co integration analysis of quarterly european tourism demand in tunisia abstract the purpose of this study is to identify the factors that affect the destination choice process in addition to prices and income factors the supply factor is introduced as an explanatory variable in the econometric model co integration analysis and error correction models ecms are used to estimate the long run tourism demand elasticities and to forecast the quarterly european tourism demand for a 1 year ahead horizon the main finding of this study is that the behaviour of european tourists varies from one country to another the co integrating relationships show that the large elasticity magnitude may be the reflection of the relatively expensive services often sought after by tourists from these countries the estimated values of the supply elasticity corroborate the supply induced demand hypothesis finally compared to the basic structural model and using the root mean squared error the ecm provides more precise forecasts

marketing mix and brand sales in global markets examining the contingent role of country market characteristics marketing products globally is challenging due to the diverse nature of markets we use market heterogeneity unbranded competition resource and infrastructure availability and sociopolitical governance as country market characteristics that distinguish between developed and emerging countries we investigate their moderating role on the relationship between elements of the marketing mix and brand sales we provide evidence from a hierarchical linear model and a panel data set of brands from 14 emerging and developed markets that account for 62 of the global gdp that country market characteristics moderate the relationship between the complete set of marketing mix elements and brand sales performance asymmetrically while distribution and price have the largest impact in emerging and developed countries respectively product innovation and advertising have significantly larger impacts in emerging markets relative to developed countries these finding highlights the importance of contingency view of marketing strategy in global markets

measuring persistence in croatian tourism evidence from the adriatic region this study examines the degree of persistence in foreign tourist arrivals and overnight stays for seven croatian coastal counties over the period january 1998 to december 2013 using fractional integration techniques our findings reveal that the respective regional tourism indicators exhibit seasonal unit roots which require seasonal first differences to render the respective time series stationary with respect to the long run evolution of the respective time series both the parametric and semi parametric fractional integration approaches show the degree of persistence is greater than zero but significantly less than one for the majority of the coastal counties impulse response analysis reveals indeed shocks to the deseasonalized time series either foreign tourist arrivals or foreign tourist overnight stays appear short lived with the exception of istria and primorje gorski kotar counties policy implications of the results are also discussed

tourism terrorism and political violence in tunisia evidence from markov switching models abstract this study investigates the impact of terrorist attacks and political violence on the number of tourist arrivals and overnight stays in tunisia the dataset employed consists of monthly data that covers the period from january 2000 to september 2016 which includes several political and terrorist attacks in tunisia and the region empirically we investigate the true data generating process dgp of these two proxies of tourism activity by accounting for four statistical properties that characterize these series 1 seasonality 2 unit roots 3 breaks and 4 long memory behavior our empirical findings show strong evidence of stationarity five breaks in the tourist arrival time series and spurious long memory behavior by estimating a 3 state markov switching model consisting of the mean trend and variance we find that the tunisian jasmine revolution and two recent terrorist attacks one at the bardo national museum on march 18 2015 and the other at the tourist resort at port el kantaoui sousse on june 26 2015 played an important role in influencing the tourism activity of the country our empirical findings show also that local shocks have a more important impact than international shocks in influencing tourism activity interestingly we find that the effects of terrorist shocks have a long duration compared to political violence shocks several security marketing and economic policies have been proposed and discussed in the paper

modeling conditional yield densities given the increasing interest in agricultural risk many have sought improved methods to characterize conditional crop yield densities while most have postulated the beta as a flexible alternative to the normal others have chosen nonparametric methods unfortunately yield data tends not to be sufficiently abundant to invalidate many reasonable parametric models this is problematic because conclusions from economic analyses which require estimated conditional yield densities tend not to be invariant to the modeling assumption we propose a semiparametric estimator that because of its theoretical properties and our simulation results enables one to empirically proceed with a higher degree of confidence copyright 2003 oxford university press

the value of ideal contingency markets in agriculture an incomplete markets equilibrium in which no contingency markets are available is compared to a complete markets equilibrium formed by introducing a futures market and a crop insurance market the two regimes are compared using comparative static and welfare analyses numerical examples highlight important characteristics of the model and illustrate how the effects of introducing contingency markets can be quantified the main conclusions are that contingency markets in agriculture increase economic efficiency but there is no guarantee that farmers and consumers both benefit it is found that futures and crop insurance markets may reduce farmer welfare when the demand for farm products is price inelastic

are crop yields normally distributed the evidence for nonnormality of crop yields is reassessed three methodological problems are identified in typical yield distribution analyses i misspecification of the nonrandom components of yield distributions ii missreporting of statistical significance and iii use of aggregate timeseries ats data to represent farm level yield distributions one or more of these problems infect virtually all evidence against normality to date the positive contribution of the article is a set of principles that must be followed in any valid investigation of yield normality

