probabilistic disruptions. The disruption probabilities of intermodal hubs are estimated by using a probabilistic model which is developed using real world data. We developed an accelerated Benders decomposition algorithm to solve this challenging NP-hard problem. Numerical analysis show that the model selects to use intermodal hubs located in areas with low disruption probabilities. In case of a disaster, the reliable solution results in 6.21% savings over the minimum cost solution.     

IMMIGRANT RELATIVE WAGES AT THE GREAT RECESSION: EVIDENCE WITH MATCHED EMPLOYER‐EMPLOYEE DATA FOR SPAIN

The article examines relative wages of immigrants in Spain, with a particular focus on the impact of the Great Recession. The empirical analysis is restricted to men and is based on matched employer‐employee microdata and the decomposition techniques of Juhn et al. (1991, 1993) and Fortin et al. (2011). Our results show that the significant native‐immigrant wage gap that exists both in terms of average wages and of differentials along the wage distribution is essentially explained by differences in the endowments of observed characteristics so that, in general, immigrants tend to receive a similar wage treatment than Spaniards with analogous observed attributes. On the other hand, the Great Recession has had a noticeable impact on the relative wages of immigrants, given that the significant increase of the native‐immigrant wage gap observed during the previous expansionary period was mitigated during the economic downturn due to composition effects arising from the severe employment destruction pattern.     

Is it one break or ongoing permanent shocks that explains U.S. real GDP?

The relative importance of permanent versus cyclical shocks to GDP has been found to depend on the presence or absence of a single break in mean growth. We estimate unobserved components models conditional on a trend break having occurred in any specified quarter and use the Bayesian model averaging to combine the conditional estimates. We estimate a break occurred around 2006:1. Allowing for a break significantly reduces estimates of trend variance. However, enough spread remains in the posterior distribution to indicate that available data does not definitively settle the question of the relative importance of trend versus cycle.     

Cross-hedging strategies between CDS spreads and option volatility during crises

This paper presents a joint analysis of the term structure of credit default swap (CDS) spreads and the implied volatility surface for five European countries from 2007 to 2012, a sample period covering both the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the European debt crisis. We analyze to which extent effective cross-hedges can be performed between the credit and equity derivatives markets during these two crises. We find that during a global crisis a breakdown of the relationship between credit risk and equity volatility may occur, jeopardizing any cross-hedging strategy, which happened during the GFC. This stands in sharp contrast to the more localized European debt crisis, during which this fundamental relationship was preserved despite turbulent market conditions for both the CDS and volatility markets.     

Comparing efficiency of holding business model and individual management model of airports

This research compares the efficiency of holding business model to individual management model of airports, employing some robust non-parametric partial frontier-based methods to compare the statistical distributions of efficiency, under different scenarios, to find out which group of airports yields better global performance. The comparison between groups will follow a Malmquist index decomposition, which seems to be the most appropriate tool for within- and inter-group performance comparison. For this purpose, a sample of 145 airports from three continents is utilized. The results provide evidence that European airports are the most productive ones, and within this cluster, the individual management model presented a significant frontier shift with respect the holding cluster frontier, meaning that the former is much more productive than the latter.     

An integrated academic literacy approach to improving students’ understanding of plagiarism in an accounting course

Plagiarism in higher education is a widespread and complex issue. Students' understanding of plagiarism differs as a result of combining their prior learning about referencing with their current experience of institutional policies and generic resources. Plagiarism was identified as a major learning issue in a core second-year undergraduate accounting course at an Australian university. The purpose of this field study was to implement and evaluate an educative, integrated, discipline-specific intervention designed to address this learning issue. In the study, the theoretical and practical components of understanding plagiarism are identified as conceptualisation and application. Evaluation of students’ questionnaire responses pre and post the implementation of the intervention showed an improvement in their understanding of plagiarism, both conceptually and in the application of their knowledge. Furthermore, students’ reflections evidenced that they perceived positive changes in their understanding of plagiarism post intervention.     

A number‐of‐modes reference rule for density estimation under multimodality

We consider kernel density estimation for univariate distributions. The question of interest is as follows: given that the data analyst has some background knowledge on the modality of the data (for instance, ‘data of this type are usually bimodal’), what is the adequate bandwidth to choose? We answer this question by extending Silverman's idea of ‘normal‐reference’ to that of ‘reference to a Gaussian mixture’. The concept is illustrated in the light of real data examples.     

Raising the bar (4)

This editorial summarizes and comments on the papers published in issue 11(4) so as to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends. The first paper deals with common factors and spatial dependence in the error term specification of a production function model. The second paper sets forth a New Economic Geography (NEG) model with production activities that vary in their complexity, so as to analyse the impact on specialization patterns across different regions. The third paper measures the efficiency of local public investments using a relatively unknown econometric technique in which the time span over which the variables in the regression equation are measured is increased by one time period every run. The fourth paper adopts a conditional quantile regression approach to determine the impact of people employed in informal jobs on the wage distribution in Colombia and five of its regions. Finally, the last paper proposes and tests two new Bayesian variable selection approaches for spatial econometric models.