do relationships matter evidence from loan officer turnover we show that the cost of employee turnover in firms that rely on decentralized knowledge and personal relationships depends on the firms planning horizons and the departing employees incentives to transfer information using exogenous shocks to the relationship between borrowers and loan officers we document that borrowers whose loan officers are on leave are less likely to receive new loans from the bank are more likely to apply for credit from other banks and are more likely to miss payments or go into default these costs are smaller when turnover is expected as in the case of maternity leave or when loan officers have incentives to transfer information as in the case of voluntary resignations this paper was accepted by wei jiang finance

demographic change tourism expenditure and life cycle behaviour abstract the paper explores how demographic changes in human populations may impact on tourism decision making of households over their life cycle by means of hurdle models the study focuses respectively on the decision to travel domestically or abroad and investigates if statistically significant differences exist as to the impact of age and cohort on the decision to travel and tourism expenditure using a vast dataset on italian household expenditures over the period 1997 2007 the empirical results show that demographic aspects do have a strong effect on the tourism behaviour of families and that cohort and age effects act differently on the decision of households to make a trip and on how much they spend on tourism age has a negative effect on the desire to travel but a positive effect on tourism expenditure on the other hand older cohorts are inclined to travel but they have a low propensity to spend on tourism relevant differences in income elasticity along the life cycle of households have also been found finally age and cohort aspects have a different effect on the decision as to whether to travel nationally or internationally

consumer demand and the life cycle allocation of household expenditures the purpose of this paper is to estimate the parameters of household preferences that determine the allocation of goods within the period and over the life cycle using micro data in doing so the authors are able to identify important effects of demographics labor market status and other household characteristics on the intertemporal allocation of expenditure they test the validity of the life cycle model using excess sensitivity tests and find that controlling for demographics and labor market status variables can largely explain the excess sensitivity of consumption to anticipated changes in income

distance constraints the limits of foreign lending in poor economies how far does mobility of multinational banks solve problems of financial development using a panel of 80 000 loans over 7 years i show that greater cultural and geographical distance between a foreign bank s headquarters and local branches leads it to further avoid lending to informationally difficult yet fundamentally sound firms requiring relational contracting greater distance also makes them less likely to bilaterally renegotiate and less successful at recovering defaults differences in bank size legal institutions risk preferences or unobserved borrower heterogeneity cannot explain these results these distance constraints can be large enough to permanently exclude certain sectors of the economy from financing by foreign banks

the uk consumption boom of the late 1980s aggregate implications of microeconomic evidence two competing explanations of the uk consumer boom in the late 1980s are the financial liberalisation imperfect housing market hypothesis of muellbauer and murphy and the expectations hypothesis of king we use 15 years of family expenditure surveys and cohort analysis to investigate to what extent these two hypotheses agree with observed changes in consumption patterns we find that the housing markets explanation accounts for much of the increase by older cohorts but cannot be reconciled with the marked rise in expenditure levels of younger households a simple simulation exercise shows instead that the expectations hypothesis can generate increases of expenditure by young consumers of the magnitude observed in our data

income and the substitution pattern between domestic and international tourism demand this article analyses the role of income in the decision of participating in the tourism demand within 1 year the tourists who are participating can travel to domestic destinations only abroad destinations only or to both of them such a substitution pattern is modelled using a bivariate probit model the analysis is carried out to the regional level using a survey conducted in 15 european eu 15 countries in addition to the traditional socioeconomic variables the analysis adds new variables to the outbound tourism demand modelling such as the attributes of the place of residence the results show that tourism demand is income elastic however there are marked differences in the income elasticities of the probabilities of travelling domestically or abroad above certain income threshold the substitution pattern between destinations takes part the probability of travelling domestically only remains constant whereas the probability of travelling abroad keeps growing additionally the article prov

the application of generational theory to tourism consumer behavior an american perspective abstract the purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes and behaviors of american international travelers using a generational analysis based on woodside and dubelaar 2002 s theory of tourism consumption systems tcs five hypotheses were proposed regarding tourists information source preferences destination visitation history future destination preferences destination evaluation criteria and travel activity preferences the study utilized chi square and anova tests to detect statistically significant differences among generations additionally two perceptual mapping techniques correspondence analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis were employed to graphically discern the relationships between generations and the variables of interest the results support all five hypotheses revealing not only a number of significant differences among generations but also some important similarities the study provides important empirical support for the theory of tcs whilst showing the value of generational analysis as a commonsense segmentation criterion in travel market research