the influence of global and local iconic brand positioning on advertising persuasion in an emerging market setting this study explores how positioning a brand as global and or local iconic can moderate the impact of advertising frequency af on brand attitudes in an emerging market context we argue that brands may be seen as the source of an advertisement and that the positioning of a brand can thus enhance source attractiveness and or source credibility which in turn facilitate the impact of af on brand attitudes our results support that both a global and a local iconic positioning enhance the af brand image relationship but they do not have an effect on the af brand quality relationship additionally we examine whether source attractiveness and source credibility mediate these moderation effects and find that only source attractiveness is a significant mediator additionally we investigate whether a hybrid positioning strategy i e positioning as both global and local iconic is beneficial results indicate that a separate positioning i e global or local iconic is a better strategy to increase the attractiveness of the advertising source and in turn facilitate the effect of advertising frequency to create brand image

tourism demand modelling and forecasting a review of recent research abstract this paper reviews the published studies on tourism demand modelling and forecasting since 2000 one of the key findings of this review is that the methods used in analysing and forecasting the demand for tourism have been more diverse than those identified by other review articles in addition to the most popular time series and econometric models a number of new techniques have emerged in the literature however as far as the forecasting accuracy is concerned the study shows that there is no single model that consistently outperforms other models in all situations furthermore this study identifies some new research directions which include improving the forecasting accuracy through forecast combination integrating both qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches tourism cycles and seasonality analysis events impact assessment and risk forecasting

crop insurance valuation under alternative yield distributions considerable disagreement exists about the most appropriate characterization of farm level yield distributions yet the economic importance of alternative yield distribution specifications on crop insurance valuation has not been well documented the results of this study demonstrate that large differences in expected payouts from popular crop insurance products can arise solely from the parameterization chosen to represent yield distributions the results suggest that the frequently unexamined yield distribution specification may lead to economically significant errors in crop insurance policy rating and assessment of expected payouts from policies

a fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average approach to forecasting tourism demand the primary aim of this paper is to incorporate fractionally integrated arma p d q arfima models into tourism forecasting and to compare the accuracy of forecasts with those obtained by previous studies the models are estimated using the volume of monthly international tourist arrivals in singapore empirical findings demonstrate the evidence that the approach we propose generates relatively lower sample mean absolute percentage errors mapes this study also deals with the volatile data faced by a forecaster we use the asian financial crisis and the september 11 event as examples of economic and political shocks with respect to the objective of shaving the coefficient mape forecasts based on the selected arfima models dominate convincingly

a bibliometric analysis of the global branding literature and a research agenda this study examines the citations used in the global branding literature gbl and evaluates the knowledge structure of this area of research to date our bibliometric analysis involves an examination of 120 global branding articles in business related research we employ multidimensional scaling to reveal a range of intellectual influences that have helped shape the gbl the foundation of knowledge in the gbl is uncovered by analyzing co citation data to identify important topical influences in the formation of global branding research the conceptual framework developed incorporates five areas with important implications for the future development of global branding as an area of inquiry these major research topics in the gbl are international branding strategy brand positioning brand country origin brand concept image and brand performance we leverage resource and capability based paradigms and use the five underpinning knowledge groups to propose an agenda for future research that fills existing gaps and offers the potential to advance and enrich the gbl

nonparametric estimation of crop yield distributions implications for rating group risk crop insurance contracts we use nonparametric density estimation procedures to evaluate county level crop yield distributions implications for rating area yield crop insurance contracts are discussed the procedures developed are used to measure yield risk and calculate insurance premium rates for wheat and barley in the 1995 96 group risk program

u s soybean yields estimation and forecasting with nonsymmetric disturbances national average soybean yields are skewed with a relatively high chance of low yields maximum likelihood estimates support this hypothesis revised forecasts which account for skewed yields are positioned higher than forecasts based on the illusion of a symmetric distribution also yield instability has been increasing steadily the standard deviation of the soybean yield distribution is twenty five percent higher in the late 1980s than it was in the early 1970s

beyond country image favorability how brand positioning via country personality stereotypes enhances brand evaluations across four lab experiments and a field study we find that brands are evaluated more favorably when the brand is positioned in a manner that is congruent with the brand s home country personality stereotype than when brand positioning is incongruent results demonstrate that cultural authenticity mediates this effect we also uncover a moderating effect whereby brands are viewed more favorably when brand positioning and country personality stereotypes are incongruent rather than congruent under conditions of consumer animosity toward the firm s home country this study is the first to demonstrate how international firms can leverage country of origin personality stereotypes as a brand building advantage

