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This paper aims to examine the direct impacts of marketing resources and marketing activities on several business performance indicators in the banking industry and the indirect effects through customer-based brand equity.

We use a holistic empirical approach based on resource-based view and marketing productivity chain. The main study consists of a secondary analysis using quarterly data of fourteen banks over four years. We analyze the data using fixed-effect panel data regression, namely seemingly unrelated regressions.

We find that customer-based brand equity is one of the most influential factors on business performance. Moreover, the indirect effect through customer-based brand equity should be considered in improving business performance. Marketing-related financial resources positively impact customer-based brand equity and business performance. Regarding marketing activities, pricing strategies affect the bank preferences of customers, which in turn affect the growth of deposit volumes and churn rates. Additionally, the number of bank branches positively impacts business performance. Advertising spending on different media has differentiated impacts on the performance indicators; thus, the allocation of advertising budget and advertising planning are critical.

This study examines the inter-relationships among marketing resources, marketing activities, consumer response through brand equity and marketing performance. This study contributes to the literature by integrating the resource-based view and the marketing productivity chain to analyze the inter-relationships using panel data and several sector-related metrics. This study provides valuable insights to decision-makers in the banking industry.

The global energy sector draws significant stakeholder attention due to never-ending controversies surrounding its environmental impacts. Investors’ response to such controversies causes direct financial implications for these firms. Furthermore, environmental, social and governance (ESG) sensitivity, which is likely to safeguard the energy sector firms from such controversies, is itself conditional to the development stage of a country and its regulatory environment. Therefore, this study aims to investigate if the influence of ESG on the share price volatility (SPV) of energy sector firms is subject to the development stage of the countries.

The study investigates nine years of panel data of 93 global energy sector firms from developing and developed nations. Using dynamic two-way fixed effects estimation and computing robust standard errors to obtain the econometric results.

The main finding reveals that the impact of ESG on SPV is, indeed, subject to the development stage of the nations. Similar results are observed for the effects of the social dimension of ESG on SPV. While ESG impacts the SPV negatively for firms in developing economies, the impact is the opposite for firms in developed nations. In other words, strong ESG propositions induce share price stability for developing countries while destabilizing the firms in developed nations.

The policymakers should further streamline the regulations and policies related to ESG adoption and adherence. In practice, the energy sectors should streamline their operations. Firm managers, especially in the energy sector, should devise strategies with ESG as an essential component to safeguard their firms against environmental and market volatility and adversatives. The firms in developing nations should further strengthen their social dimension of ESG to foster social equity and harmony.

The study contributes through its niche investigations on the energy sector, which is very important for the world economy. The study is relevant in the current scenario when the world faces a severe energy crisis due to global supply chain issues.

Gillette’s historically successful “razor and blade” business model (RBM) has been a promising benchmark for multiple businesses across diverse industries worldwide in the past several decades. The extant literature deals with very few nuances of this business model notwithstanding the fact that there are several variants of this business model being put to practical use by firms in diverse industries in grossly metaphorically equivalent situations.

This study adopts the 2 × 2 truth table framework from the domains of mathematical logic and combinatorics in fleshing out all possible (four logical possibilities) variants of the razor and blade business model for further analysis. This application presents four mutually exclusive yet collectively exhaustive possibilities on any chosen dimension. Two major dimensions (viz., provision of subsidy and intra- or extra-firm involvement in the making of razors or blades or both) form part of the discussion in this paper. In addition, this study synthesizes and streamlines entrepreneurial wisdom from multiple intra-industry and inter-industry benchmarks in terms of real-time firms explicitly or implicitly adopting several variants of the RBM that suit their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of evolution in situations that are grossly reflective of the metaphorically equivalent scenario of razor and recurrent blades. Inductive method of research is carried out with real-time cases from diverse industries with a pivotally common pattern of razor and blade model in some form or the other.

Several new variants of the razor and blade model (much beyond what the extant literature explicitly projects) have been discovered from the multiple metaphorically equivalent cases of RBM across industries. All of these expand the portfolio of options that relevant entrepreneurial firms can explore and exploit the best possible option chosen from them, given their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of growth.

