The effects of store atmosphere on shopping behaviour - A literature review.

This paper provides an insight into how the atmospherics of a retail environment influence shopping behaviour. Its objective is to support researchers and practitioners by summarizing the current state of knowledge and identifying gaps and avenues for future research. The scope covers studies in retail marketing and environmental psychology published during the last 35 years. It has been shown that environmental cues (music, scent etc.) have an effect on the emotional state of the consumer, which in turn causes behavioural changes, both positive (approach, buy more, stay longer etc.) and negative (not approach, buy less, leave earlier etc.). Most studies make reference to the PAD model, which proposes that the relevant emotions in this process can be measured along three dimensions Pleasure, Arousal and Dominance (Mehrabian, A. & Russell, J.A.,1974, An approach to environmental psychology, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press). Since then, significant advances have been made to understand the effect of individual cues, their interaction, as well as the role of moderators, such as gender, age, or shopping motivation. However, there are a number of opportunities for further research. Too little is known about the moderating effects of Arousal and Dominance and how they interact with each other and with Pleasure dimension. Also a number of other moderators, such as gender and culture, should be integrated into the model

Tests of Welded Copper Joints

The Copper and Brass Research Associatio

Do Foreign Institutional Investors Destabilize China’s A-Share Markets?

This paper investigates the eect of foreign institutional investors on the sta- bility of Chinese stock markets. Previous literature views this investor group as destabilizing feedback traders. We use the abolition of ownership restrictions on A shares as a natural experiment. There is strong evidence that foreign in- stitutions have a stabilizing eect on Chinese stock markets and contribute to market eciency. This nding is robust across exchanges, sample periods, size quintiles and alternative model specications. By contrast, domestic investors appear to engage in positive feedback trading. Our results have important implications for market regulation.Foreign Institutional Investors, Feedback Trading, Chinese Stock Markets, Regulation, Ownership Restrictions

Empirical Evidence on Feedback Trading in Mature and Emerging Stock Markets

We investigate the hypothesis that some participants in mature and emerging capital markets engage in feedback trading. The analysis is based on the Shiller-Sentana-Wadhwani noise trader model. It has the attractive property that it yields testable implications about the presence of positive and negative feedback traders in stock markets. This theoretical framework, together with an asymmetric GARCH-type model, allows us to draw conclusions about whether differences exist between mature and emerging capital markets in terms of the degree of feedback trading. The empirical results show that positive and negative feedback trading strategies exist in both types of markets but are more pronounced in emerging stock markets than in their mature counterparts. Hence, non-fundamental trading strategies seems to play a more important role in emerging relative to mature stock markets.feedback trading; return autocorrelation; emerging capital markets in central and eastern european contries; asymmetric GARCH models

The demand for money by private firms in a regulated economy: Theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence for Germany 1960 - 1998

Based on a cash-in-advance approach, this paper investigates theoretically the determinants of money holdings of firms under the conditions of a highly regulated labor market and analyses empirically the demand for money of German businesses during the period 1960-1998. As a result of our theoretical analysis the demand for cash balances by firms for shadow market activities depends among other things positively on the expected wage wedge. The empirical results show that the coefficient of the wage wegde has a positive sign in the long-run cointegrating relationship and is statistically significant positive in the short-run dynamics of the error correction model. -- Auf der Grundlage eines Cash-in-advance-Ansatzes untersucht der vorliegende Beitrag die Bestimmungsgründe der Geldnachfrage von deutschen Unternehmen (1960-1998) - vor dem Hintergrund eines hoch regulierten Arbeitsmarktes. Das theoretische Modell ergibt, daß Unternehmen Kasse für Aktivitäten auf dem Markt für Schwarzarbeit unterhalten und zwar um so mehr, je größer die Kluft zwischen den Bruttoarbeitskosten und den Nettolöhnen (wage wedge) ist. Der Koeffizient der wage wedge weist ein positives Vorzeichen in der Kointegrationsbeziehung auf und ist statistisch signifikant positiv in der kurzfristigen Dynamik des Fehler-Korrektur-Modells.Money Demand by Firms,Wage Wedge,Cash-in-Advance Model,Cointegration,Error-Correction,Geldnachfrage von Unternehmen,Cash-in-advance-Modell,Kointegration,FehlerKorrektur-Modell,Lohnzusatzkosten

Policy Words and Policy Deeds: The ECB and the Euro

This paper examines the role of the ECB communication activities on daily Eurodollar exchange rate and interest rates. We estimate the relationship between monetary policy and the exchange rate using a technique that explicitly recognizes the joint determination of both the levels and volatilities of these variables. We also consider more traditional estimation strategies as a test of the robustness of our main results. We introduce a new indicator of ECB communications policies that focuses on what the ECB says about the future economic outlook for the euro area along five different economic dimensions. The impact of ECB communications policies is more apparent in the time series framework than in the heteroskedasticity estimator approach. Time series estimates reveal that interest rate changes generally have a much larger impact on exchange rate movements, and their volatility, than do ECB verbal pronouncements. Previous studies that conclude that news effects are significant at the daily frequency may have reached such a conclusion because the measurement of news was too highly aggregated. The endogeneity of the exchange rate-interest rate relationship is more apparent when the proxy for monetary policy is the euro area-US differential than when any other proxy for monetary policy is employed.Central bank communication, Eurodollar exchange rate

The Bundesbank's Communications Strategy and Policy Conflicts with the Federal Government

In this paper we provide an estimate of the likelihood of conflict between the federal government and the Bundesbank for the 1989 – 1998 period. We rely on a novel proxy for the impact of public communication by Bundesbank officials on the probability of conflict, in addition to interest rate, exchange rate, money supply behavior, as well as electoral influences. The empirical evidence is consistent with the view that speeches by the Bundesbank President dealing with inflation and economic policy are a positive source of conflict in a probabilistic sense. Conflict was not a constant but flared up at times of economic stress and could be exacerbated by the "talking" of Bundesbank officials. --Deutsche Bundesbank,Conflict,Central Bank Communication,Political Factors

Dectecting speculative bubbles in stock prices: A new approach and some evidence for the US

A large part of the current debate on US stock price behavior concentrates on the question of whether stock prices are driven by fundamentals or by non-fundamental factors. In this paper we put forward the hypothesis that a present value model with time-varying expected returns provides an empirically valid description of US stock price behavior in the long-run, while short-run deviations of actual share prices from present value prices are driven by nonfundamental factors like speculative bubbles and/or noise trading behavior. Our empirical findings for the US stock market covering the 1871:1 - 2000:12 period provide strong and robust support for the hypothesis that in the short-run US stock prices exhibit nonfundamental run-ups followed by crashes, while in the long-run US share prices adhere to fundamentals. --Present Value Model,US Stock Prices,Asymmetric Adjustment,Cointegration