incomplete markets and government agriculture policy this paper investigates the welfare effects of several stereotypical agricultural policies in an economy with production risk and incomplete contingent claim markets the policies analyzed include target price deficiency payment programs the brannan plan production controls the cochrane plan and land set asides when there is no trading in contingent claims and when economic parameters take on values characteristic of staple food markets the paper finds that ajoint brannan plan production control program is often welfare increasing however production controls on their own tend to be welfare decreasing in addition land set asides are generally welfare reducing even in the presence of a brannan plan these results are derived analytically in a simple equilibrium model they are illustrated with a numerical example which demonstrates that welfare benefits from typical agricultural policy interventions can be large

nonparametric estimation of crop insurance rates revisited with the crop insurance program becoming the cornerstone of u s agricultural policy recovering accurate rates is of paramount interest lack of yield data presents by far the most fundamental obstacle to recovery of accurate rates thisarticle employsnew methodology to estimate conditional yield densities and derive the insurance rates in our application we find the nonparametric kernel density estimator requires an additional twenty six years of yield data to estimate the shape of the conditional yield dens itiesasaccurately asthe recently developed empirical bayesnonparametric kernel density estimator such methodological improvements can significantly aid in ameliorating the data problem recovering accurate premium ratesis paramount to the actuarial soundness of the crop insurance program a program which hasgained prominence in the overall u s agricultural policy agenda the 1996 federal agricultural improvement and reform fair act signaled a new policy environment under which farmerswould be s to market forces under this policy regime crop insurance remains in some respects one of the only government subsidized income stabilizing mechanisms available to agricultural producers in addition it appears that current political forcesare in the proces sof fashioning crop insurance as the cornerstone of u s agricultural policy consider the 1999 state of the union address in which the president stated

celebrity endorsements in emerging markets align endorsers with brands or with consumers this paper investigates country of origin co effects as they relate to celebrity endorsements across multiple studies in emerging markets the authors show that consumers evaluations depend on the match between 1 celebrity co and consumer co termed consumer co fit and 2 celebrity co and brand co termed brand co fit if there is a trade off between consumer co fit and brand co fit the authors identify contingencies e g ethnocentrism levels that determine which type of co fit leads to higher evaluations furthermore the authors develop prescriptions for segmentation in emerging markets and specify when these prescriptions differ from those prescribed by prior international business research

toward a normative theory of crop yield skewness while the preponderance of empirical studies point to negative crop yield skewness in a wide variety of contexts the literature provides few clear insights on why this is so the purpose of this paper is to make three points on the matter we show formally that statistical laws on aggregates do not suggest a normal yield distribution we explain that whenever the weather conditioned mean yield has diminishing marginal product then there is a disposition toward negative skewness in aggregate yields this is because a high marginal product in bad weather states stretches out the left tail of the yield distribution relative to that of the weather distribution turning to disaggregated yields we decompose unconditional skewness into weather conditioned skewness plus two other terms and study each in turn

spatial pattern of yield distributions implications for crop insurance crop insurance is similar to flood and hurricane insurance in that spatially correlated weather tends to cause violations of the independence assumption ideally one would seek to pool uncorrelated risk drawn from the same distribution in crop insurance this article proposes a testing procedure for the cross sectional pooling of group units and empirically analyzes whether the proposed test improves out of sample rating performance we utilize a balanced panel of u s county level corn yields for 510 counties and the results of an out of sample crop insurance rating performance exercise provide economic significance to the proposed pooling methodology and results

spatio temporal modeling of agricultural yield data with an application to pricing crop insurance contracts this article presents a statistical model of agricultural yield data based on a set of hierarchical bayesian models that allows joint modeling of temporal and spatial autocorrelation this method captures a comprehensive range of the various uncertainties involved in predicting crop insurance premium rates as opposed to the more traditional ad hoc two stage methods that are typically based on independent estimation and prediction a panel data set of county average yield data was analyzed for 290 counties in the state of parana brazil for the period of 1990 through 2002 posterior predictive criteria are used to evaluate different model specifications this article provides substantial improvements in the statistical and actuarial methods often applied to the calculation of insurance premium rates these improvements are especially relevant to situations where data are limited

relaxing heteroscedasticity assumptions in area yield crop insurance rating this article focuses on the effect of differing heteroscedasticity assumptions on derived premium rates of area yield crop insurance tests of the proportional and absolute heteroscedasticity assumptions are conducted using both in sample and out of sample measures our results suggest that arbitrarily imposing a specific form of heteroscedasticity or homoscedasticity in insurance rate calculations limits actuarial soundness our results have practical implications for the federal crop insurance programs as we reject the traditional rating assumptions for many cotton regions and lower yielding higher risk corn and soybean counties but not in the heart of the cornbelt copyright 2011 oxford university press