Potential user factors driving adoption of IPTV. What are customers expecting from IPTV?

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), the convergence services of television and Internet, is being rapidly developed around the world. The advent of digital technologies has changed the convergence market dramatically with the wide diffusion of the convergent services. Using the Technology Acceptance Model as a conceptual framework and method of logistic regression, this research analyzes the demand for IPTV by drawing data from 452 consumers. Individuals' responses to questions about whether they accept IPTV are collected and combined with observations of their socio-economic status and intrinsic/extrinsic factors modified from the Technology Acceptance Model. Results of logistic regression show two variables (intrinsic and extrinsic factors) that seem to explain what influences consumer behavior towards adopting IPTV. Overall, the logistic regression model explains over 50% of the variance in the IPTV adoption. The variances shed light on the multi-open platform environment that IPTV will forge.     

An instrumental variable approach for panel unit root tests under cross-sectional dependence

For dynamic panel models with cross-sectional dependence, several unit root tests are constructed using a Huber-type instrument, whose null asymptotics are standard Gaussian and do not depend on nuisance parameters. A Monte-Carlo simulation shows that the proposed tests have better sizes and comparable powers relative to other two existing tests developed for cross-sectionally dependent dynamic panel models.     

The rationality and efficacy of decisions under uncertainty and the value of an experiment

Summary A decision maker faces a known prior distribution over payoff relevant states. We compare the expected utility of this individual under two scenarios. In the first, the decision maker makes a choice without further information. In the second, the decision maker has access to an experiment before choosing an action. However, the decision maker does not know the true joint distribution over states and messages. The value of the experiment as measured by the difference in the two utility levels can be negative as well as positive. We give a condition which is necessary and sufficient for the experiment to be valuable in our sense, for any decision problem.An earlier version of this paper was circulated under the title Noisy Bayes Updating and the Value of Information. We have gained from the comments of Stephen Coate, John Geanakoplos, Larry Samuelson, Timothy Van Zandt and seminar participants at Harvard Business School, Princeton, Boston University, the international conference on game theory at Stony Brook 1992 and the Winter meeting of the Econometric Society at Anaheim 1993. The first author received support for this project from NSF grant #SES-9308515 and a University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation Grant.     

The Effects of Oil Price on the Korean Economy: A Global VAR Approach

This article empirically explores the effects of oil price on the Korean economy using a Global VAR model. First, we evaluate the average connectedness of oil price with the Korean domestic variables over the precrisis period. We then investigate the time-varying contribution of oil price to the Korean financial and real sectors during and after the global financial crisis through recursive estimation. It is found that the contribution of oil price becomes very large in the case of real exports, equity prices, and real output, but plays a much less prevalent role in the remaining cases. In the meantime, the time-varying contribution of oil price to the Korean economy has not changed during and after the global financial crisis. Interestingly, we find that the Korean economy is affected mostly by overseas financial conditions in the short-term but it becomes more susceptible to oil price fluctuations in the long run, suggesting that Korea’s reliance on energy imports leaves the economy exposed to volatility in energy prices.     

Impacts of household loan regulation on financial stability: evidence from Korea

The paper examines whether banking regulations and monetary policy contributed to controlling the fragility of household debt in Korea. The results show that housing loan regulations such as debt to income regulation contributed to a lower household debt delinquency ratio. Lowering the target interest rate provided additional stabilisation of the delinquency ratio. It is recommended that the government adopt an appropriate mix of regulation and monetary policy to control household financial fragility. The financial supervisory services need to be involved in managing debt to income regulation and minimising financial instability and financial market distortions. Further, the monetary authority has to adopt a more effective position in controlling the real lending interest rate and the delinquency ratio of household loans. Such a policy mix will improve effectiveness in controlling financial fragility, especially at a time of financial crisis.     

A bootstrap test for jumps in financial economics

An i.i.d. bootstrap is applied for the ratio test of Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2006) for jumps in jump diffusion processes. Asymptotic validity is established for the bootstrap test both under the null of no jump and under the alternative of jumps. Finite sample simulation shows that the bootstrap test has more stable size than the ratio test of Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2006).     

Information in generalized method of moments estimation and entropy-based moment selection

In this paper, we make five contributions to the literature on information and entropy in generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. First, we introduce the concept of the long run canonical correlations (LRCCs) between the true score vector and the moment function f(_vt,_θ0)$f(v_t,{\theta }_0)$ and show that they provide a metric for the information contained in the population moment condition E[f(_vt,_θ0)]=0$\mathrm{E}[f(v_t,{\theta }_0)]=0$. Second, we show that the entropy of the limiting distribution of the GMM estimator can be written in terms of these LRCCs. Third, motivated by the above results, we introduce an information criterion based on this entropy that can be used as a basis for moment selection. Fourth, we introduce the concept of nearly redundant moment conditions and use it to explore the connection between redundancy and weak identification. Fifth, we analyse the behaviour of the aforementioned entropy-based moment selection method in two scenarios of interest; these scenarios are: (i) nonlinear dynamic models where the parameter vector is identified by all the combinations of moment conditions considered; (ii) linear static models where the parameter vector may be weakly identified for some of the combinations considered. The first of these contributions rests on a generalized information equality that is proved in the paper, and may be of interest in its own right.     

The managed heart: The structural analysis of the stressor–strain relationship and customer orientation among emotional labor workers in Korean hotels

This study examined the structural relationships among three different dimensions of workplace stressors (customer-related stressor, CRS; work environment-related stressor, WERS; job-related stressor, JRS), negative affectivity (NA), emotional exhaustion (EE), and the negative effect of that strain on customer orientation (CO) in the context of the emotional labor (EL) of frontline employees in the hotel industry. Data were collected from self-administrated questionnaires distributed among frontline employees in room and F&B divisions in Korean deluxe tourist hotels, where EL is intense. The results of the structural equation analysis indicated a positive association between all three workplace stressors and NA and between NA and EE. There was also a relationship in the opposite direction with EE and CO, as hypothesized. The moderating effect of organizational level on the workplace stressors–NA relationships was also confirmed. In addition, in an alternative model, we found that NA partially mediates the relationship between JRS and EE; whereas, NA fully mediates the relationships between CRS/WERS and EE. Practical implications are discussed in detail and limitations of the study and future research directions are also suggested.     

Real exchange rate dynamics in the presence of non-traded goods and transaction costs

This paper studies the role of non-traded goods and transaction costs in accounting for the puzzling behavior of real exchange rates. We show that introducing the transaction costs and non-traded goods in an otherwise standard competitive model dramatically improves its ability to rationalize observed real exchange rate dynamics.