Financial regulations are often born out of financial crises, a response intended to reduce the impact of future upheavals. A pertinent question for our times is: how much of a difference do they make? Ryan LaFond and Haifeng You ponder this question in looking at a recent study of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA), which was ... Read More

Target search is important in a number of fields, from industrial engineering and radiology to product searches and navigation. The processes involved have had to be inferred in the past based on final choice, but the evolution of eye movement tracking has opened the way to following closely just how people look for targets. Ralf van der Lans and his co ... Read More

Good quality financial reporting has been shown to improve capital investment efficiency, but this finding to date has been incomplete. While reporting quality is related to general improvement, it has not been clear whether it reduces over-investment or under-investment, or both. Gary Biddle, Gilles Hilary and Rodrigo Verdi investigate and find higher ... Read More

People willingly pay different prices for the same goods and the advent of the Internet, which was supposed to provide consumers with more and better information so they could find the best deal, has not changed things. That finding, from a study comparing US airline tickets, shows that companies are still able to use pricing strategies to brand themselves ... Read More

It has been a long held belief among financial economists that when a firm's information disclosure is less transparent, its stock price reflects less firm-specific information as opposed to market-wide information. That is, its stock price synchronicity, the proportion of variation in stock return that can be explained by the market factor, will be high ... Read More

Corporate governance mechanisms can be a means to keep managers in line and ensure they work towards the interests of the firm's owners. The problem is that, there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution. Some mechanisms work better in certain firms than others. In highly innovative firms that depend on firm-specific knowledge assets to create economic value, for ... Read More

When researchers investigate factors that enhance employee job performance and commitment, they face an important constraint: much of the theory and findings are based in the US, where the culture is less traditional and less accepting of unequal distributions of power in the workplace. What happens, then, when you apply the same theories to a society with ... Read More

Consumers' prior knowledge of a product category can enhance the impact of an advertisement. The challenge for marketers is to find the best way to tap into this effect. It is not sufficient to present only the information. How the message is presented and how abstract the content is can make a difference in consumer evaluations. That finding by Jiewen Hong ... Read More

Expatriate managers returning to their parent company from overseas assignments have a fairly high turnover rate - an estimated 20 percent quit within one year of coming home. Multinational companies wanting to prevent this situation should offer expatriates more support overseas so as to strengthen their commitment to the firm, according to research by Riki ... Read More

Debt management is a serious and timely concern. The sub-prime mortgage problem in the US showed that the repercussions of poor debt management can extend into other sectors and markets, and have global economic consequences. Credit card debt by its nature merits similar concern. Credit card debt is not secured by assets, nor is the financial status of card ... Read More