Search results

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the global economy, disrupting supply chains, causing job losses and altering consumer demand. In Malaysia, the real estate sector has been notably affected, with increased property impairments and overhang due to unprecedented uncertainty. Understanding these effects is crucial for policymakers and investors to prevent real estate and banking crises. This study aims to analyse the relationships between macroeconomic factors during the pandemic on property impairments and overhang, providing insights for maintaining macroeconomic stability. The findings will inform strategies for mitigating economic shocks, identifying opportunities, and guiding real estate policies in Malaysia and potentially globally.

This research article uses a time series ARDL regression analysis to examine pivotal macroeconomic factors including income, housing process, interest rates and unemployment on property loan impairments and property supply overhang in Malaysia. ARDL is effective to measure and analyse time series data, especially to understand the lagged impacts of macroeconomic factors. This can be seen by various economists in analysing macroeconomic factors affecting non-performing loans or the real estate finance using regression analyses both in Malaysia and other regions. The observations are gathered before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, spanning a five-year period with monthly frequency from 2018 to 2022.

The study emphasizes the critical importance of effectively managing unemployment and implementing policy interventions, such as moratoriums, to stabilize the economy and reduce the risk of loan impairments during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, this study highlights a significant inverse relationship between income per capita and loan impairments, underscoring the necessity for policies that promote economic growth and income equality. Initiatives targeting job creation, education and skills development can elevate income levels, thereby decreasing loan impairments. Lower lending interest rates during the pandemic also help mitigate the risk of loan impairments by facilitating borrowing, stimulating economic activity and enhancing financial well-being. Furthermore, the study suggests that while lower interest rates incentivize property developers and investors, understanding the intricate interaction between housing prices and supply is crucial for policymakers and stakeholders to effectively manage the housing market and ensure adequate housing supply, especially during crises.

This paper provides insight for policymakers, regulators, investors and property consultants into the dynamic effects of key macroeconomic factors amidst a global recession in how they impact the real estate market with regards specifically to all types of property loan impairments and property supply overhang. The observations are limited to the COVID-19 period, spanning five years with monthly data from 2018 to 2022. This understanding can facilitate the development of targeted strategic monetary policies and investment decisions in case of future recessions.

Policymakers should prioritize initiatives such as moratoriums and job creation programs to mitigate economic downturns. Additionally, financial institutions need to adjust lending practices in response to lower interest rates, while stakeholders in the housing market must understand the complex dynamics between housing prices and supply to ensure a balanced market. Overall, addressing underlying economic factors and implementing targeted policies are essential for building resilience and promoting sustainable economic growth amidst challenging circumstances.

Initiatives aimed at fostering income equality, creating employment opportunities and ensuring housing accessibility contribute to greater social cohesion and well-being. By promoting financial inclusion and building resilience to crises, societies can mitigate the adverse social impacts of economic challenges such as unemployment and housing affordability. Overall, addressing socioeconomic disparities and promoting inclusive growth are essential for fostering a more equitable and resilient society.

The originality and uniqueness of this study lie in its comprehensive analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on loan impairments and housing supply. While previous studies have focused on the pandemic’s effects on specific segments of the real estate market or property prices, this study provides a broad overview of its impact on property loan impairments and housing supply overhang. Finally, this study highlights the social and practical implications. Overall, this study offers a distinctive analysis of COVID-19’s impact on the real estate market and its implications for policymakers, real estate professionals and investors.

Increasing overhang of serviced apartments poses a serious concern to the national property market. This study aims to examine the impacts of macroeconomic determinants, namely, gross domestic product (GDP), consumer confidence index (CF), existing stocks (ES), incoming supply (IS) and completed project (CP) on serviced apartment price changes.

To achieve more accurate, quality price changes, a serviced apartment price index (SAPI) was constructed through a self-developed hedonic price index model. This study has collected 1,567 transaction data in Kuala Lumpur, covering 2009Q1–2018Q4 for price index construction and data were analysed using the vector autoregressive model, the vector error correction model and the fully modified ordinary least squares (OLS) (FMOLS).

