The Effects of Exchange Rates on Export Prices of Farmed Salmon

The CBS inverse demand system is extended to include exchange rates. Applying the extended model to trade data for farmed salmon, results suggest export prices are at least as sensitive to changes in exchange rates as to changes in trade volume. Exchange rate pass-through (absorption into export prices) is complete for the Chilean peso and the British pound, but incomplete for the Norwegian kroner and the US dollar. This suggests producers in Chile and the United Kingdom (UK) are more affected by short-term movements in relative currency values than are producers in Norway and Rest of World (ROW). Model simulations suggest currency realignments, especially the depreciation of the Chilean peso, contributed to the 2003-04 collapse in world salmon prices.Exchange rates, flexibilities, inverse demand system, Demand and Price Analysis, International Relations/Trade, Q13, M30, F10,

Investment and revenue cap under incentive regulation: The case study of the Norwegian electricity distributors

Electricity distribution operators are regulated as monopolies around the world. Incentive regulation is further applied to relate their allowed revenues (revenue cap) to cost efficiency and investment. Incentive regulation varies cross countries and has evolved over time for individual countries. Norway is one of the first countries reforming the network distributors by incentive regulation. Using the long time series data, we evaluated the impact of the Norwegian regulation regimes on firms’ investment. The panel data model includes common time-varying factors to control firm heterogeneity. The cross-section dependence test is further employed to test the relationship between investment and revenue cap in different regulation regimes. The empirical findings confirm a dynamic pattern of investment behavior between regimes, in terms of both the unobserved common factors and the cross-section dependence between investment and revenue cap. This study provides an interesting solution for incentive evaluation and contributes to the management accounting literature in terms of econometric techniques.publishedVersio

Economic drivers for the Chinese tourists

Asia, particularly China, has become an attractive market that receives much attention in the Norwegian tourism industry. This raises relevant questions about the sustainability of the Chinese tourism boom. If the Norwegian tourism industry increasingly targets this rapidly growing market with larger investments, it should respond to the prospects of long-term growth. Such prospects hinge on the economic drivers behind the influx of Chinese tourists. In this study, we use both descriptive data analysis and the ARDL model to investigate the main economic factors that drive Chinese tourists to Norway. Specifically, we investigate whether the boom of the Chinese tourists is a relatively stable trend associated with the growing Chinese economy or just a short-term phenomenon brought by the weakened NOK. Our findings suggest instead of the well-recognized Chinese economic growth, it is the improving price competitiveness of Norway resulting from the weakening Norwegian kroner that has made the boom of the Chinese tourists in Norway. This result suggests although the income effect is significant in affecting aggregate tourist flow from a source country, for a single destination, price competitiveness is the key to make a destination attractive since the substitution effects of other destinations are huge and the income effect becomes uncertain.publishedVersio

The Role of Social Media Technologies in Service Innovation: Perceptions of Exceptional-customer-engaged Value Co-creation

Social media technologies have greatly facilitated customers’ self-empowerment, and have given rise to a handful of exceptional customers who engage in service innovation. Compared with the more common customer behaviors like word-of-mouth and review-and-feedback, exceptional customers actively integrate their heterogeneous resources and creatively cooperate with firms to innovate service. Nevertheless, there have been relatively few studies on how information technologies enable such customer engagement and the co-creation of service innovation. We adopted a qualitative approach and conducted a comparative analysis of two cases, including a pair of firms and their cooperating exceptional customers, to reveal two value co-creation mechanisms enabled by social media technologies: customers as communicators who facilitate the individualization of product promotion through resource sharing and digital engagement with firms; and customers as innovators who facilitate the individualization of brand design through resource convergence and co-creation of new value propositions with firms. This study discovered the enabler role of social media technologies in service innovation and value co-creation between firms and exceptional customers, as well as a theoretical basis and practical guidance for market innovation in the digital era

The Value of IT-Institution Alignment: A Managerial Perspective of IT-Business Alignment

Present commercial software packages have incorporated management insights, and best-practices to facilitate IT-business alignment. However, poor alignment of IT-business still exists in practice. In this study, we investigate the notion of IT-business alignment from a managerial perspective. Our study shows that: 1) IT exhibits a function of sensing to detect problems promptly, whereas institution exhibits a function of responding to solve problems effectively; 2) The alignment process undergoes three major stages: at the first stage, alignment is achieved between institution and IT but not between business process and IT; at the second stage, IT integration succeeds in aligning with the business process but not with the original institution; at the third stage, the organization adapts the existing institution to achieve both IT-institution alignment and IT-business process alignment; 3) It is not always wise to improve IT systems and revise original institution to pursue a higher level in IT-institution alignment

Applying a Topical Relevance Typology to Analyze Online Product Information Types and Their Effects on Internet Consumer Decision

