Regulatory Modes and Entrepreneurship: The Mediational Role of Alertness in Small Business Success

Previous studies suggest that entrepreneurs play a key role in the success of their ventures. But relatively little is currently known about how they produce such effects. The present research provides data suggesting that two modes of entrepeneurs’ self‐regulation—locomotion and assessment—enhance a firm's success through their effects on the components of alertness. This mediational model was tested and supported with data from 120 entrepreneurs. Locomotion was positively related to the scanning and search component, while assessment was positively related to the association and evaluation components. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of founders’ self‐regulation in the performance of their companies.     

Environmental Policy,Rankings and Stock Values

This paper examines the impact of Newsweek's ‘The Greenest Big Companies in America’ on stock values for large companies. Newsweek ranks the biggest Companies in America from one to 500. An event window of ten days following the rankings release to the public was examined to analyze the impact of relative rankings on stock values. Dummy variables were constructed denoting firms ranked in the highest and lowest quartiles. Control variables included return to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the firm's beta coefficient and total revenue. The main finding of the study is that inclusion in the top quartile of the rankings has a positive and statistically significant impact on firms' stock values, while the coefficient for the lowest quartile was not statistically different from zero. The results provide evidence of a positive impact on stock values from favorable environmental recognition but no effect for low ranked firms. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Managerial Views of Corporate Impacts and Dependencies on Ecosystem Services: A Case of International and Domestic Forestry Companies in China

A line of research is emerging investigating the private sector impacts and dependencies on critical biodiversity and ecosystem services, and related business risks and opportunities. While the ecosystem services narrative is being forwarded globally as a key paradigm for promoting business sustainability, there is scarce knowledge of how these issues are considered at managerial level. This study thus investigates managerial views of corporate sustainability after the ecosystem services concept. We analyse interviews conducted with 20 managers from domestic and international forestry companies operating with a plantation-based business model in China. Content analysis was employed to analyse the data, with a focus on four key areas: (1) interviewee familiarity with the ecosystem services concept; (2) their views of corporate dependencies and impacts on ecosystem services; (3) related business risks and opportunities; and (4) viability of existing instruments and practices that can be employed in detecting and addressing business impacts and dependencies on ecosystem services. Through an inductive approach to the empirical findings, we refined a framework that holds operational value for developing company response strategies to ecosystem services impact/dependence assessment, ensuring that all issues are addressed comprehensively, and that related risks and opportunities are properly acknowledged.     

The Impact of High Tech Production Techniques on Productivity and Profitability in Selected U.S. Manufacturing Industries

This paper examines the impact of high technology onmultifactor productivity and price-cost margins. Principal components obtained from five technologyvariables are related to multifactor productivityand price-cost margin. A negative and significantrelationship between price-cost margin and hightechnology methods when industry effects areexcluded, becomes insignificant in the industryeffects specification. The price-cost marginequations suggest that prior findings of a negativerelationship between profitability and hightechnology may result from omitting industryeffects. For multifactor productivity, there is apositive impact from high technology regardless ofwhether the specification includes industry effects.     

The Effects of Firm Size and Industry on Corporate Giving

Recent downward trends in corporate giving have renewed interest in the factors that shape corporate philanthropy. This paper examines the relationships between charitable contributions, firm size and industry. Improvements over previous studies include an IRS data base that covers a much broader range of firm sizes and industries as compared to previous studies and estimation using an instrumental variable technique that explicitly addresses potential simultaneity between charitable contributions and profitability. Important findings provide evidence of a cubic relationship between charitable giving and firm size and evidence of strong industry effects. The plus-minus-plus regression coefficient sign pattern for the cubic firm size model suggests that small and large firms give more relative to total receipts with lower giving ratios among medium size firms. One interpretation for this finding is that small firms are close to the communities they serve while high visibility creates a need for large firm philanthropy. Strong industry effects provide evidence of inter-industry differences in giving culture and/or different public relations requirements across industries. Christie H. Amato (Ph.D., University of Alabama) is professor of marketing at the Belk College of Business Administration, University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Dr. Amato's research interests lie in the area of strategic marketing, productivity, quality of life and ethics. She has published articles in top marketing journals including: Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Advertising and Journal of Business Research. Louis H. Amato (Ph.D., University of South Carolina) is professor of economics at the Belk College of Business Administration, University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Dr.␣Amato's research interests lie in the areas of market structure and profitability, productivity, quality of life and ethics. He has published articles in top journals including Southern Economic Journal, Review of Industrial Organization, and Quarterly Journal of Business and Economics.     

Alternative profitability measures and tests of the structure-performance relationship

This paper compares the inferences gained when alternatively specifying Census-based price-cost margin and IRS-based accounting rate of return as the dependent variable in conventional structure-performance models. We find important differences between the structure-performance inferences of the alternative specifications of the profit measure. Further, the alternative profit measures are not highly correlated.The authors acknowledge the constructive comments of an anonymous referee.     

Forecasting high resolution electricity demand data with additive models including smooth and jagged components

Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF) is a fundamental instrument in the efficient operational management and planning of electric utilities. Emerging smart grid technologies pose new challenges and opportunities. Although load forecasting at the aggregate level has been extensively studied, electrical load forecasting at fine-grained geographical scales of households is more challenging. Among existing approaches, semi-parametric generalized additive models (GAM) have been increasingly popular due to their accuracy, flexibility, and interpretability. Their applicability is justified when forecasting is addressed at higher levels of aggregation, since the aggregated load pattern contains relatively smooth additive components. High resolution data are highly volatile, forecasting the average load using GAM models with smooth components does not provide meaningful information about the future demand. Instead, we need to incorporate irregular and volatile effects to enhance the forecast accuracy. We focus on the analysis of such hybrid additive models applied on smart meters data and show that it leads to improvement of the forecasting performances of classical additive models at low aggregation levels.     

Why Do Some Consumers Prefer Organic Food? A Discourse Analytical Perspective

In an attempt to better understand the main motives behind organic food consumption, this study explores the consumer discourses of organic food. In all, 35 in-depth interviews were conducted, from which three major discourses were identified. These discourses were named primitivist, retro, and racialist. The data suggest that these Romantic discourses play on images of a supposedly glorious and innocent past. Consequently, consumers using these three discourses were more likely to prefer organic food, as they had a tendency to construct this type of food as more natural, authentic, and real. In this sense, Romantic discourses seem to offer more resonant themes for consumers than contemporary modern science can ever provide.     

Rule-of-thumb behaviour and monetary policy

We investigate the implications of rule-of-thumb behaviour by consumers or price setters for optimal monetary policy and simple interest rate rules. This behaviour leads to endogenous persistence in output and inflation and alters the policymaker's welfare objective. Our main finding is that highly inertial policy is optimal regardless of what fraction of agents occasionally follow a rule of thumb. We also find that a first-difference version of Taylor's (Carnegie-Rochester Conf. Ser. Public Policy 39 (1993) 195-214) rule generally has desirable properties. By contrast, the coefficients in other optimised simple rules tend to be extremely sensitive with respect to the fraction of rule-of-thumb behaviour.