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The purpose of this paper is to study how repeat customers utilize their established overall restaurant brand image (ORBI), overall restaurant loyalty, satisfaction and behavioral intentions (revisit, recommend) to reengage with a casual-dining restaurant brand.

The study design consists of a mixed-methods, two-phase research approach that includes both qualitative and quantitative data. First, focus groups and in-depth interviews with adult customers reveal preliminary insights on restaurant dining patterns and familiarity with franchised casual dining restaurants. Second, an online self-administered survey tests the influence of ORBI on repeat customers’ overall restaurant loyalty, satisfaction and behavioral intentions.

For repeat customers, ORBI positively predicts loyalty and satisfaction. Loyalty and satisfaction mediate the relationship between ORBI and intentions to recommend, while loyalty alone mediates the relationship between ORBI and intentions to revisit a casual dining restaurant.

Managers looking to stimulate recommendation intentions can increase ORBI, loyalty or satisfaction among repeat customers; or choose some combination of these three predictors. To improve revisit intentions, managers should first increase loyalty, followed by ORBI. Importantly, management needs to tailor information given to repeat customers differently than other customers.

This paper provides a first conceptualization of how both loyalty and satisfaction jointly mediate the relationships between ORBI and two behavioral intentions (revisit, recommend). The results show that loyalty plays a significant role in these predictive relationships and is more important than satisfaction for enhancing intentions to revisit a restaurant.

This research aimed to explore whether subject facets would increase patron use of subject headings in a faceted (Yufind) versus a non‐faceted (Orbis) catalog interface at Yale University.

Two rounds of think aloud protocol testing were done with students to measure the acceptance and use of subject heading facets. After a faceted and non‐faceted interface were implemented, side‐by‐side, log file analysis was employed to measure and compare use of subject headings in both interfaces.

Initial usability testing showed that patrons would try facets, but had some problems effectively using them. In production from January to May 2011, at least one facet was used in 25.4 percent of Yufind searches, and subject facets were used in 5.1 percent of searches, while in Orbis subject headings were used in 6.4 percent of searches. Facets were used less than subject heading links in records in either interface.

The findings are important as libraries spend significant staff time adding subject headings to records, and their use by patrons is declining. As measured in two production systems running on exactly the same catalog records, subject heading facets did not successfully increase use of subject headings. Without further refinements, faceted display may not be a successful strategy to increase patron use of subject headings.

A comparison of patron generated subject heading use in two concurrently running interfaces, one faceted and one not, has not been done before.

In this chapter, we document the growing importance of FDI from BRIC countries in relation to FDI from both developed and developing countries and investigate the types of firms that are responsible for BRIC FDI.

We follow a two-step empirical approach. First, we provide macro evidence on FDI from BRIC countries. We use UNCTAD data to highlight the patterns of FDI flows and stocks. Second, we provide firm-level evidence on FDI. Using ORBIS data, we elaborate a rich taxonomy of FDI that accounts for the decision to invest abroad and for the location, ownership, and number of foreign subsidiaries. Thus, we characterize BRIC multinationals’ involvement in FDI and examine the relationship between FDI and performance at the firm level.

We unveil new facts about BRIC multinationals. BRIC multinationals are in the minority in their home countries, but they outperform domestic enterprises. Within the group of BRIC investors, those firms that invest in developing countries, that operate in joint ventures, or that have more than five foreign subsidiaries are in the minority, but they outperform those firms that select other FDI strategies.

Our estimates document a positive and robust correlation between FDI and performance; however, the cross-sectional nature of our data does not permit a proper causality analysis.

Our work contributes to the International Economics literature on internationalization and firm performance as well as to the International Business literature on FDI from emerging economies. With respect to the former, we innovate by studying the relation between FDI strategies and firm performance. In relation to the latter, we innovate by introducing firm-level data and a cross-country approach that lets us illustrate the roles and features of FDI from BRIC countries.

To report and analyze transaction data over a four‐year period for patron‐initiated borrowing via the Cascade union catalog as well as transaction data for traditional ILL in a consortium of six academic libraries in Washington State.

Transaction data for patron‐initiated borrowing via the Cascade union catalog were gathered from statistics produced by the Inn‐Reach software. Data for ILL were collected via a survey of libraries’ staff. Data for returnables and copies were analyzed at the consortium and institutional level.

In the third year of patron‐initiated borrowing, traditional ILL transactions for returnables had decreased 21 per cent consortium‐wide, the total number of transactions for returnables had increased 271.9 per cent, and the transactions for copies remained steady. Although the borrowing and lending patterns at the six libraries varied, each loaned and borrowed more returnables via patron‐initiated borrowing than via traditional ILL.

This study describes activity at a single consortium of only six libraries. Since the Cascade libraries have now merged into a larger consortium, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, it would be interesting to collect and analyze new data from the larger group to see if patterns have changed.

The increased volume of returnables delivered to users in this consortium suggests that patron‐initiated borrowing is an effective method for resource sharing. Traditional ILL remains a necessary alternative for copies and books not available within the consortium.

