The contribution of Western fast food to fast-growing body mass in China

The westernization of Asian countries has led to the rapid expansion of Western-style fast-food restaurants, which are believed to be fueling an unprecedented rise in body mass in these countries. This study tests this belief using longitudinal data from China. Exploiting the opening of a Western-style fast-food restaurant in a particular community, we conduct a transition analysis to make a more convincing causal interpretation than the standard cross-sectional or fixed-effects approach. Considering several measures of fatness, we find no robust evidence of Western fast food having a substantial effect overall, but there is some indication of effect heterogeneity.     

Does context matter for sustainability disclosure? Institutional factors in Southeast Asia

Corporate sustainability is a dynamic, socially constructed concept. Relatedly, to understand the variations in the disclosure of corporate sustainability activities across countries, we need to inherently explore their underlying sociopolitical contexts. At present our understanding in this regard, is deficient. We respond to this extant research gap by adopting a multi‐country approach to investigate the relationship between countries' institutional environments and firms' sustainability disclosure (SD) practices, across six countries in the Southeast Asian region. Our findings reflect a common focus of Southeast Asian firms on community and human resources (HRs) related disclosures. Nevertheless, nuanced differences in their overall SD levels confirm the influence of differing legal, normative, and sociocultural systems in engendering greater disclosure and transparency at a national level. By quantifying the institutional environment and identifying external influencing factors, our study provides a useful framework grounded in neo‐institutional theory to widen the existing understanding of how institutional pressures can be measured and compared across different contexts.     

Being Innovative While Being Green: An Experimental Inquiry into How Consumers Respond to Eco‐Innovative Product Designs

Eco‐innovations are an effective way for companies to strategically align themselves with customers’ growing environmental concerns. Despite their crucial role, scant research has focused on eco‐innovative product designs. Drawing from the sustainability and innovation literature, this article proposes that in the design of an eco‐innovation, its degree of innovativeness, level of eco‐friendliness, and detachability significantly affect consumers' adoption intentions. This article develops various conceptual models tested through three independent online experiments with U.S. consumers. The findings support the hypotheses and provide useful insights into the underlying mechanisms of how and why consumers respond to eco‐innovative product designs across various high‐tech product categories. Specifically, the results show (1) a positive effect of innovativeness degrees of eco‐innovative attributes on consumers' perceptions of product eco‐friendliness and on their adoption intentions as well as a significant moderating role of consumers' need for cognition (Study 1); (2) a positive influence of eco‐friendliness levels of eco‐innovative attributes on consumer adoption intentions in the case of high‐complexity products but not for low‐complexity products, emphasizing the need to adopt different approaches when developing eco‐innovations to ensure favorable consumer reactions (Study 2); and (3) a significant impact of the detachability of eco‐innovative attributes on consumers' perceptions of trade‐offs between environmental benefits and product functionality and on their intentions to adopt eco‐innovations (Study 3). These findings add to existing theoretical knowledge, provide actionable managerial implications, and identify fruitful avenues for future research.     

Effects of investor tax heterogeneity on stock prices and trading behaviour around the ex-dividend day: the case of Australia

Using a sample of Australian stocks during the 1996–2014 period, this study examines how tax heterogeneity between domestic and foreign investors affects trading behaviour and stock prices around the ex-dividend day. Domestic investors prefer dividends and tend to buy stocks cum-dividend and sell them ex-dividend whereas foreign investors tend to trade in the opposite direction. Abnormal trading turnover increases with tax heterogeneity. Moreover, stocks with a larger domestic investor base are associated with a higher price drop-off ratio on the ex-dividend day and higher market value of franking credits. Overall, our findings support the dynamic dividend clientele hypothesis.     

Social media bots and stock markets

This study examines the link between information spread by social media bots and stock trading. Based on a large sample of tweets mentioning 55 companies in the FTSE 100 composites, we find significant relations between bot tweets and stock returns, volatility, and trading volume at both daily and intraday levels. These results are also confirmed by an event study of stock response following abnormal increases in the volume of tweets. The findings are robust to various specifications, including controlling for traditional news channel, alternative measures of volatility, information flows in pretrading hours, and different measures of sentiment.     

Developmental Rent Management Analysis: Learning,Upgrading, and Innovation

In this article, I construct an original analytical framework, called the developmental rent management analysis (DRMA), for the analysis of rents and rent management. This framework is based on the premise that successful rent management depends on political and institutional arrangements to produce incentives and pressures for technical upgrading and innovation. This is because, while rents are created for a variety of purposes, rent outcomes — whether growth-enhancing or growth-reducing — depend on a set of political, institutional, and market conditions that take place formally and informally. Therefore, the key objective of the DRMA framework is to understand how a country’s politics, institutions, and industries are configured to incentivize and compel industrial upgrading. Thus, DRMA enables a broader and more complex understanding of the various factors at play in the process of development. I provide an illustrative application of the DRMA framework using the Vietnamese experience of adopting third-generation technology in the telecommunications industry.     

Applying the dissonance‐minimising format to value cultural heritage in developing countries*

We adapt the dissonance‐minimising (DM) format proposed by Blamey et al. [Land Economics, 75 (1999) 126] in a dichotomous choice contingent valuation survey to estimate the economic benefits of preserving a cultural heritage site in Vietnam. We find that the DM format can be successfully applied to avoid biases because of yea‐saying in a developing country context.