holiday taking and income this paper is the first attempt to estimate the determinants of holiday taking across several countries to accomplish this a two stage estimation procedure is employed which enables incongruous income categories to be transformed into a single income variable it is found that in the mid 1980s there was a substantial similarity in the holiday taking behaviour of europeans the large national differences in holiday participation are explained by differences in income and demographic factors a remarkable regularity in the responsiveness of the probability of holiday taking to marginal changes in income is found

deconstructing life cycle expenditure we revisit two well known facts regarding life cycle expenditures the hump shaped profile of nondurable expenditures and the increase in cross household consumption inequality we document that the behavior of total nondurables masks surprising heterogeneity in the life cycle profile of individual consumption subcomponents we provide evidence that the categories driving life cycle consumption either are inputs into market work or are amenable to home production using a quantitative model we document that the disaggregated life cycle consumption profiles imply a level of uninsurable permanent income risk that is substantially lower than that implied by a model using a composite consumption good

factors underlying the employment effects of financial assistance policies this paper examines the employment creation effects of financial assistance to industry the assistance schemes covered are the regional policy instruments of regional development grant and regional selective assistance and the assistance policies of local authorities and a number of other agencies using survey data and regression techniques it is shown that there are significant variations in cost effectiveness between assistance schemes and between projects of different purpose a policy implication of this is that agencies could increase the employment creation effects of their policies by focusing assistance on particular types of project

humps and bumps in lifetime consumption in this article we argue that the life cycle model that allows demographics to affect household preferences and relaxes the assumption of certainty equivalence can generate hump shaped consumption profiles over age that are very similar to those observed in household level data sources and in particular match the differences in shape across different education groups liquidity constraints or myopia are not required to explain the empirical features of observed life cycle patterns

tourism participation and expenditure by spanish households the effects of the economic crisis and unemployment abstract this paper examines household tourism participation decisions and tourism expenditure across the business cycle microdata is used from the spanish household budget survey for the years 2006 2010 facilitating an analysis of the consequences of the economic crisis and unemployment on tourism consumption decisions by households by estimating a heckman model the effects of households socioeconomic determinants on participation and expenditure decisions can be identified taking the year 2008 the beginning of the crisis as a reference the stability of the tourism expenditure model is tested identifying variables whose effects alter in times of crisis one important aspect of the study is how household unemployment affects tourism participation and expenditure decisions the effect of unemployment takes into account whether it is the main breadwinner his or her spouse or another member of the household who is unemployed concentrating on those households whose main breadwinner was employed at the time an analysis is also made of how job insecurity affects tourism consumption decisions from the results the unemployment variables can be seen to have a significant explanatory power suggesting that unemployment information does help to explain the evolution of tourism expenditure across the business cycle

the revised regional development grant scheme a case study in cleveland county of a marginal employment subsidy wren c 1989 the revised regional development grant scheme a case study in cleveland county of a marginal employment subsidy reg studies 23 127 137 in 1984 substantial changes were made to the primary instrument of uk regional industrial policy the regional development grant in order to improve the cost effectiveness of this measure subsequently in 1988 it was decided to abandon the scheme because of the deadweight spending associated with automatic assistance schemes in this paper an examination is made of the revised rdg scheme taking the county of cleveland as a case study it is shown that the vast majority of payments under the revised scheme were in the form of a job grant and that it operated in effect as a marginal employment subsidy a survey of firms in cleveland suggests that the revised scheme was an effective job creation measure associated with relatively little deadweight spending and this calls into question the decision to abandon the scheme in 1988 wren c 1989 le p

estimating and testing the compensated double log demand model in spite of the proliferation of flexible functional forms for consumer demand systems the double log demand model continues to be popular especially in applied work calling for single equation models it is usually estimated in uncompensated form it can also be estimated in compensated form by deflating the income variable alone using stone s price index the compensated form has the same right hand side as a single equation version of the popular linear approximation to the almost ideal demand model facilitating the construction of a test for choosing between the two alternatives this paper demonstrates these results develops the specification test and illustrates its application using us meat consumption data simulations suggest that the test is well behaved with good power in typical applications

distance and private information in lending we study the effects of physical distance on the acquisition and use of private information in informationally opaque credit markets using a unique data set of all loan applications by small firms to a large bank we show that borrower proximity facilitates the collection of soft information leading to a trade off in the availability and pricing of credit which is more readily accessible to nearby firms albeit at higher interest rates ceteris paribus analyzing loan rates and firms decision to switch lenders provides further evidence for banks strategic use of private information however distance erodes our lender s ability to collect proprietary intelligence and to carve out local captive markets suggesting that the requisite soft information is primarily local the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

