Determinants of dining satisfaction and post-dining behavioral intentions

The purpose of this research is to empirically investigate the determinants and consequences of dining satisfaction with restaurant services. A total of 338 undergraduate business students participated in this research. Results reveal that there exist three sources of customers’ satisfaction with restaurant services: positive emotions, perceived service quality and negative emotions. Positive emotions have more impact on customers’ satisfaction than negative emotions. In addition, emotions mediate the impact of perceived service quality on dining satisfaction. Finally, satisfaction has a significant impact on recommendation, customer loyalty and willingness to pay more.     

On the Sources of Inflation in Kenya: A Model‐Based Approach

We develop a semi‐structural new‐Keynesian open‐economy model – with separate food and non‐food inflation dynamics to study the sources of inflation in Kenya in recent years. To do so, we filter international and Kenyan data (on output, inflation and its components, exchange rates and interest rates) through the model to recover a model‐based decomposition of most variables into trends (or potential values) and temporary movements (or gaps) – including for the international and domestic relative price of food. We use the filtration exercise to recover the sequence of domestic and foreign macroeconomic shocks that account for business cycle dynamics in Kenya over the last few years, with a special emphasis on the various factors (international food prices, monetary policy) driving inflation. We find that while imported food price shocks have been an important source of inflation, both in 2008 and more recently, accommodating monetary policy has also played a role, most notably through its effect on the nominal exchange rate. We also discuss the implications of this exercise for the use of model‐based monetary policy analysis in sub‐Saharan African countries.     

A Psychological Reexamination of the Bertrand Paradox

The Bertrand paradox describes a situation in which two competing firms reach an outcome where both price at marginal cost. In laboratory experiments, this equilibrium is not generally observed. Existing empirical works on Bertrand competition have found evidence for boundedly rational models. We find that such models are useful in organizing behavior in early stages of the game, but less so in later stages. We show that a new model, coarse grid Nash equilibrium, based on the assumption that subjects discretize the strategy space, explains the data better.     

Using Housing Futures in Mortgage Research

Expectations of housing prices play an important role in real estate research. Despite their importance, obtaining a reasonable proxy for such expectations is a challenge. The existing literature on mortgage research either does not include housing expectation proxies in empirical models, or uses “backward-looking” proxies such as past housing appreciation or time series forecasts based on past housing appreciation. This paper proposes to use the transaction prices of Case-Shiller housing futures as an alternative “forward-looking” proxy. As an example, we compare the performances of four different expectation proxies in explaining mortgage default behavior. The loan level analysis shows that the futures based expectation proxy outperforms other proxies by having the highest regression model fit and being the only proxy that shows a significant negative effect on mortgage default behavior, as theory suggests. Out of sample predictions also show that futures have better prediction accuracy than other proxies. In addition, the paper shows that futures contain additional information that is not present in the backward-looking proxies.     

Theϕ-divergence statistic in bivariate multinomial populations including stratification

ϕ-divergence statistics quantify the divergence between a joint probability measure and the product of its marginal probabilities on the basis of contingency tables. Asymptotic properties of these statistics are investigated either considering random sampling or stratified random sampling with proportional allocation and independence among strata. To finish same tests of hypotheses of independence are presented. The research in this paper was supported in part by DGICYT Grants No. PS91-0387 and No. PB91-0155. Their financial support is gratefully acknowledged.     

Bank lending channel of monetary policy： Evidence for Colombia,using a firms＇ panel data

In this paper we find empirical evidence of bank lending channel for Colombia, using a balanced panel data of about four thousand non-financial firms. We find that increases in the interest rate, proxiing for the monetary policy instrument, lead to a reduction in the proportion of bank loans, out of total debt, of the firms. This bank lending channel amplifies the effect of the traditional interest rate channel, which leads to a reduction in total debt and spending when monetary policy tightens. Our evidence suggests that firm size matters in the transmission of monetary policy through the bank lending channel： Smaller firms have a higher probability of being credit rationed after a tightening of monetary policy than （otherwise identical） larger firms.     

Volatifity spillovers on precious metals markets and the G-7： The effects of the Asian crisis

This paper investigates the nature of volatility spillovers between stock returns and precious metals returns for the G-7 countries over the 1995-2006 period. We divide our sample into a number of sub periods, prior to, during and after the Asian crisis, with the objective to provide a wide analysis of the behaviour of these two markets taking into account the effects of the Asian crisis; We use EGARCH modelling, which takes into account whether bad news has the same impact on volatility as good news. The results show that there is no evidence of volatility persistence from stock returns to precious metals returns, but overall the results are significant in the other way around. In terms of volatility spillovers effects, the main findings are that there is evidence of volatility spill over running in a bidirectional way in almost all the cases. And finally, the results from asymmetric spillovers effects show that negative news has a stronger impact in these financial markets than positive news.