This study has enriched the literature by presenting and analyzing a more inclusive or perhaps comprehensive palette of explicit choices in the form of several variants of the RBM for the relevant entrepreneurial firms to choose from. Future research can undertake the task of comparing these variants of RBM with those of upcoming servitization business models such as guaranteed availability, subscription and performance-based contracting and exploring the prospects of diverse combinations.

Smart entrepreneurial firms identify and adopt inspiring benchmarks (like razor and blade model whenever appropriate) duly tweaked and blended into a gestalt benchmark for optimal profits and attractive market shares. They target diverse market segments for tied-goods with different variants or combinations of the relevant benchmarks in the form of variegated customer value propositions (CVPs) that have unique and enticing appeal to the respective market segments.

Value-sensitive customers on the rise globally choose the option that best suits them from among multiple alternatives offered by competing firms in the market. As long as the ratio of utility to price of such an offer is among the highest, even a no-frills CVP may be most appealing to one market segment while a plush CVP may be tempting to yet another market segment simultaneously. While professional business firms embrace resource leverage practices consciously, amateur customers do so subconsciously. Each party subliminally desires to have the maximum bang-to-buck ratio as the optimal return on investment, given their priorities ceteris paribus.

Prior studies on the RBM have explicitly captured only a few variants of the razor and blade model. This study is perhaps the first of its kind that ferrets out many other variants (more than ten) of the razor and blade model with due simplification and exemplification, justification and demystification.

The current research aims to investigate the impact of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) evolution, government stringency measures and economic resilience on stock market volatility in the Middle East and North African (MENA) emerging markets. Other macroeconomic factors were also taken into account.

Based on financial data from 10 selected MENA countries, we tested an integrated framework that has not yet been explored in prior research. The exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (E-GARCH) was adopted to analyze data from March 2020 to February 2022.

Our research illustrates the direct and indirect effects of the virus outbreak on stock market stability and reports that economic resilience could alleviate the volatility shock. This finding is robust across the various proxies of economic resilience used in this study. We also argue that the negative impact of the pandemic on equity market variation gets more pronounced in countries with higher level of stringency scores.

Policymakers ought to strengthen their economic structures and reinforce the economic governance at the national level to gain existing and potential investors’ trust and ensure lower stock market volatilities in times of crisis. Our study also recommends some key economic factors to consider while establishing efficient policies to tackle unexpected shocks and prevent financial meltdowns.

Our findings add to the evolving literature on the reaction of economic and financial markets to the sanitary crisis, particularly in developing countries where research is still scarce. This study is the first of its kind to investigate the stock market reaction to stringency measures in the understudied MENA region.

Art return indices are usually estimated based only on a few means of artistic expression (mainly paintings and drawings). Other forms of expression (e.g. sculptures and installations) are generally ignored, in part because they are three-dimensional and, hence, more difficult to measure. We analyze the price determinants as well as the return and risk of three artistic expressions (paintings, drawings and sculptures) executed by Fernando Botero, the most expensive living Latin American artist, to analyze the degree to which their risk and return attributes differ throughout a 20-year period.

We analyzed all paintings, drawings and sculptures executed by Botero and sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s between 2000 and 2020 (a total of 707 artworks). The data and the images of each artwork were obtained from the web pages of these two auction houses. A hedonic regression was run to explain the price of each artwork and use explanatory variables that are standard in the literature. Art price indices for paintings, drawings and sculptures were constructed using the year-dummy variables estimated in the regressions. We performed a similar analysis for another artist, Carlos Cruz-Diez, as a robustness to our results.

The performance of Botero’s sculptures through time differs markedly from that of his paintings and drawings. Our results suggest that it is possible that returns estimated in the literature could suffer from a bias, as they have usually ignored the performance of sculptures and other artistic expressions. Botero’s paintings provided a return that was comparable to those of his sculptures (3.36% and 3.20%, respectively), they were two times as high as those of his drawings (1.68%). On the other hand, whereas paintings and drawings had similar annual standard deviations (26% and 25.22%, respectively), sculptures had a much smaller standard deviation (16.96%).