a review of innovation research in tourism abstract over the past two decades there has been increasing focus on the topic of innovation in tourism this article reviews the research contributions various categories of innovation product process managerial marketing and institutional are addressed important determinants of innovation are acknowledged including the role of entrepreneurship technology push and the existence of territorial industry clusters representation of knowledge is also identified as a critical factor for both the occurrence and nature of innovations the review reveals that there is still only limited systematic and comparable empirical evidence of the level of innovative activities and their impacts and wider implications for destinations and national economies an agenda for future research is emerging suggesting that there is quest for both formal quantification and for qualitative studies of the foundations processes implications and policies of innovation in tourism

an analysis of households appraisal of their budget constraints for potential participation in tourism abstract this paper examines the importance of households budget constraints as a barrier to participation in tourism for this purpose a sample of spanish households drawn from the european community household panel was analysed this survey gathers data on the economic and socio demographic situation of all adult household members more specifically it includes a question on each household s capacity to afford a week s yearly holiday the aim of this question is to assess whether households have sufficient financial resources to participate in tourism the results of the analysis demonstrate that budget constraints on tourist travel are binding for a significant percentage of spanish households the results also show that this type of constraint is not only conditioned by the level of income but by a more complex appraisal that also includes other financial variables such as households saving capacity or the unemployment status of its members furthermore non financial variables such as the level of education age and barriers associated with poor health status all help to determine the degree of importance with which households perceive their budget constraints

statistical models for zero expenditures in household budgets household budget surveys are an important source of data on consumer s expenditure not just for individual consumers but also for estimating national aggregates however it is a widespread finding that for certain commodities most notably tobacco and alcohol the estimate from the household survey falls short of the known consumption total calculated with some confidence from data on production imports exports and excise duties for example in the british family expenditure survey with which we shall largely be concerned total tobacco expenditure was underestimated in 1976 by 21 percent see kemsley redpath and holmes 1980 p 51 much of this understatement together with that on alcohol is thought to occur because of the design of the survey which excludes many persons amongst whom consumption of such items is thought to be atypically high e g prisoners hoteliers and their residents merchant seamen even so the possibility remains that some of the understatement is due to various types of misreporting by households included in the survey in this paper we consider a model in which the standard tobit specification tobin 1958 is supplemented by the operation of a simple binary censor the tobit model is essentially a linear regression model in which non positive observations of the dependent variable are replaced by zero we take this specification as our starting point but add a second censoring process that randomly replaces a fraction of the observations generated by the tobit model bv zeroes the combined model can serve as a representation of several types of

spatial competition in the banking system localization cross subsidies and the regulation of deposit rates abstract the paper analyses a spatial competition model of the banking sector banks offer two kind of services deposits and credit and can either borrow or lend on the money market we investigate the consequences of the regulation of rates paid on deposits the main conclusions are as follows regulation first increases network size beyond social optimum in the long run it results in lower equilibrium credit rates because of increased competition secondly regulation generates tied sales contracts by which banks propose bundles of credit and deposit services tied sales in turn motivate the introduction of cross subsidies between the two activities the rent levied upon regulated deposits financing lower rates in the credit market finally it is shown that in a regulated environment the effectiveness of monetary policy is reduced in the sense that fluctuations of money market rates are less than fully transmitted in credit rates

embeddedness in the making of financial capital how social relations and networks benefit firms seeking financing i investigate how social embeddedness affects an organization s acquisition and cost of financial capital in middle market banking a lucrative but understudied financial sector using existing theory and original fieldwork i develop a framework to explain how embeddedness can influence which firms get capital and at what cost i then statistically examine my claims using national data on small business lending at the level of dyadic ties i find that firms that embed their commercial transactions with their lender in social attachments receive lower interest rates on loans at the network level firms are more likely to get loans and to receive lower interest rates on loans if their network of bank ties has a mix of embedded ties and arm s length ties these network effects arise because embedded ties motivate network partners to share private resources while arm s length ties facilitate access to public information on market prices and loan opportunities so that the benefits of different types of ties are optimized within one network i conclude with a discussion of how the value produced by a network is at a premium when it creates a bridge that links the public information of markets with the private resources of relationships

location matters an examination of trading profits the electronic trading system xetra of the german security exchange provides a unique data source on the equity trades of 756 professional traders located in 23 different cities and eight european countries we explore informational asymmetries across the trader population traders located outside germany in non german speaking cities show lower proprietary trading profit their underperformance is not only statistically significant it is also of economically significant magnitude and occurs for the 11 largest german blue chip stocks we also examine whether a trader location in frankfurt as the financial center or local proximity of the trader to the corporate headquarters of the traded stock or affiliation with a large financial institution results in superior trading performance the data provide no evidence for a financial center advantage or of increasing institutional scale economies in proprietary trading however we find evidence for an information advantage due to corporate headquarters proximity for high frequency intraday trading