This is the first study to examine consortium‐wide transaction data for both patron‐initiated borrowing and traditional interlibrary loan for a sustained period of time.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate foreign direct investment (FDI) premia in the former Soviet states.

The authors follow an empirical approach. Using Orbis data for a sample of more than 3,000 companies, the authors characterize FDI involvement and FDI premia of firms from three distinctive groups of former Soviet states, designated “upper-middle”-income, “lower-middle”-income and “high”-income countries. This yields interesting within-group and between-group results on the effects of outward FDI (OFDI) and inward FDI (IFDI) on firm-level innovation.

The authors unveil new facts about innovation and FDI in the former Soviet states. FDI firms innovate more than non-FDI firms and OFDI firms innovate more than IFDI firms. The innovation effect of OFDI is the largest for firms from the “lower-middle” countries, followed by the “high” and “upper-middle” countries. The innovation effect of IFDI is the largest for firms from the “lower-middle” countries, followed by the “upper-middle” and “high” countries. FDI to and from Europe has the largest impact on innovation; this holds across country groups.

The estimates of this paper document robust FDI premia, i.e., a positive and significant correlation between firm-level innovation and FDI. However, the cross-sectional nature of the data does not permit a proper causality analysis.

The paper contributes to the literature on FDI premia by: considering IFDI and OFDI in a unified empirical framework; dissecting IFDI and OFDI by location; measuring firm-level productivity in terms of innovation; and providing cross-country comparable evidence on both emerging and advanced economies. At the same time, the paper contributes to the literature on FDI from emerging economies by: taking a firm-level quantitative approach; focusing on a relatively unexplored set of countries; and providing comparable cross-country evidence on both emerging and advanced economies.

The amount of current assets and the structure of their financing within working capital management define the level of risk, liquidity and profitability of any company. This chapter identifies the type of working capital investment and financing policies and reveals their influence on the financial performance of Czech firms.

The type of investment policy was defined, based on the structure of current assets and the working capital-to-sales ratio, followed by the share of different liabilities in assets, used to determine the financing policy. The Orbis database provided the chapter with indexes of manufacturing, agricultural, construction and trade companies for the period of 2012–2021.

The results obtained revealed the liquidity and financial independence of all selected industries. Flexible investment and conservative financing policies in agriculture were accompanied by low profitability. The decrease of the working capital-to-sales ratio and the attraction of the current debts for assets financing provided a higher return on assets in the manufacturing, agricultural and trade sectors.

Productivity growth in Italy has been persistently anemic and lagged that of the euro area over the period 1999–2015, while the indebtedness of its corporate sector increased. Using the ORBIS firm-level database, this chapter studies the long-term impact of persistent corporate-debt accumulation on the productivity growth of Italian firms, and investigates whether total factor productivity (TFP) growth varies with the level of corporate indebtedness. The authors employ a novel estimation technique proposed by Chudik, Mohaddes, Pesaran, & Raissi (2017) to account for dynamics, bi-directional feedback effects, cross-firm heterogeneity, and cross-sectional dependence arising from unobserved common factors (e.g., oil price shocks, labor and product market frictions, and the stance of the global financial cycle). Filtering out the effects of unobserved common factors and controlling for firm-specific characteristics, the authors find significant negative effects of persistent corporate-debt build-up on firms’ TFP growth on average, and weak evidence of a threshold level of corporate debt, beyond which productivity growth drops off significantly. The results have strong policy implications, for example the design of the tax system should discourage persistent corporate-debt accumulation, and effective and timely frameworks to reduce corporate-debt overhangs are essential.

As Czech export is widely considered the key to the economic development of Czechia, this chapter explores the relationship between microeconomic profitability among companies in selected TOP10 export industries and the macroeconomic development of the export itself. An investigation was carried out to compare the differences caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the comparison is developed according to the size and concentration of ownership among exporting companies. Annual data are obtained from the Bureau van Dijk Orbis database to analyse profitability among 4,283 companies in 10 NACE industries from 2012 to 2021. We have obtained encouraging results, demonstrating that not only those less profitable companies affected export development. However, in general, our results emphasise the importance of those less profitable medium-sized companies for Czech export, within the manufacture of machinery and equipment, and the manufacture of motor vehicles in particular.

This paper aims to describe the results of a usability test performed at Western Washington University to determine whether users were as successful performing common catalog‐related tasks in WorldCat Local as they are in the library's current catalog, Innovative Interfaces' WebPAC.

A usability team developed a test based on tasks commonly performed in the library catalog. They then tested 24 participants of varying levels of experience and asked each to perform 20 common catalog tasks in either the WebPAC interface currently in use or the WorldCat Local interface. The WorldCat Local interface was a test version which reflected Western Washington University's library holdings, in addition to the Orbis Cascade Alliance consortial holdings and all WorldCat holdings.

While the results found that there were tasks in which participants were more successful in WorldCat Local than in the WebPAC, they also identified common tasks in which users were far less successful in WorldCat Local than in the WebPAC.

WorldCat Local is one example of a new generation of discovery interfaces that is being considered by a number of academic institutions. This paper provides some insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the product.