A limitation of the hedonic regression method lies in the need to have a significant and diverse sample to identify the true effect of each variable on the price of a good. Another limitation is that we were only able to use art prices from auctions, as this is the only comprehensive source of art price data that is publicly available. These two limitations are shared by all the studies that use the hedonic pricing model.

Our results have practical applications for art collectors and investors, as well as for artists, galleries and, in general, for the whole art market ecosystem. The risk and return attributes of the various artistic expressions of an artist can be different, and thus it makes sense to analyze each one of them individually, as well as their correlations with the other artistic expressions and with traditional and other alternative investments.

The art market is part of what is known as the “orange economy” (also known as the Creative Economy). According to the World Bank, the economic value of the creative sector is not well known or appreciated, even though cultural, creative and artistic activities are vital for our sense of well-being.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that compares the financial performance of paintings, drawings and sculptures for the case of a specific artist. We chose Botero for three reasons. First, he is a Latin American living artist who has achieved the highest levels of international sales. Second, Botero has worked extensively on various artistic expressions (oil paintings, drawings on different materials and sculptures) throughout his life, a characteristic that is essential to be able to carry out our study. Third, there is a long record of auction sales for each of Botero’s artistic expressions.

Los índices de rentabilidad del arte generalmente se estiman basándose únicamente en unos pocos medios de expresión artística (principalmente pinturas y dibujos). Otras formas de expresión artística (por ejemplo, esculturas e instalaciones) generalmente se ignoran, en parte porque son tridimensionales y, por tanto, más difíciles de medir. Analizamos los determinantes del precio, así como el retorno y el riesgo de tres expresiones artísticas (pinturas, dibujos y esculturas) ejecutadas por Fernando Botero, el artista latinoamericano vivo más caro, para analizar en qué medida sus atributos de riesgo y retorno difieren a lo largo del tiempo, en un período de 20 años.

Analizamos todas las pinturas, dibujos y esculturas ejecutadas por Botero y vendidas en Sotheby’s y Christie’s entre 2000 y 2020 (un total de 707 obras de arte). Los datos y las imágenes de cada obra se obtuvieron de las páginas web de estas dos casas de subastas. Se realizó una regresión hedonante para explicar el precio de cada obra de arte y se utilizaron variables explicativas estándar en la literatura. Los índices de precios de arte para pinturas, dibujos y esculturas se construyeron utilizando variables ficticias anuales estimadas en las regresiones. Realizamos un análisis similar para otro artista, Carlos Cruz-Diez, como análisis de robustez de nuestros resultados.

El desempeño de las esculturas de Botero a través del tiempo difiere marcadamente del de sus pinturas y dibujos. Nuestros resultados sugieren que es posible que los retornos estimados en la literatura sufran un sesgo, ya que generalmente han ignorado el desempeño de esculturas y otras expresiones artísticas. Las pinturas de Botero proporcionaron un retorno comparable al de sus esculturas (3.36% y 3.20%, respectivamente), pero fueron dos veces superiores a los de sus dibujos (1.68%). Por otro lado, mientras que las pinturas y los dibujos tuvieron desviaciones estándar anuales similares (26% y 25.22%, respectivamente), las esculturas tuvieron una desviación estándar mucho menor (16.96%).

Una limitación del método de regresión hedónica radica en la necesidad de contar con una muestra significativa y diversa para identificar el verdadero efecto de cada variable sobre el precio de un bien. Otra limitación consiste en que solo pudimos utilizar precios de arte de subastas, ya que esta es la única fuente completa de datos sobre precios de arte que está disponible públicamente. Estas dos limitaciones son compartidas por todos los estudios que utilizan el modelo de precios hedónico.

Nuestros resultados tienen aplicaciones prácticas para coleccionistas e inversores de arte, así como también para artistas, galerías y, en general, para todo el ecosistema del mercado del arte. Los atributos de riesgo y retorno de las diversas expresiones de un artista pueden ser diferentes, por lo que tiene sentido analizar cada una de ellas individualmente, así como sus correlaciones con las otras expresiones artísticas y con las inversiones tradicionales y otras alternativas.

