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In Indonesia, rubber is the most valuable export crop produced by small scale agriculture and plays a key role for inclusive economic development. This potential is likely to be not fully exploited. The observed concentration in the crumb rubber processing industry raises concerns about the distribution of export earnings along the value chain. Asymmetric price transmission (APT) is observed. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study investigates the price transmission between international prices and the factories’ purchasing prices on a daily basis. An auto-regressive asymmetric error correction model is estimated to find evidence for APT. In a subsequent step the rents that are redistributed from factories to farmers are calculated. The study then provides estimations of the size of this redistribution under different scenarios.

The results suggest that factories do indeed transmit prices asymmetrically, which has substantial welfare implications: around USD3 million are annually redistributed from farmers to factories. If the price transmission was only half as asymmetric as it is observed, the majority of this redistribution was re-diverted.

This study combines the approaches of non-parametric and parametric estimation techniques of estimating APT processes with a welfare perspective to quantify the distributional consequences of this intertemporal marketing margin manipulation. Especially the calculation of different scenarios of alternative price transmissions is a novelty. The data set of prices on such a disaggregated level and high frequency as required by this approach is also unique.

While traders of agricultural products are known to often exercise market power, this power has rarely been quantified for developing countries. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In order to derive a measure, the authors estimate the traders’ revenue functions and calculate the marginal value products directly from them. The authors subsequently find the determinants affecting their individual market power.

Results show that market power at the traders’ level exists and is substantial. This market power is amplified in situations of extreme remoteness, and weakens with increasing market size.

An exceptional data set with detailed information on the business practices of rubber traders in Jambi, Indonesia is employed with an innovative methodology to directly estimate revenue functions.

The article investigates the patterns of asset impairment recognition in search of signs of “big bath” earnings management practices across an internationally diversified sample of public companies. It also elucidates the incentives that may underlie such practices and explores possible safeguards embedded in the existing corporate governance mechanisms.

The article applied static panel and binary logit models to an international firm-level panel dataset of 1045 public companies observed between 2003 and 2018.

Our empirical results suggest that recognition of asset impairment has no determinate impact on earnings volatility. Investigating the possibility of “big bath” earnings management practices, the authors found no impact of asset impairment recognition on total senior executive compensation in firms, which pay performance-based remuneration. The quality of corporate governance has appeared to impact the firms’ intertemporal proclivity to recognize asset impairment with those having the more entrenched and management-controlled boards being more likely to time impairment recognition by delaying it during exceptionally good and exceptionally bad years. While generally unlikely, recognition of asset impairment in a period with a recorded negative operating performance is found to be closely associated with key executive departures.

The article corroborates the salient role of corporate governance mechanisms in shaping the intertemporal patterns of asset impairment recognition. The possible remedies to the phenomenon should be derived therefrom.

X = multiple interpretations

Most current modeling approaches identify very small gains from trade reform. In this chapter, we examine recent developments in the literature to assess whether standard modeling approaches are mis-specifying, understating, or overstating the gains from trade reform. Key areas where the impacts of trade barrier reduction appear to be understated include the measurement of barriers; the aggregation of these barriers; process productivity gains, particularly those resulting from reallocation of resources between firms; product quality improvements and expansion of product variety; factor supply; and investment of gains from trade.

Throughout the 1990s, the supply of new condominiums in Tokyo significantly increased while prices persistently fell. This article investigates whether the market power of condominium developers is a factor in explaining the outcome in this market and whether there is a relationship between production cost trend and the degree of market power that the developers were able to exercise. In order to respond to these questions, we construct and structurally estimate a dynamic durable goods oligopoly model of the condominium market – one incorporating time-variant costs and a secondary market – using a nested GMM procedure. We find that the data provide no evidence that firms in the primary market have substantial market power in this industry. Moreover, the counterfactual experiment provides evidence that inflationary and deflationary expectations on production cost trends have asymmetric effects to the market power of condominium producers. The increase in their markup when cost inflation is anticipated is significantly higher than the decrease in the markup when the same magnitude of cost deflation is anticipated.

The temporality of performance measurement systems has been claimed to affect actors’ time orientation, such as that of listed company managers. The purpose of this paper is to explore this view.

The study uses constructivist data gathered from executives in one listed and one non-listed company.

The study shows that the research on performance measurement is based on a linear-quantitative view on time that assumes that humans orient towards the future from one point, the present; this view excludes other time-related constructs, particularly the past, and highlights a choice between the short term and the long term, idealising the long term. It is shown that the performance measurement of non-listed company executives is constructed through past-based, present-based and future-based rationalities: executives acknowledge the past as a basis for present and future performance, present actions as shaping future performance and future plans and performance targets as bases for present actions. Listed company executives’ performance measurement is constructed predominantly through the present-based time rationality.

“The orientation from the present” and the “short” and “long terms” could be enhanced with time rationalities.

The evaluation periods within performance measurement systems do not determine the time orientations of the actors subjected to those systems; time rationalities could be considered when designing such systems.

The paper provides a novel view on performance measurement and time.

This article is concerned with the role of theory in explaining the inter‐industry variation of vertical integration (VI). Why, for example, is the world aluminium industry highly integrated (Stukey, 1983) whereas the tin industry is not (Hennart, 1982)? The article is not concerned with explaining differences in the average level of VI across countries, although these are undoubtedly significant (Chandler and Daeins, 1980).

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of brand familiarity and profit-sharing rate on Muslim customers’ brand trust, perceived financial risk, perceived value and intention to invest in an Islamic bank.

A between-subjects experimental design was applied in the study. Six experiments involving two brand familiarity levels and three profit-sharing rates were conducted using a total of 217 samples. Randomization was applied in the study, which generated unequal sample sizes for each group of experiments.

The findings of this experimental study demonstrated that Muslim customers’ familiarity with the bank’s brand has a significant impact on their brand trust and intention to invest in an Islamic bank. The study also found that the profit-sharing rate has a significant impact on the perceived value both with and without interaction with brand familiarity.

The current study applies an independent measured design or a between-subjects experimental design, that resulted in unequal sample sizes. In addition, the study also does not control for the types of bank accounts owned by respondents. The design may invite the presence of confounding variables that exist due to individual differences and environmental variables.

The results show that Islamic bank managers should care about the brand familiarity issue, which strongly influences customers’ brand trust and customer intention to invest in an Islamic bank. In addition, Islamic bank managers should pay attention to the profit-sharing rate given to customers, as it interacts with brand familiarity in influencing customers’ perceived value.

This study examined the impact of brand familiarity and profit-sharing rate on Muslim consumers’ brand trust, perceived risk, perceived value and intention to save in an Islamic bank. The paper provides a shred of empirical evidence to the theoretical relationship between the subjective and objective cues that influence the formation of customers’ trust, perceived financial risk, perceived value and intention in the Islamic bank context.