FEB Publication of the Month

Electronic government systems can be structured to restore trust in citizen-government relationships. FEB-researchers Eric Lim and Chee-Wee Tan developed a model that yields both developmental prescriptions and technological specifications for realizing trust-building strategies via electronic government systems.

Companies that work on a low-volume customer-specific basis can improve their delivery performance significantly. And quite simply too, Dr Martin Land states on the basis of recent research. ‘My colleagues and I have done a big job combining the existing knowledge on two order release mechanisms. This combination turns out to be such an improvement that a considerable number of old results have become redundant. In terms of performance, this is quite a breakthrough in the field of order release methods.’

Terrorism, on average, shortens cabinet duration. That is the main result of research by Richard Jong-A-Pin and Jochen Mierau. In an analysis of a data set comprising 2,400 cabinets in over 150 countries in the period 1970-2002, they find that terrorism significantly increases the probability of cabinet failure. ‘When we compare the impact of terrorism relative to other variables affecting cabinet duration, we find that terrorism has a greater impact than economic growth, but less than variables characterizing the political environment,’ says Jong-A-Pin.

Financial crisis have a stronger negative effect in countries where the population is very averse to uncertainty. Firms in these countries, such as Greece, reduce their investments much more after a crisis than countries where the inhabitants are more at ease with uncertainty, such as the United States or the United Kingdom. This is the result of research by dr. Robert Inklaar and FEB-alumnus (and former Honours student) Jing Yang.

Large temporary shocks may have long-term consequences: civil war violence occurred between 1993 and 2003 has a clear impact on individual behavior in 2009. These are the findings of a study carried out by FEB professor Robert Lensink and researchers from other universities, who investigated the impact of conflict on social, risks and time preferences in 35 communities in Burundi.

A punishment or reward will be more effective if it is costly for the person imposing it. If the costs of punishing or rewarding someone are high, it will have a greater effect on group cooperation. These are the findings of a study carried out by Daniel Balliet, FEB researcher Laetitia Mulder and Paul van Lange. Their paper entitled Reward, punishment, and cooperation: A meta-analysis is soon to be published in Psychological Bulletin, and is the new FEB Publication of the Month.

The new FEB Publication of the Month is dedicated to the article ‘Cointegration, long-run structural modelling and weak exogeneity: Two models of the UK economy’, by Dr Jan Jacobs. He and Kenneth Wallis (University of Warwick and holder of an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen) have published the article in the Journal of Econometrics. ‘I am extremely proud of this paper’, says Jacobs.

From the beginning of the credit crisis and ensuing recession, it has become conventional wisdom that ‘no one saw this coming’. In fact, many had seen it coming for years, says Dirk Bezemer. ‘Many models missed the crisis not because the conditions were so unusual. They missed it by design. It is impossible to warn against a credit crisis and recession in a model world where credit does not exist. This is the world our policymakers have been living in.’ Bezemer, Associate Professor at the International Economics & Business department, is author of the paper Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models which is the next FEB Publication of the Month.

Bribery is key for entrepreneurs who operate in a business environment with insufficient formal institutions, and that is dominated by a dual market structure and powerful government officials. ‘Bribes enable entrepreneurs to use government resources, avoid red tape and thus foster revenues’, says dr. Gjalt de Jong. ‘We suggest, however, that bribes are subject to diminishing returns because high levels of bribes increasingly absorb the returns on entrepreneurial activities, and distort entrepreneurial spirit and behavior.’ De Jong is first author of the paper Which entrepreneurs bribe and what do they get from it? Exploratory evidence from Vietnam, which is the next FEB Publication of the Month. The article is scheduled to appear in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice in March 2012.

The persistency of marketing effects depends on the stage of the product life cycle. These effects are strongest around the introduction of a new product and decline in the course of the product life cycle. ‘We show that this does not only hold for persistent marketing effects but also for temporary marketing effects. So if you want to make the most out of your marketing budget, make sure you spend a significant portion of it early in the product life cycle’, says dr. Jaap Wieringa. He is co writer of the paper Early marketing matters: a time-varying parameter approach to persistence modeling , published in the Journal of Marketing Research , which is the next FEB Publication of the Month.

As of March 2010, the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) presents a Publication of the Month, based on recent research of the SOM Research and Graduate School. In April 2010 FEB focus on the research of dr. Jennifer Jordan. 'The salary level of managers affects decision making in companies', Jordan says. 'Individuals who receive higher salaries are less concerned about the well-being of non-powerful employees and they prioritize higher the profitability of the company and their own financial rewards.' Her paper Salary and Decision Making: Relationship Between Pay and Focus on Financial Profitability and Prosociality in an Organizational Context, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, is the next FEB Top Publication of the Month.

In the first ‘FEB Publication of the Month’ we pay attention to the research of dr. Michael Koetter, who investigated the driving forces of growth in 77 countries during the period 1970-2000. ‘This paper focuses on a very simple question: Do all countries grow alike?’, says Koetter. ‘And of course our answer to this question is: No, they don’t!’. Koetter and his colleagues published their results in the topjournal Journal of Development Economics.