El mercado del arte forma parte de lo que se conoce como “economía naranja” (también conocida como Economía Creativa). Según el Banco Mundial, el valor económico del sector creativo no es bien conocido ni apreciado, a pesar de que las actividades culturales, creativas y artísticas son vitales para nuestra sensación de bienestar.

Hasta donde hemos podido comprobar, este es el primer artículo que compara el desempeño financiero de pinturas, dibujos y esculturas para el caso de un artista específico. Elegimos a Botero por tres razones. En primer lugar, es el artista vivo latinoamericano que ha alcanzado los mayores niveles de ventas internacionales. En segundo lugar, Botero ha trabajado extensamente en diversas expresiones artísticas (óleos, dibujos sobre distintos materiales y esculturas) a lo largo de su vida, característica que resulta fundamental para poder realizar nuestro estudio. En tercer lugar, existe un largo historial de ventas en subasta de cada una de las expresiones artísticas de Botero.

The Internet has changed consumer decision-making and influenced business behaviour. User-generated product information is abundant and readily available. This paper argues that user-generated content can be efficiently utilised for business intelligence using data science and develops an approach to demonstrate the methods and benefits of the different techniques.

Using Python Selenium, Beautiful Soup and various text mining approaches in R to access, retrieve and analyse user-generated content, we argue that (1) companies can extract information about the product attributes that matter most to consumers and (2) user-generated reviews enable the use of text mining results in combination with other demographic and statistical information (e.g. ratings) as an efficient input for competitive analysis.

The paper shows that combining different types of data (textual and numerical data) and applying and combining different methods can provide organisations with important business information and improve business performance.

The paper shows that combining different types of data (textual and numerical data) and applying and combining different methods can provide organisations with important business information and improve business performance.

The study makes several contributions to the marketing and management literature, mainly by illustrating the methodological advantages of text mining and accompanying statistical analysis, the different types of distilled information and their use in decision-making.

We propose an alternative rationale for why some firms employ veterans, driven not solely by benevolence but also by the prospect of enhanced outcomes. Financially, hiring veterans could correlate with improved stock market performance for the hiring company while aligning with corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Our study centers on the stock market performance of companies hiring veterans. It aims to underscore a lesser-known facet of the veteran employment discourse and its connection to the hiring firm's financial performance.

This paper evaluates the stock market performance of three VETS portfolios (made of companies that hire veterans) compared to the benchmark SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Using a modular approach, we create three VETS passive indices: VETSEW (equal-weighted index), VETSPW (price-weighted index) and VETSVW (value-weighted index). The study analyzes the annual returns, portfolio allocations, risk-adjusted performance metrics and style analysis of the portfolios from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2022.

The findings indicate that all three VETS portfolios outperformed the benchmark, with higher ending balances and superior risk-adjusted ratios such as the Sharpe and Sortino ratios. Notably, the portfolios demonstrated resilience during challenging periods, including the COVID-19 pandemic, subsequent recovery and an inflationary period.

Limitations include the paper's focus solely on stock returns, suggesting a need for broader financial and management ratios. Moreover, a deeper exploration into how veterans contribute during turbulent times is suggested for further investigation. Although the study touches upon the financial performance of veteran-focused companies during challenging economic times, it does not extensively delve into the specific ways in which veterans add value under such circumstances, presenting an opportunity for further exploration.

Firms that employ veterans amid the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate favorable risk-adjusted returns, underscoring the potential of veterans as valuable crisis-time assets. Our research further underscores the correlation between veteran hiring and enhanced financial prowess. These insights carry significant policy implications, including CSR initiatives for hiring veterans, skill translation and training and collaboration with veteran organizations.

The paper's findings suggest significant implications: (1) Policymakers could incentivize firms to hire veterans through tax benefits or grants, leveraging their skills for organizational resilience. (2) Collaborative efforts between policymakers and firms can promote responsible hiring, boosting a company's reputation through diversity and inclusion, positively impacting society. (3) Support for skill translation from military to civilian jobs is crucial. Programs certifying skills and tailored education aid veterans' successful transition into the workforce. (4) Collaborations between policymakers, veteran organizations and private sector entities can create networks, job placements and support systems for veterans' employment.

