Does justice affect brand advocacy? Online brand advocacy behaviors as a response to hotel customers’ justice perceptions

This study focuses on customers' information-sharing behavior in the context of online brand advocacy behavior regarding hotel brands. We aim to explain hotel customers' online brand advocacy behavior through three-sided justice evaluations (i.e., justice for employees, justice for the self, and global belief in a just world), and their hotel satisfaction. Hypotheses are tested by using survey data acquired from 688 individuals on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings show that customers' perceptions of justice for the self positively affect their hotel satisfaction, perceptions of justice for employees and the global belief in a just world positively affect online brand advocacy behavior, and hotel satisfaction also positively affects online brand advocacy behavior. We expand current research efforts on online brand advocacy research and provide theoretical and managerial implications for the development of marketing and management research and practice.     

军民融合协同创新驱动产业园区高质量发展研究

军民融合产业园区高质量发展对于推进军民深度融合、在全国形成可复制可推广经验具有重要意义。军民融合协同创新通过促进新知识涌现、推进新产业集聚发展，最终汇聚经济发展新动能，驱动园区高质量发展。在提出军民融合协同创新驱动园区高质量发展的机理与组织框架基础上，将发展模式归纳为以分享经济为背景的资源共享模式、以新型研发机构为核心的第三方模式、以产业联盟为核心的产业链拓展模式和以交易平台为核心的“PPP”模式，最后提出相关对策建议。     

Financing energy efficiency retrofits in Chilean households: The role of financial instruments,savings and uncertainty in energy transition

High firewood consumption for heating produces high levels of pollution in cities in central and southern Chile, with serious consequences for health and quality of life. Energy efficiency measures (EEMs) have been identified as the best strategy to reduce air pollution and maximize social benefits. However, their adoption has been slow. The objective of this article is to investigate household preferences for financial incentives needed to promote private investments in EEMs in Central-Southern Chilean households and study the role of energy savings and the uncertainty about potential savings in the investment decision, with the aim of finding solutions to increase the adoption of these technologies. We use a choice experiment to explore the trade-off between the investment costs, financial instruments, energy savings, and the uncertainty about achieving the theoretical savings provided by engineering and architectural models. The results show that financial instruments play the most important role in this decision, followed by the savings achieved by the retrofit. Householders prefer to finance their investments with a mix of their personal resources and medium-term credits, trying to avoid long-term commitments. Although uncertainty was found to be a significant variable, it seems to play a small role in the investment decision.     

Socio-demographics,political attitudes and informal sector employment: A cross-country analysis

In this paper, we empirically investigate the relationship between informal sector employment and micro-level socio-demographic characteristics, political acts and attitudes, and individual norms. Using self-reported individual micro-level data from the World Values Survey for seven developing countries (China, Ecuador, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Yemen), our cross-country regressions and principal component analysis reveal that socio-demographic characteristics of individuals are strong predictors of their informal sector employment. Our estimations further document that individual preferences for an economically strong, interventionist and egalitarian state and confidence in state and political institutions are positively and significantly correlated with informal sector employment, whereas variables associated with confidence in free market institutions and support for competition are negatively and significantly correlated with informal sector employment. We also show that individuals who participate either actively or inactively in peaceful and lawful political processes are significantly less likely to work in the informal sector. Finally, we document that individual norms, such as religiosity and tax morale, are negatively correlated with informal sector employment. Throughout our analysis, instead of having to rely on ad-hoc informality categorizations of third parties, we base our measurement of informal sector employment directly on the self-evaluation of individuals, who have the best information on the degree of their informality.     

The socio-economic determinants of COVID-19: A spatial analysis of German county level data

The study explores the association of socioeconomic, demographic, and health-related variables at the regional level with COVID-19 related cases and deaths in Germany during the so-called first wave through mid-June 2020. Multivariate spatial models include the 401 counties in Germany to account for regional interrelations and possible spillover effects. The case and death numbers are, for example, significantly positively associated with early cases from the beginning of the epidemic, the average age, the population density and the share of people employed in elderly care. By contrast, they are significantly negatively associated with the share of schoolchildren and children in day care as well as physician density. In addition, significant spillover effects on the case numbers of neighbouring regions were identified for certain variables, with a different sign than the overall effects, giving rise to further future analyses of the regional mechanisms of action of COVID-19 infection. The results complement the knowledge about COVID-19 infection beyond the clinical risk factors discussed so far by a socio-economic perspective at the ecological level.     

