Different but Similar: Social Comparison of Travel Motives Among Tourists

Although previous research suggests that people prefer to think of themselves as being authentic (or individualistic) travellers rather than stereotyped tourists, there have been few studies investigating the external validity of such claim. This paper addresses this research gap by investigating tendencies to dissociate the self from typical tourists in terms of travel motivation. Findings suggest that people perceive their own travel motives to be different from those who they perceive as typical tourists and that these tendencies generalize across people involved in different forms of tourism. This paper discusses the results from a social psychological perspective and provides implications for future research and destination management alike. © 2014 The Authors. International Journal of Tourism Research published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Raising the bar (6)

Raising the bar (6). Spatial Economic Analysis. This editorial summarizes and comments on the papers published in issue 12(4) so as to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends. The first paper addresses the question of whether ‘jobs follow people’ or ‘people follow jobs’. The second paper develops a new methodology to determine functional regions. The third paper is a major contribution to the growing literature on new modelling approaches and applications of disaster impact models. The fourth paper focuses on the costs and benefits of higher education. The fifth paper develops a two-step procedure to identify endogenously spatial regimes in the first step using geographically weighted regression, and to account for spatial dependence in the second step. Finally, the sixth paper estimates a dynamic spatial panel data model to explain house prices and to show that restricted housing supply in the city of Cambridge, UK, has some undesirable labour market effects.     

Asymmetric pricing of implied systematic volatility in the cross‐section of expected returns

Assuming a symmetric relation between returns and innovations in implied market volatility, Ang, A., Hodrick, R., Xing, Y., and Zhang, X. (2006) find that sensitivities to changes in implied market volatility have a cross‐sectional effect on firm returns. Dennis, P., Mayhew, S., and Stivers, C. (2006), however, find an asymmetric relation between firm‐level returns and implied market volatility innovations. We incorporate this asymmetry into the cross‐sectional relation between sensitivity to volatility innovations and returns. Using both portfolio sorting and firm‐level regressions, we find that sensitivity to VIX innovations is negatively related to returns when volatility is rising, but is unrelated when it is falling. The negative relation is robust to controls for other variables, suggesting only the increase in implied market volatility is a priced risk factor. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 31:34–54, 2011     

Fair Trade Consumption: In Support of the Out-Group

Two sets of self-transcendence values – universalism and benevolence – act as a source of motivation for the promotion of the welfare of the other rather than the self. This article sought to determine the exact nature of the interaction between these sets of values and the consumption of fair trade products. In an earlier study, universalism values were found to have a significant influence on fair trade consumption whereas benevolence values did not, despite their shared goal and values theory. Additionally, there was supporting evidence in the extant literature that benevolence values should influence fair trade consumption behavior. This study took a closer look at the individual values that make up the value categories universalism and benevolence to better understand and describe this universalism–benevolence distinction in fair trade consumption. It was established that perhaps group membership has an influence on the decision to buy fair trade products. Specifically, it seems that an overriding sense of responsibility to one’s own group – the in-group – prevents some consumers from identifying with, empathizing with, and subsequently sharing resources with fair trade producers; members of out-groups in far-flung corners of the globe. It appears that the universalism–benevolence distinction in fair trade consumption might also be described as an in-group–out-group distinction.     

On the relative efficiency of estimators which include the initial observations in the estimation of seemingly unrelated regressions with first-order autoregressive disturbances

The generalized least squares estimator for a seemingly unrelated regressions model with first-order vector autoregressive disturbances is outlined, and its efficiency is compared with that of an approximate generalized least squares estimator which ignores the first observation. A scalar index for the loss of efficiency is developed and applied to a special case where the matrix of autoregressive parameters is diagonal and the regressors are smooth. Also, for a more general model, a Monte Carlo study is used to investigate the relative efficiencies of various estimators. The results suggest that Maeshiro (1980) has overstated the case for the exact generalized least squares estimator, because, in many circumstances, it is only marginally better than the approximate generalized least squares estimator.     

Earnings conference calls and stock returns: The incremental informativeness of textual tone

Quarterly earnings conference calls are becoming a more pervasive tool for corporate disclosure. However, the extent to which the market embeds information contained in the tone (i.e. sentiment) of conference call wording is unknown. Using computer aided content analysis, we examine the incremental informativeness of quarterly earnings conference calls and the corresponding market reaction. We find that conference call linguistic tone is a significant predictor of abnormal returns and trading volume. Furthermore, conference call tone dominates earnings surprises over the 60 trading days following the call. The question and answer portion of the call has incremental explanatory power for the post-earnings-announcement drift and this significance is primarily concentrated in firms that do not pay dividends, illustrating differences in investor behavior based on the level of cash flow uncertainty. Additionally, we find that a context specific linguistic dictionary is more powerful than a more widely used general dictionary (Harvard IV-4 Psychosocial).     

Confidence,opinions of market efficiency,and investment behavior of finance professors

We identify finance professors’ opinions on the efficiency of the stock markets in the United States and assess whether their views on efficiency influence their investing behavior. Employing a survey distributed to over 4,000 professors, we obtain four main results. First, most professors believe the market is weak to semi-strong efficient. Second, twice as many professors passively invest than actively invest. Third, our respondents’ perceptions regarding market efficiency are almost entirely unrelated to their trading behavior. Fourth, the investment objectives of professors are, instead, largely driven by the same behavioral factor as for amateur investors–one's confidence in his own abilities to beat the market, independent of his opinion of market efficiency.