a micro econometric analysis of vacation behaviour we present a micro econometric limited dependent variable model which simultaneously explains the decision whether to go on vacation or not the choice of destination and the decision on the level of the vacation expenditures the model has been estimated on the basis of a cross section of dutch households we find a striking difference in income elasticity between domestic vacations and vacations abroad and a large impact of owning certain durables such as a boat on the choice of destination to illustrate the potential of the model some simulations are performed

micro economic determinants of tourist expenditure a quantile regression approach abstract we assess the effect of the main determinants of tourist expenditure by applying both linear and quantile regression models to individual micro data collected by a survey addressed to non resident tourists who spent their holidays in sardinia during the period april october 2012 we find that in addition to income and foreign nationality tourist expenditure is crucially driven by trip related party size stay length accommodation sea and sun typology and transport modality and psychographic characteristics repeated visits and holiday motivations moreover our results indicate that the effects vary with respect to the expenditure component and the level of spending thus confirming the high complexity of the tourism product higher positive effects were found for heavy spenders in the case of foreign nationality previous visits and notoriety motivated holidays while party size and the number of visited sites contribute to reducing the level of expenditure for light spending tourists

parametric and semi parametric modelling of vacation expenditures we analyse several limited dependent variable models explaining the budget share that dutch families spend on vacations to take account of the substantial number of zero shares two types of models are used the first is the single equation censored regression model we estimate and test several parametric and semi parametric extensions of the tobit model second we consider two equation models in which the participation decision and the decision on the amount to spend are treated separately the first decision is modelled as a binary choice model the second as a conditional regression we estimate and test parametric and semi parametric specifications

a double hurdle analysis of travel expenditure baby boomer seniors versus older seniors abstract this study examined the socio demographic and economic determinants of leisure travel expenditure and compared these determinants in baby boomer senior households and older senior households in the united states unlike previous studies this study performed heckman s double hurdle analysis using the consumer expenditure survey ces to present a two step process for making travel consumption decisions the results revealed that more baby boomer senior households participated in leisure travels than older senior households however among those households that chose to travel the mean expenditure of the older senior group was higher than for baby boomers this study also showed similarities and differences in the determinants of travel consumption decisions between baby boomer seniors and older seniors this two step approach provided in depth information on the processes involved in deciding to travel and how much to spend on travel this additional information will be valuable in understanding senior consumers in the tourism industry

sex and credit do gender interactions matter for credit market outcomes abstract this paper studies the effects of gender interactions on the supply of and demand for credit using data from a large albanian lender we document that first time borrowers assigned to officers of the opposite sex are less likely to return for a second loan the effect is larger when officers have little prior exposure to borrowers of the other gender and when they have more discretion to act on their gender beliefs as proxied by financial market competition and branch size we also find that first time borrowers matched with opposite sex officers pay higher interest rates and receive smaller and shorter maturity loans but do not experience higher arrears our results are consistent with the existence of a gender bias and learning effects that lead to the disappearance of the bias

what do we learn about consumer demand patterns from micro data the aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand to do this we utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4 000 households in each of 15 years employing a number of different aggregation procedures we conclude that aggregate data alone are unlikely to produce reliable estimates of structural price and income coefficients however once certain aggregation factors as well as trend and seasonal components are included an aggregate model is not necessarily outperformed across all demand equations in terms of forecasting ability jel d12 c52 c31 the purpose of this paper is to develop a complete consumer demand system based on a time series of individual household data and to use it to measure the biases introduced into the study of consumer de mand behavior when aggregate data are used in place of the appropriate microeco nomic data we assess the suitability of ag gregate data through the impact on income and price elasticities and by evaluating the ability of both micro and aggregate based models to forecast aggregate consumer de mand the biases introduced by the use of aggregate data depend upon the way that household characteristics interact with in come and price effects and on departures of demand systems from linearity we explore the structure of microeconomic demand sys tems and the role of household characteris tics in the behavior of consumer demand both for the light this may shed on the pattern of future demands and for the im plications this behavior has for issues of aggregation consumer demand patterns typically found in micro data sets vary considerably across households with different household characteristics and with different levels of income we model this variability by making intercept and slope parameters in the budget share equations of our demand sys tem depend on household characteristics and by allowing for nonlinear total log expenditure terms in fact in theory consistent demand systems it is total ex penditure rather than disposable income that is allocated across goods we find that this general framework leads to a well specified data coherent demand system which is a quadratic extension of the popu lar almost ideal model of angus s deaton and john muellbauer 1980 the micro level estimates are shown to be sensitive to the treatment of endogeneity of total expen diture and to the specification of interaction terms with household characteristics in ad dition this specification is also shown to possess many attractive features for the evaluation of aggregate models