COVID-19, stock market and sectoral contagion in US: a time-frequency analysis

We assess the conditional relationship in the time-frequency domain between the return on S&P 500 and confirmed cases and deaths by COVID-19 in Hubei, China, countries with record deaths and the world, for the period from January 29 to June 30, 2020. Methodologically, we follow Aguiar-Conraria et al. (2018), by using partial coherencies, phase-difference diagrams, and gains. We also perform a parametric test for Granger-causality in quantiles developed by Troster (2018). We find that short-term cycles of deaths in Italy in the first days of March, and soon afterwards, cycles of deaths in the world are able to lead out-of-phase US stock market. We find that low frequency cycles of the US market index in the first half of April are useful to anticipate in an anti-phasic way the cycles of deaths in the US. We also explore sectoral contagion, based on dissimilarities, Granger causality and partial coherencies between S&P sector indices. Our findings, such as the strategic role of the energy sector, which first reacted to the pandemic, or the evidence about predictability of the Telecom cycles, are useful to tell the history of the pass-through of this recent health crises across the sectors of the US economy.     

Volatility spillovers between WTI and Brent spot crude oil prices: an analysis of granger causality in variance patterns over time

There has been an increase in price volatility in oil prices during and since the global financial crisis (GFC). This study investigates the Granger causality patterns in volatility spillovers between West Texas International (WTI) and Brent crude oil spot prices using daily data. We use Hafner and Herwartz’s (2006) test and employ a rolling sample approach to investigate the changes in the dynamics of volatility spillovers between WTI and Brent oil prices over time. Volatility spillovers from Brent to WTI prices are found to be more pronounced at the beginning of the analysis period, around the GFC, and more recently in 2020. Between 2015 and 2019, the direction of volatility spillovers runs unidirectionally from WTI to Brent oil prices. In 2020, however, a Granger-causal feedback relation between the volatility of WTI and Brent crude oil prices is again detected. This is due to the uncertainty surrounding how the COVID-19 pandemic will evolve and how long the economies and financial markets will be affected. In this uncertain environment, commodities markets participants could be reacting to prices and volatility signals on both WTI and Brent, leading to the detection of a feedback relation.     

我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空分布及影响因素研究

深入分析我国“一带一路”沿线地区风险投资时空格局及影响因素，有助于促进创新创业与企业发展、提高区域科技创新水平。运用空间分析方法和空间计量模型，对2003-2018年我国“一带一路”沿线139个城市风险投资的时空分布特征及影响因素进行分析，结果表明：①沿线地区的风险投资发展具有不均衡性，呈现为沿海高、西部低的分异格局；②风险投资的全局自相关系数均为正，呈现出明显的空间集聚特征；③风险投资机构数、国家高新区数量、风险投资退出、政府引导基金发展、财政科技支出对区域风险投资具有显著促进作用，环境污染对风险投资有一定抑制作用。随着ESG投资理念逐渐获得认可，沿线地区可以通过提升绿色发展水平促进风险投资发展。     

New development: China renews reform of central–local fiscal relations and provides for basic national public services

China’s reform on central–local fiscal reform has slowed down in recent years. The appointment of a new finance minister experienced in local government affairs is expected to renew the reform affirmed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress in late 2017. China has unprecedentedly identified a comprehensive list of 81 national basic public services as entitlements. Eighteen of them are subject to national and local standards, and co-financed by central and local governments. A new cost-sharing method for 10 of these services classifies sub-national jurisdictions into five tiers, in which the central government’s share declines from 80% to 10%. These measures, effective in 2019, aim at creating a ‘harmonious and moderately prosperous society’.     

Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Empirical Revisit of West German Consumers' Attitudes Toward Products and Brands from Former East Germany

More than 25 years after the German reunification, data show that products/brands from the eastern regions of Germany (“Neue Länder”) still do not have significant shares in the country's western part (“Alte Länder”). To analyze potential reasons for this phenomenon, our current study replicates a previous study that investigated selected attitudes of Alte Länder consumers toward products/brands from the Neue Länder. It is shown that factors such as consumer ethnocentrism, product judgment, willingness to buy, and economic animosity continue to influence consumer behavior and as such our study offers potential explanation for the failure of Neue Länder products/brands in the western regions of Germany.