A Review of New Evaluation Models for Strategic Communication: Progress and Gaps

After identification of “stasis” in evaluation of strategic communication including public relations and corporate communication despite intensive focus for more than 40 years, recent initiatives in measurement and evaluation on three continents highlight a number of important advances in theory and practice. Although studies have identified a lack of standards and a narrow focus on “activities” and “outputs” in traditional evaluation models and literature, a two-year international study, which examined a number of recently developed evaluation frameworks and models and accompanying implementation guidelines, identifies several new concepts and dimensions in evaluation, along with some remaining gaps for further research. Based on content analysis of evaluation literature, interviews, and ethnography, this article reports four key findings of recent research and explains how these can contribute to theory-building and practice to transform the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public relations and corporate, government, organizational and marketing communication.     

Information Entropy-Based Housing Spatiotemporal Dependence

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - In the existing housing literature, there has been no academic consensus on how to combine the spatial dependence and the temporal dependence...     

Further Mining the Predictability of Moving Averages: Evidence from the US Stock Market

Most studies on the predictability of moving average (MA) technical analysis use the discrete (buy/sell) trading recommendations. However, it is possibly incomplete or unreliable to explore the predictability of MA by only employing its generated trading signals. To further explore the forecastability of MA, we study its measurable impact on the stock market returns by using a conventional predictive regression framework. Our empirical study on the US stock market with respect to more detailed price information finds, (i) that the proposed predictor, MADP (MA based on daily prices) shows significant predictability in‐ and out‐of‐sample, and significantly outperforms the historical average (HA) benchmark as well as the MA based on monthly prices, (ii) that the predictability of MADP centers on the short‐term lags (within the most recent 10 days) and disappears when lags are beyond 20 days, and (iii) that the economic evaluation of the portfolios based on trading strategies confirms the superior performance of MADP with short‐term lags against the benchmark even though considering transaction costs.     

The Roles of HRM in CSR: Strategic Partnership or Operational Support?

As the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy requires promoting employee participation and initiating meaningful changes in organisational culture, the involvement of the human resource management (HRM) function in policy formulation and implementation is highly desirable. The relationship between the HRM and CSR functions is, however, under-investigated than other areas. Hence, there is a lack of clarity concerning HRM roles and the conditions under which they may be strategic or operational in nature. By drawing on data from interviews with 29 CSR and HRM professionals of large organisations in New Zealand, this paper argues that the role and contribution of the HR function in CSR is contingent on organisational variables such as the CSR structure, the scope and application of CSR and the nature of the HR functions. It concludes that in such contexts HRM is more likely to offer operational support in executing CSR rather than strategic input.     

FDI facilitated by agglomeration economies: evidence from manufacturing and services joint ventures in China

The open door policy of China’s economic reform since the 1980s has attracted heavy foreign direct investment (FDI) flows into China and especially to Guangdong (particularly the Pearl River Delta region, PRD) and induced significant economic growth during the past two decades. While there exist various classical theories of FDI in attempting to identify the determinants of FDI inflow and to explain the behavior of FDI flows, limited attention has been given from the perspective of agglomeration effects generated by a core-periphery (CP) relation.This paper intends to study the impacts of agglomerations on FDI inflows in the context of Krugman’s CP relation (1991) by investigating (1) the formation of a CP relation via gravity model analysis; (2) whether different types of industry FDI flows will respond differently in the CP-system, given agglomeration effects; and (3) whether FDI origin and firm scale matter in affecting FDI flows.A database consisting of a population frame of 37,742 firm-level manufacturing and services joint ventures investing in Guangdong in 1998 was used. Empirical results show that the agglomerations of the CP relation have affected FDI flow patterns. While both manufacturing and services FDI and sources of investment responded differently to the impacts, smaller firms were found more responsive to the CP-agglomeration settings regardless of FDI by industry type and by source. The significance and implications of the CP-system to further facilitate FDI in the region are discussed.     

Fiscal decentralization, revenue and expenditure assignments, and growth in China

Theory suggests that a close match between revenue and expenditure assignments at sub-national levels benefits allocative efficiency, and hence economic growth. That is, a convergence of revenue and expenditure assignments at sub-national levels of government should, according to the theory, be positively associated with a higher growth rate. In the case of China, this paper shows, divergence, rather than convergence, in revenue and expenditures at the sub-national level of government is associated with higher rates of growth. A panel dataset for 30 provinces in China is used to examine the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth over two phases of fiscal decentralization in China: (1) 1979–1993 under the fiscal contract system, and (2) 1994–1999 under the tax assignment system. The seeming contradiction between the theory and evidence in the China case is reconciled by taking into account the institutional arrangements that prevailed during the two phases of fiscal decentralization, in particular the inconsistency between the assumptions of the theory of fiscal decentralization and the institutional reality of China.     

苏南、苏中和苏北对外开放度与经济增长关系的实证分析

一个国家或地区的经济开放程度涉及很多方面，如贸易国际化、资本国际化、劳动力跨国流动、技术引进和输出等。基于操作上简便易行、指标上具有可比性和连续性、资料易于搜集和量化等原则，本文拟选择出口额、实际利用外商直接投资额与GDP建立对外开放度这一指标。通常情况下，有些学者还会考虑国际投资开放度这个指标，但是．在计划计算苏南、苏中及苏北的国际投资开放度这一指标时发现：一方面由于统计资料的限制．另一方面由于苏南、苏中及苏北的对外投资数额很小，