Volunteerism,compassion and religiosity as drivers of donations practices

• The topic of donations is one of high relevance and has been widely covered in contemporary marketing literature. It is a topic of interest to both theoreticians and practitioners alike, particularly due to its implicit links to fundraising activities and research. The reality of what makes an individual donor ultimately part with his money and give it away to a nonprofit organization is a hot contemporary topic. This study looks into the role of religiosity as a predictor of donations practices. Also volunteerism and compassion, two acts of pro‐social behaviour are analysed as predictors of donations practices. Using data collected from a survey of 612 charity donors in Portugal, the results show unequivocally that religiosity does influence donations practices, and so being a predictor of donations practices. Moreover, pro‐social behaviour is a predictor of donations practices when in the case of volunteerism, but not in the form of compassion.
• The findings are particularly useful for nonprofit organizations that want to attract and retain individual charitable donors and may also help to increase donation regularity, to obtain higher amounts, and donations both to religious and to secular organizations. Finally, it can be stated that the understanding of religiosity sheds light on knowledge about donations practices, and that this study also makes an important contribution to academia, as it is the first study conducted in Portugal that assesses the drivers of donations practices.

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Private equity and regulatory capital

Regulatory capital requirements for European banks have been put forward in the Basel II Capital Framework and subsequently in the capital requirements directive (CRD) of the EU. We provide a detailed discussion of the capital requirements for private equity investments under different approaches. For the internal model approach we present a structural model that we calibrate to a proprietary dataset. We modify the standard Merton structural model to make it applicable in practice and to capture stylized facts of private equity investments. We also implement the early default feature with a fast simulation algorithm. Our results support capital requirements lower than in Basel II, but not as low as in CRD, thereby giving adverse incentives to banks for using advanced risk models. A sensitivity analysis shows that this finding is robust to parameter uncertainty and stress scenarios.     

Epistemological and Pedagogical Challenges of Teaching International Business Ethics Courses

International business ethics courses imply four basic epistemological and pedagogical challenges: (a) understanding various perceptions of ethics and values/virtues; (b) identifying ethical maxims among religious/spiritual traditions; (c) designing international business ethics courses as dialogical experiences; and (d) deepening our personal contribution to others’ learning process. This article argues that those epistemological and pedagogical challenges could determine the design and the contents of international business ethics courses: facing up to compatible/incompatible ethical theories (philosophical questioning), identifying ethical maxims among religious/spiritual traditions (religious and spiritual questioning), and reading our actions/decisions as quasi-texts (literature-bound questioning). Business ethics teachers could take those challenges upon themselves and design their business ethics courses accordingly. For each of the four challenges, a specific ethical issue is described; advice for teachers as well as ethical questions for debate and personal development are provided.     

Does country matter in urban organic food products consumption?

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of finding international consumer segments in the organic food product (OFP) market. For that purpose, the power of country of residence in discriminating between urban frequent, occasional and non‐consumers of OFP was evaluated; and the most appropriate international segmentation bases for that market were studied. In order to achieve this goal, a survey of organic food consumers from Lisbon (Portuguese) and Berlin (German) was implemented through a structured questionnaire. Upon this, factorial and discriminant analysis was applied to the data. The results highlight the significance of the “Country” variable when distinguishing between groups of urban OFP consumers and non‐consumers as well as between frequent and occasional urban OFP consumers. The different levels of OFP consumption are mostly explained by the level of declared “OFP knowledge”. Therefore, we can conclude that in order to increase the consumption of OFP and dilute the effect of the country variable and to be able to work with international segments, marketers should aim to increase awareness and knowledge on these products. It is important to mention that this study was based on a non‐probabilistic sample and, consequently, generalizations of its conclusions must be made with care.     

Fashion consumer profiles in the Portuguese market: involvement,innovativeness, self‐expression and impulsiveness as segmentation criteria

This study identified fashion consumer profiles among Portuguese young adults. The work was based on four constructs: fashion involvement, fashion innovativeness, self‐expression through fashion products and impulsiveness. Another purpose of this study was to test these instruments in this cultural context in order to contribute to the generalizability of the scales. A cluster analysis uncovered three groups: Moderates, Apathetic and Enthusiasts. On the whole, this study proposes a new way of segmenting Portuguese fashion consumers and demonstrates that the four constructs employed can be used in different cultural contexts.     

Frontier markets’ efficiency: mutual information and detrended fluctuation analyses

This study tests weak form efficiency in frontier markets. Mutual information and detrended fluctuation analyses are performed to assess global correlation and long range dependence in the stock markets of twenty three countries. The results indicate that Slovenia is the only case where there is evidence compatible with weak form efficiency. The relatively less inefficient markets are mainly located in Europe and America, and the relatively more inefficient mainly in the Middle East. This information is useful for investors, but also for the assessed countries’ regulators as they indicate that relevant impediments are preventing the exploitation of potential profitable opportunities.

     

Competitive advantage,private-label brands,and category profitability

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of private-label resources possessed by a supermarket retailer. Our study examines whether or not private-label products can help in the overall enhancement of product category performance. We examine the performance of a supermarket retailer in the Northeast United States that operates over 100 stores and generates a total yearly sales volume in excess of $3 billion. Data of this nature is difficult to obtain for research purposes, and this proved to be very valuable. Data obtained from the internal financial database of the supermarket was used and generated from point-of-sale information. We then developed a research model from the literature review and used structural equation modelling to analyse the data. The findings of this study indicate that a change in category private-label sales penetration and category market share had little impact on category profitability. The major implication for retailers is the necessity for category managers to focus on all brands within their respective categories and not over-emphasise a private-label brand focus.     

Adopt the euro? The GME approach

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the degree of financial integration achieved in the European Union based on covered interest parity and using Generalized Maximum Entropy. EU countries are divided into two groups according to their current situation with respect to the adoption of the euro. Financial integration before the adoption of the euro is analyzed for the countries that adopted the euro in 1999. Similarly, current financial integration is evaluated for non-euro EU countries. Besides the importance of comparing the situation of the non-euro EU countries with the situation of the euro EU countries previous to the euro adoption, which may be useful to evaluate an eventual decision of the non-euro members to adopt the euro, it is interesting to analyze the performance of Generalized Maximum Entropy. Generalized Maximum Entropy has the ability to estimate the parameters of a regression model without imposing any constrains on the probability distribution of errors and it is robust even when we have ill-posed problems. Overall our results suggest that the degree of financial integration on non-euro countries is lower than the degree of financial integration that existed among euro adopting countries before the adoption of the euro.     

Selbstständige Migranten in Deutschland

Die Selbstst?ndigkeit von Personen mit Migrationshintergrund ger?t in den letzten Jahren vermehrt in das Blickfeld von Politikern, Wissenschaftlern und der allgemeinen ?ffentlichkeit. Was aber sind die besonderen Merkmale von selbstst?ndigen Migranten gegenüber selbstst?ndigen Deutschen und wie lassen sich diese Unterschiede erkl?ren? Andreia Tolciu (M.E.S), 27, ist Doktorandin am Hamburgischen WeltWirtschaftsInstitut (HWWI) und Stipendiatin der Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft; Ann-Julia Schaland, 26, Dipl.-Geografin, ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in der Migration Research Group am HWWI und Stipendiatin der Edmund Siemers-Stiftung.