Numerous prior studies within the domain of corporate social responsibility have predominantly neglected the contributions veterans offer to businesses and the underlying reasons behind firms' decisions to employ them. Our research uniquely concentrates on the stock market performance of companies that choose to hire veterans.

This study examines the impact of outcome uncertainty on the National Football League (NFL) secondary ticket market prices. As a demand-driven market, it is essential to comprehend how resellers respond to outcome uncertainty, one of the consumer demand factors in sports.

Using real-time ticket prices and money lines as a proxy of the probabilities of winning, this study employs a regression analysis and examines 33,554 price observations from the NFL’s secondary ticket market partner, StubHub.

The result shows a positive relationship between outcome uncertainty and secondary market ticket prices, indicating that resellers adjust the prices in response to the level of outcome uncertainty and put more value on games with greater uncertainty. This finding confirms the demand-driven nature of the secondary ticket market, as outcome uncertainty is one of the demand factors in sports.

This study links the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis with secondary ticket market pricing and fills a gap in the literature by providing an important perspective on games with uncertainty in the secondary ticket market. Outcome uncertainty has limited understanding in relation to secondary ticket market pricing despite its relationship with consumer demand. The positive relationship between outcome uncertainty and the ticket prices, grounded in real-time price data and win probability from sport betting markets, enhances our understanding of price determinations in the secondary ticket market.

The current study immerses in the realm of bank mergers among prominent PSBs in India, focusing on the financial performance of six recently merged PSBs entities. Amidst the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economies, the study aims to uncover the efficiency of these PSBs in navigating this unprecedented crisis.

The evaluation encompasses panel data on an annual basis spanning from 2020 to 2023. To assess the overall efficiency of merged PSBs, the advanced statistical technique like one-step system generalized method of moments has been applied to estimate its efficiency.

The study findings affirm that PSB mergers have bolstered financial metrics and efficiency. Enhanced return on equity (ROA) and net profit margin (NPM) signify improved profitability and efficiency. The consolidation also facilitates better asset management and utilization. Moreover, merged entities benefit from economies of scale, cost efficiencies, risk diversification, technological investments, and overall performance improvements.

The study's policy suggestions stress ongoing consolidation efforts to boost banking sector resilience, advocating for improved efficiency, governance, and asset quality management. These steps are crucial for successful bank mergers and fostering a robust, competitive banking landscape in India.

This study is a novel attempt to analyze Indian bank profitability and efficiency post PSB mergers amid COVID-19 pandemic. In a developing country like India, especially in PSBs has experienced significant structural changes over the previous 7 years just before pandemic, such a study necessitates a prompt empirical investigation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe sustainability of hollow and solid blocks in sub-Saharan Africa.

Indicators of stakeholder value are proposed for measuring block sustainability based on comparisons of user building value price and carbon emissions. Block manufacturing processes in Tanzania and Uganda are described and assessed in this context.

The results from Uganda indicate that there are economic and environmental advantages in using hollow blocks as long as they are produced to statutory compliance levels. However, where blocks are not produced to standard requirements, the results indicate that it is better to use solid blocks. This surprising result seems to indicate that blocks prepared using low additions of cement might have sufficient functional quality for simple residential building applications even though they might not meet current standard strength requirements and have low cement productivity. These results also indicate that the improvement potential indicated previously cannot be realised when hollow blocks are used for simple construction needs.

Clear benchmarks for the best practical level of cement block sustainability seem to be missing. The first reasons is that the lowest acceptable compressive strength has not been defined since standard requirements might not be relevant in the studied context. The second one is that the lowest possible practically achievable cement content with acceptable cement productivity has not been established.

Understanding sustainability can be very difficult and substantial work needs to be done to introduce operational sustainability indicators.

The results contribute to the discussion of understanding, defining and measuring sustainability.