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.     

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.     

Blockchain in Additive Manufacturing and its Impact on Supply Chains

Additive manufacturing (AM) appears to be a particularly attractive use case for blockchain. This research combines inductive in‐depth interviews with the Delphi method to explore what potentials blockchain technology in AM creates, which adoption barriers firms need to overcome, and how supply chains will be affected by the integration of these two potentially disruptive technologies. The results suggest opportunities that are related to intellectual property (IP) rights management, the monitoring of printed parts throughout their lifecycle, process improvements, and data security. The most important barriers for blockchain adoption in AM are an absence of blockchain‐skilled specialists on the labor market, missing governance mechanisms, and a lack of firm‐internal technical expertise. By addressing important limitations of AM, blockchain is expected to improve the competitiveness of AM in parts’ production, catalyzing the trend toward more decentralized manufacturing resulting in more agile, resilient, and flexible supply chains and reduced logistics costs. Beyond that, blockchain‐based AM platforms are expected to enhance supply chain visibility, drive supply chain digitalization, support supply chain finance, and contribute to the emergence of shared factory systems.     

Economic Competition,Policy Interdependence,and Labour Rights

Extant scholarship treats national policies concerning labour rights as a function of economic factors and yet neglects influences of policies among economically competing states. Relying on the policy interdependence theory, this study argues that labour rights policy in a state is dependent on its economic competitors’ labour policy decisions. It specifically maintains that the intensifying competition for foreign direct investment and exports as well as against imports channels negative externalities of deteriorating labour protection in competing states which drives expansive downward policy mimicking and leads to a global decline in labour rights – a race to the bottom. Utilising spatial econometric technique to analyse a new data on labour rights for the period 1994–2009, it finds that labour rights practices are interdependent among economic competitors and experience global deteriorations; whereas labour rights laws remain largely independent due to high policy and reputational costs of lowering them and show more fluctuations.     

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.     

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’.     

Optimal investment with vintage capital: Equilibrium distributions

The paper concerns the study of equilibrium points, or steady states, of economic systems arising in modeling optimal investment with vintage capital, namely, systems where all key variables (capitals, investments, prices) are indexed not only by time but also by age. Capital accumulation is hence described as a partial differential equation (briefly, PDE), and equilibrium points are in fact equilibrium distributions in the variable of ages. A general method is developed to compute and study equilibrium points of a wide range of infinite dimensional, infinite horizon, optimal control problems. We apply the method to optimal investment with vintage capital, for a variety of data, deriving existence and uniqueness of equilibrium distribution, as well as analytic formulas for optimal controls and trajectories in the long run. The examples suggest that the same method can be applied to other economic problems displaying heterogeneity. This shows how effective the theoretical machinery of optimal control in infinite dimension is in computing explicitly equilibrium distributions. To this extent, the results of this work constitute a first crucial step towards a thorough understanding of the behavior of optimal paths in the long run.     

Mandatory IFRS adoption and management forecasts: The impact of enforcement changes

We examine how concurrent enforcement changes affect the positive relationship between mandatory IFRS adoption and firms’ voluntary disclosure. We show that the increase in the issuance of management forecasts after IFRS adoption is smaller for firms from IFRS-mandating countries with concurrent enforcement changes than for those from countries without such changes. We find no difference in the increase of forecast informativeness between firms from IFRS-mandating countries without concurrent enforcement changes and firms from non-IFRS-mandating countries; however, firms domiciled in IFRS-mandating countries with concurrent enforcement changes exhibit a significantly smaller increase in forecast informativeness. Our findings suggest that better IFRS enforcement distinctly weakens (strengthens) the positive effect of IFRS adoption on voluntary (mandatory) disclosure.     

Forget about ‘the ideal worker’: A theoretical contribution to the debate on flexible workplace designs,work/life conflict,and opportunities for gender equality

This study integrates insights from Self-Determination Theory and Boundary Theory to present scenarios on how flexible workplace designs can trigger multiple motivational processes underlying gendered work/nonwork integration behaviors, and how these affect work/life conflict. We disentangle processes underlying work engagement and work/life conflict, explaining the paradoxical outcomes found with regard to gender inequality in terms of work/life performance, satisfaction, and health. Policy makers and organizations need an increased understanding and a reconceptualization of these issues, realizing that the ideal worker does not exist. Instead, a long-term perspective is needed in order to truly realize the potential benefits of flexible workplace designs for all stakeholders. Organizations need to take responsibility for preventing individual workers’ depletion and stimulating the regeneration of workers’ resources.     

Bridging the great divide? Making sense of the human rights-CSR relationship in UK multinational companies

Human rights (HR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are both fields of knowledge and research that have been shaped by, and examine, the role of multi-national enterprises in society. Whilst scholars have highlighted the overlapping nature of CSR and HR, our understanding of this relationship within business practice remains vague and under-researched. To explore the interface between CSR and HR, this paper presents empirical data from a qualitative study involving 22 international businesses based in the UK. Through an analysis based on sensemaking, the paper examines how and where CSR and HR overlap, contrast and shape one another, and the role that companies’ international operations has on this relationship. The findings reveal a complex and multi-layered relationship between the two, and concludes that in contrast to management theory, companies have bridged the ‘great divide’ in varying degrees most notably in their implementation strategies.