Results of the regression model show that only GDP, ES and IS were significantly associated with SAPI, with an R² of 0.7, where both ES and IS have inverse relationships with SAPI. More precisely, it is predicted that the price of serviced apartments will be reduced by 0.56% and 0.21% for every 1% increase in ES and IS, respectively.

Therefore, government monitoring of serviced apartments’ future supply is crucial by enforcing land use-planning regulations via stricter development approval of serviced apartments to safeguard and achieve more stable property prices.

By adopting an innovative approach to estimating the response of price change to supply and demand in a situation where there is no price indicator for serviced apartments, the study addresses the knowledge gap, especially in terms of understanding what are the key determinants of, and to what extent they influence, the SAPI.

Proposes that most managers and researchers acknowledge that emerging and newly industrialized markets do not have the same quantity of secondary data as the long‐industrialized economies of North America and Western Europe. Presents the results of a search of available, business‐related, secondary data on South‐East Asia’s rapidly growing economies; highlights how this dearth of data has resulted in an informational void that affects the practice of strategic management in the region. Also delineates how regional managers cope with and adapt to the informational void, and to the region’s fast‐changing business, cultural and competitive environments, by developing their unique, highly‐intuitive style of strategic management. Finally, provides some suggestions to bridge this informational void for management practice and for future research.

While several studies have examined the roles of husbands and wives in making decisions about products, few have examined the impact of children. This article reports the results of a 1985 study of the influence of children on families. The study examines children's influence in each of four stages of the purchase decision, for 25 products, and by age of the children. For child‐centered (e.g., toys, children's clothing, food) and child‐used products or services (e.g., vacations, restaurant choices, outside entertainment), the study shows that children are perceived as influential by most households. Older children are perceived as more influential than younger children for nearly all the products studied. The study concludes that “family” decision making is quite different from “husband‐wife” decision making.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of celebrity endorsers on consumer advocacy, customization and entertainment intentions based on the notion of the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework. In addition, this study aims to examine the mediating and moderating role of customization and entertainment intentions on the proposed relationships. The authors also intend to highlight the comparative effects between male and female young social media consumers on those proposed associations.

In the pursuit of comprehensive and rigorous data collection, this study adopted a quantitative methodology using a meticulously crafted questionnaire. The questionnaire survey was conducted in major cities of Malaysia using the convenience and snowball sampling techniques. A total of 576 responses were collected, even though 549 retorts were used for data analysis. In this investigation, the authors strategically used covariance-based structural equation modeling through the use of AMOS v. 24 as the primary data analysis tool. Augmenting the analytical depth, the authors also conducted a supplementary bootstrap analysis. The additional layers of examination were crucial for appraising the mediating and moderating effects inherent within the model, in which the PROCESS MACRO v.4.20 was used.

The results of this study revealed the significant direct positive effects of celebrity endorsers on consumer customization, entertainment and advocacy intentions. Consumer customization and entertainment intentions also found significant direct affirmative effects on consumer advocacy intention, along with the significant direct positive effects of consumer entertainment intention on consumer customization intention. The results further revealed that consumer customization and entertainment intentions cannot mediate the relationship between celebrity endorsers and advocacy intention. The entertainment intention also declined the mediating effects between celebrity endorsers and consumer customization intention. On the contrary, consumer customization intention significantly and positively, and entertainment intention also significantly but negatively, moderate the association between celebrity endorsers and consumer advocacy intention. This study also illustrates that the effects of those examined relationships differ between male and female young social media consumers.

This study investigates the impact of celebrity endorsers on consumer behavior, focusing on their customization, entertainment and advocacy intentions. It extends current SOR framework, enhances source credibility theory, fills gaps in the literature on social media brand engagement and underscores the significance of customization and entertainment intentions. The findings provide insights for managers aiming to harness consumer brand advocacy through celebrity endorsers effectively.

The purpose of this study is to explore a consumption values model for Islamic mobile banking acceptance and to identify any differences in perceived consumption values between Muslims and non-Muslims towards the use of Islamic mobile banking services.

Using an online survey method, a sample of 183 was collected and the partial least squares (PLS) method was used to evaluate the model and validate hypothesis, as it is ideal for assessing both the psychometric properties of all scales and, subsequently, to test the structural relationships proposed in the model.

