Business and Economics Journal

This paper discusses the recent problems in commercial real estate markets in light of the philosophy of Kierkegaard. The paper links issues in property valuation with the philosophical thought of S?ren Kierkegaard and offers a value based solution which utilizes individual perception rather than solely relying on crowd based determinants of value. This is the first link of Kierkegaard?s thought with business valuation methods and practices. The primary thrust of this paper is a discussion of the benefits of individual risk perception versus crowd thinking in valuation.

This study utilizes the Kano model to assess the attitudes/opinions of citizens in Germany and France on political and economic issues related to the maturing of the European Union. The study attempts to assess current salient political and economic concerns of European citizenry via the Kano survey research technique. The survey respondents were asked to answer 20 questions concerning economic and political issues to determine areas of concern that the French and German governments should consider in order to enhance the satisfaction of their citizens with the overall political and economic climate within the EU. The survey was conducted to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. The increased pressures associated with further EU integration and expansion adds credence to the timeliness and importance of this study. The survey results indicate that there are divergences of opinion between the surveyed countries, and that future research will help shed further light on European enlargement and integration.

This article views the value of control rights when calculating the market value of the various stakes of regular shares, i.e., minority, blocking, controlling and super controlling ones. The approach is based on the technique of determining the value of control rights, which is indirectly calculated as the difference between the results of the market equity value estimated with the techniques taking into account control rights and those estimated with the techniques disregarding control rights (estimating equity capital on the minority level). The author proposes mechanisms for calculating premiums on control and discounts for lack of control reflecting various sets of initial data, including the structure of the company’s whole equity capital.

Research continues to investigate the relative efficacy of monetary and fiscal policies for stabilizing the US economy, a debate that began with Anderson and Jordan’s well-known study. This paper examines the contention of Senbet that monetary policy matters for stabilizing real economic activities; fiscal policy does not. We show that this claim is unfounded and apparently the outcome of prematurely dismissing fiscal policy from the cointegrating vector. In the context of a properly specified model, results we obtained from cointegration and error-correction tests using data and time period similar to Senbet’s consistently suggest that only fiscal policy Granger-causes real output over the long-run. Moreover both monetary and fiscal actions Granger-cause significant short-run effects on the real side of the economy.

Institutional infrastructure and governance play a critical role in attracting foreign investments. This is especially true in transition countries. This paper examines the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in South Eastern European Countries during the 1992-2010 timeframe. Using GMM estimations applied to dynamic panel data, visibility into regional foreign investments highlight the role of institutions as well as the distinctions between total FDI and Non-Privatization related FDI. The empirical data point to the importance of the quality of the institutions and the role of the privatization process in these countries.

This study intends to make a comparative analysis of the accounting standards for consolidation and investment in the three Chinese regions, i.e. the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, against the international accounting standards and the U.S. GAAP in order to facilitate more informative financial reporting. We also discuss the disclosure and supervisory requirements for equity investments. Due to the differences in the historical backgrounds and stages of economic development among the three regions, it is inevitable and necessary for the regions to maintain their respective characteristics in the accounting standards. Our analysis would generate some insight into how the three regions could reduce unnecessary differences between accounting standards in order to provide international investors with better and more reliable business information for decision making.

Numerous studies analyzing family firms have tried to explain their outperformance by diverse contractual and relational theories. However, the effect of entrenchment reveals ambiguous findings. Whereas several scholars underline the negative influence of entrenchment in family firms, others propose a positive approach resulting from the superiority of family firms in terms of efficiency. The purpose of this paper is thus to understand the impact of entrenchment within family firms acting in a specific institutional context. To determine whether entrenchment is significant, a 7-items scale is used. Based on data collected on the French stock market (SBF 120), we distinguish between family firms where the likelihood of entrenchment is high and those characterized by lower level of entrenchment. Our results show that family firms displaying higher level of entrenchment outperform (ROA, Gross Sales Margin and ROE), thereby confirming that managers in family firms are more likely to act as stewards of the organization.

This editorial focuses on the discussion of the concept of shared value creation, which has been recently added to the debate on corporate sustainability. The purpose of the article is to provide significant insight on shared value creation, how this approach is interacting with the existing literature on Corporate Social Responsibility and to present some cases of corporations that included societal needs in their core value propositions.

In this study, we presented robust analyses of the Nigerian equity market using weekly stock prices of 140 listed companies in Nigeria over the period of Jan 1 2006 to Dec 27 2012. We adopted two sets of tests. The first set comprises Llliefors, Cramer-Von-Mises, Anderson-Darling and Ljung-Box which confirmed that stock prices are not normally distributed. But the second set includes size/rank variance ratio tests and TGARCH in mean technique. The tests jointly revealed strong presence of inefficiency as anomalies can be traced to persisted volatility, lack of randomity, significant effects of information and heteroskedasticity/leptokurtic nature of stock prices. We therefore conclude that the information plays significant role in Nigerian stock market.

We investigate the effects of financial variables to increase the propensity for growth of capital markets stock indexes in60 emerging markets. We draw our sample from Compustat Global during a 257-month period (1986-2007) for a total of 9,759 observations. Our data indicate that price-to-book and turnover ratio leads to positive monthly returns of stock indexes, while evidence for traded volume is weak. However, market capitalization has a negative influence and reduces the probability of positive returns, suggesting that price pressure for transitory returns exists in these markets. This paper contributes to the financial market literature about emerging markets. It also provides useful information to regulators, investors, and practitioners for developing policies and strategies to improve the development of financial markets.

This study examined the equality of customer loyalty between two Banks in Anambra State- Nigeria. The objective of this study is to determine if there exists significant difference between loyalty of customers in two commercial banks in Anambra State. The data used for this study is primary data collected through the aid of administered questionnaire. The statistical tool used in analyzing the data was the permutation method for Hotelling T-Squared. The result of the analysis showed that there is no significant difference between customer loyalty of the two commercial banks. This result could be attributed to the improved supervision of the apex bank in Nigeria (Central Bank of Nigeria) on the activities and operation of the banking sector. Since, customer loyalty can help firms develop strategies to grow the right customers and in turn customers can be viewed in terms of their lifetime value. We recommend studies on determining the retention and lifetime value of commercial banking customers in Nigeria as a fruitful area for future research, for it appears that the banking industry is one of the most profitable within the Nigerian economy, hence, higher performance could be attained in terms of customer retention and loyalty there by creating wealth to her shareholders and rendition of social obligations to the larger society. Also, managers in the banking industry should note that failure to recognize the power of customer satisfaction, especially customer emotions, could destroy the power of customer retention and loyalty