This paper lays out a research proposal of systematically analyzing and comparing the decision effects of online product information types. Hardly any in-depth knowledge is currently available on how different information types influence online consumer trust and purchase intention. To address this research gap, we apply a generic function-based topical relevance typology to classify the variety of online product information and plan for focused comparisons of the functional roles played by different information types in e-retailing. Understanding the differential impacts of each information type provides a basis for prioritizing online information provisioning and organization, which becomes particularly meaningful in the current context of information overload. The paper briefly reviews information research in e-commerce, introduces the product type as an important moderating factor, and discusses the conceptual basis and applicability of applying the generic relevance typology to analyze product relevant information. The research model and preliminary hypotheses are also described

The Role of Guanxi in Information Technology Enabled Organizations: A Structuration Theory Perspective

Firms in China, and in Asia-Pacific countries to a certain degree, cannot escape from two institutional characteristics of modern organizations: the uniquely Eastern practice of guanxi and the uniquely Western artifact of information technology. While both constructs have been extensively studied in organizational contexts, few have examined how these two constructs interact with each other and how such interaction impact organizational processes, norms, and other institutional properties. From the lens of structuration theory, we attempt to understand this interesting and important phenomenon. We submit that guanxi is neither a cultural artifact of the Chinese society, nor a product of weak institutions in shortage economies; rather, it is an outcome of structuration between the human agents who enact it and the institutional environment in which it is enacted, enabled or constrained by information technology. This structuration view of guanxi does not predict its ever lasting effect on Chinese business and society, nor does it foretell its demise in the global economy. However, it does provide a better explanation to the critical questions why guanxi is significant in certain firms but insignificant in others and how information technology enables and constrains the enactment of guanxi in organizational life

How exchange rate affects Chinese processing trade? The case of ground fish

As imports destined for primary processing and then exporting occur across industries, in this study we developed a structural model to examine how exchange rate affects the exports of processed ground fish from China. The home demand for processed goods is incorporated into the model in accordance with the fact that the share of processed goods remaining in China tends to increase over time. China is the world’s largest import-processing centre of ground fish. The fact that China produces almost no ground fish facilitates identifying the trade data. For exports with both foreign and domestic origins, the data issue is a big challenge for empirical studies. The simulated results indicate that a 7% appreciation of the Chinese currency would raise the export price of processed ground fish by 4.06%, corresponding to a share of 40% foreign content in the processed product. In addition, the increased share of home consumption would enlarge the responses of exports to changes in the exchange rate.submittedVersio

20 Years of Nordic tourism economics research: a review and future research agenda

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism on 13th of October 2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/15022250.2020.1833363.The number of economics-related articles in the Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism (SJHT) has recently increased considerably. Despite this increase, the research efforts of Nordic economists on tourism issues have lagged behind in an international comparison. The recent increase in the number of economics-related publications in SJHT is due to better access to microdata (individual and firm data), the rapid development of statistical and econometric methods and the interest in the causes and effects of the tourism boom in the Nordic countries until recently. This article gives a brief review of the main topics of Nordic economic research that have been studied, as well as potential future research ideas (e.g. short term rentals, rising industry concentration, innovation and ICT) and data sources (big data, social media data, linked data at the micro level and register data) that can be developed and used for future studies. With the COVID-19 pandemic, general uncertainty and government intervention in the tourism sector will lead to a change in travel flows, calling for more quantitative studies. More research based on internationally comparable microdata for several Nordic countries will be particularly helpful.acceptedVersio

Efficiency in Chinese large yellow croaker aquaculture: Implication for sustainable aquaculture in China

Aquaculture supply from China has been a remedy to meet the growing global demand for seafood in the last decades. However, output growth has decreased dramatically in China in the 2000s. Previous literature focuses on the ecosystem problems arising in intensive farming in China. In this study, we used stochastic production analysis (SPA) to estimate the technical efficiency of Chinese large yellow croaker farming, which provides implications for impediments to the sustainable development of Chinese aquaculture. Data were collected from 430 large yellow croaker farmers in nine farming areas located along the coastline of southeastern China. The technical efficiency of large yellow croak farming is estimated to be 0.829, suggesting that farming is operated close to the production frontier with a maximal margin of 17% for improvement under the current technology. It further suggests that Chinese aquaculture growth is geared by conventional factors, expansion of fishing sites, and intensive farming, and is not sustainable under the constraint of farming areas and environmental problems in China. For the sustainable development of Chinese aquaculture, it is necessary to adopt new technology through innovation. The family-based farming model is a hinder to adopting new technology that requires systematic significant investment. Large-scale industrialized farming based on research and new technology development thus should be a modern trend in the future.publishedVersio