Empirical results via the PLS method demonstrates that the result satisfactorily explains the adoption of Islamic mobile banking and further demonstrates the use of the consumption values model as an alternate approach for technology adoption. The consumption values model approach appears to have a stronger fit for Muslims than non-Muslims with 66.6 per cent of the variance explained and a goodness-of-fit index of 0.724. The conditional factors are important in the non-Muslims compared to Muslims. Muslims seem to value emotional factors more than non-Muslims.

The current research findings represent mainly university students with some exposure to Islamic mobile banking experience and familiarity with mobile technology. Indeed, the samples were taken from Malaysia, an Islamic country that has a diverse ethnic and cultural background. Hence, the result may not apply to other Islamic countries, e.g. Arabic countries due to the cultural background differences. Future researchers could overcome the limits of generalisability by increasing sample coverage.

This research finding is useful as the comparison is made between Muslim and non-Muslim consumers which help practitioners and researchers to better understand the different adoption characteristics and advance insights on how to promote such a technological service for everyday banking needs especially to different segments of the community. In developing Islamic mobile banking interactions, designers should look beyond the system’s ease of use and take advantage of the different consumption values to include personalisation in the service design through automatically recognising Muslim customers and non-Muslim customers during system use.

The study contributed to the theory of consumption values model in technology adoption and demonstrated the model is capable of explaining the functional, emotional, epistemic, conditional and social values on consumers in their adoption intention. This research provides empirical findings not reported in previous studies due to the overly represented technology acceptance model approach.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is a cultural gap in student perceptions of online collaborative learning and to investigate to what extent student perceptions, motivation, and learning strategies change over time due to the actual involvement in a collaborative e‐learning environment (ELE).

A parallel e‐learning environment for a first‐year university course is implemented for a Flemish group (n = 217) at Ghent University and a Chinese group (n = 165) at Beijing Normal University. Student perceptions of the online collaborative learning environment and their motivation and learning strategies before and after the ELE are measured.

The findings show that the Flemish group perceive the online collaborative learning environment more positively compared to the Chinese group. However, Chinese students' motivation, and learning strategies change significantly towards a way that is more in line with a social‐constructivist learning approach after the online collaborative learning experience.

The current results indicate that students from different cultural contexts perceive online collaborative learning environments differently. Specific cultural adaptations in e‐learning design could be considered when an ELE is to be implemented cross‐culturally.

This study can help both Chinese and Western instructors to become aware of different perceptions of online collaborative learning and to be more supportive to the students.

The author describes how he entered the marketing field and describes his contributions in four sections: articles written, books published, students nurtured, and executives consulted and trained. He describes his contributions to the marketing field in nine areas: marketing theory and orientations, improving the role and practice of marketing, analytical marketing, the social and ethical side of marketing, globalization and international marketing competition, marketing in the new economy, creating and managing the product mix, strategic marketing, and broadening the concept and application of marketing.

This study examined the effect of different types of politically connected (PCON) Malaysian firms on analysts' forecast accuracy and dispersion.

The study identified different types of PCON firms according to Wong and Hooy's (2018) classification, which divided political connections into government-linked companies (GLCs), boards of directors, business owners and family members of government leaders. The sample covered the period 2007–2016, for which earnings forecast data were obtained from the Institutional Brokers' Estimate System (IBES) database and financial data were extracted from Thomson Reuters Fundamentals. We deleted any market consensus estimates made by less than three analysts and/or firms with less than three years of analyst forecast information to control for the impact of individual analysts' personal attributes.

The study found that PCON firms were associated with lower analyst forecast accuracy and higher forecast dispersion. The effect was more salient in GLCs than in other PCON firms, either through families, business ties or boards of directors. Further analyses showed that PCON firms—in particular GLCs—were associated with more aggressive reporting of earnings and poorer quality of accruals, hence providing inadequate information for analysts to produce accurate and less dispersed earnings forecasts. The results were robust even after addressing endogeneity issues.

This study found new evidence of the impact of different types of PCON firms in exacerbating information asymmetry, which was not addressed in prior studies.

This study has a significant practical implication for investors that they should be mindful of high information asymmetry in politically connected firms, particularly government-linked companies.

This is the first study to provide evidence of the impact of different types of PCON firms on analysts' earnings forecasts.