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This study aims to quantitatively measure the size and speed of monetary policy interest rate transmission to long‐term interest rates in Kenya.

The study uses autoregressive distributed lag specification re‐parameterized as an error correction model and mean adjustment lag methods.

The study finds incomplete pass‐through of policy rates both in the short and the long run. The study also shows that it takes approximately between 11 months to two years for policy interest rate to be fully transmitted to long‐term rates.

The study is novel as it is the first attempt the authors are aware of that empirically investigates the interest rate pass‐through in Kenya using high‐frequency data. Measuring the speed and size of interest rate pass‐through provides policy makers with insights on how long it takes for a particular policy action to yield desired results on the real economy. The findings of this study will therefore inform policy makers of the effectiveness of their policy decisions and facilitate timely monetary policy actions.

With a particular emphasis on corporate strategies for innovation, the purpose of this paper is to examine how cost behaviour operates under conditions of strong competition in the retail industry.

Retail companies listed on the Indonesian, Singaporean and Malaysian capital markets are studied using the regression analysis method.

The findings of this study show the sticky behaviour of changes in the selling, general and administrative (SGA) costs when companies are under competitive pressure. When sales increase, SGA costs will increase; however, when sales decline, SGA costs evidently increase. This is especially true for retail companies which have suffered a decrease in their sales of less than 7 per cent, but experienced positive sales growth in the previous period. The suggestion would seem to be that competition leads to greater aggression and the contemporary real options theory bears this out.

This study only uses data from retail companies listed on stock exchanges in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The type of industry, the extent of the competition and the corporate strategy employed might influence the extent of cost stickiness. Therefore, the users of financial statements need to understand these factors.

While previous studies incorporated a variety of industries, this paper focuses on examining cost behaviour amid the competitive pressure from recent phenomena in the retail industry. The study provides empirical evidence for supporting the contemporary real options theory. When an industry experiences competition, investing in an uncertain situation will add value to a company, even if it causes sticky cost behaviour. This result contributes to the literature on cost behaviour and strategy management.

Purpose – This article examines the operating lease cost stickiness characteristics exhibited by retail firms.

Methodology/approach – Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003) laid important groundwork for the study of asymmetric cost behavior or cost stickiness. The authors found that a firm’s selling, general, and administrative costs (SG&A) costs increase more with a sales increase than those expenses decrease with an equivalent sales decline. Their findings provided avenues for many studies with differing focal variables; however, extant research has not explored the degree of cost stickiness associated with operating lease expenses. Recognizing the nature and magnitude of operating leases and the competitive and changing environment for retailers, this study adapts Anderson et al.’s (2003) model to provide insights into operating lease stickiness. The study uses archival financial data from 1997 through 2016 for specialty retail firms in testing the lease cost stickiness hypotheses.

Findings – The results of this study supported the hypotheses that operating lease expenses exhibit stickiness behavior and are relatively stickier than future lease commitments for retail firms.

Originality/value – By focusing on retail firms and related lease expenses, this study provides insights into the increasingly competitive retailer environment. This article’s findings will enhance understanding of how specialty retail firms’ managers react to reduced revenues. Finally, given recent authoritative pronouncements affecting accounting for leases and the significance of leasing transactions, research providing insights into cost behavior and managerial actions stands to make an important contribution to literature and practice.

One potential source of pioneer brand advantage is retail buyers’ preference for pioneer brands. A model of pioneer brand advantage with retailers developed in the USA was tested in Japan, as a replication and cross‐cultural extension. This provides the first empirical study of Japanese retail buyer beliefs, attitude, and behavior toward new offerings, and the first direct statistical comparison of US and Japanese retail buying behavior in the marketing literature. Similarities and differences in pioneer brand advantage with retailers between Japan and the USA are discussed. Results from a survey of buyers from Japan’s largest supermarket chains suggest that pioneer brand advantage is about as strong for them as for their US counterparts, though for somewhat different reasons. The survey’s results were analyzed in two ways (through a multi‐attribute attitude model and a PLS causal model), with results that complement and corroborate one another. Data were standardized to deal with potential extreme response style bias.

Argues that the similarities between US treasury securities (treasuries) and FDIC‐insured large retail certificates of deposit (CDs) should make their prices similar in an efficient market. Considers deposit pricing and substitutability between treasuries and CDs, citing previous research; and presents a study comparing their yields for three maturities using 1986‐1995 data. Presents the results and analyses further to explore the links between changes in treasury yields and lagged changes in CD yields; and upward CD yield stickiness. Finds that CD and treasury yield spreads changed from small and positive to large and negative over the period with little effect on deposit balances; and concludes that those investors who remained interested in insured balances during the early 1990s were either insensitive to interest rates or had high switching costs. Suggests that banks have used this unwillingness to migrate to non‐insured funds to decrease CD rates relative to treasuries for higher profits and asks how long this market segment will continue to accept inferior yields.

I contribute to the ongoing policy discourse on the challenges of monetary policy transmission in environments with consolidated financial sectors and high credit rates. I empirically investigate the lending rate pass-through in Azerbaijan – a small resource-rich economy in transition – by taking advantage of a unique set of high-frequency bank-level data. My bottom-line policy message is the following. First, lending rates are considerably irresponsive to monetary policy shocks, and the interest rate channel ought to be somehow improved. Second, macroeconomic fundamentals and the concentrated bank sector are surprisingly not among the reasons behind the policy-market disconnect. Third, domestic commercial banks are able to exert substantial monopolistic pricing capacities and keep credit rates high, particularly when the central bank loosens its policy stance. Fourth, the underlying cause of both monetary policy inefficacy and high interest rate stickiness appears to be structural excess liquidity. In fact, empirical results show that pass-through is substantially higher for less liquid banks. Extraction of excess liquidity from the system should mitigate the banks’ monopolistic pricing powers, improve the efficiency of the interest rate channel, and ultimately bring the credit rates down.

Cost behaviour literature is expanding its reach beyond developed economies; however, there is limited knowledge about its causes in emerging economies. This is an exploratory study of sticky costs behaviour determinants in Argentina, a country with periodic political and economic turbulence. The purpose of this paper is to test the effect of GDP, asset intensity, industry and cost type in an inflationary context.

Anderson et al. (2003) empirical regression (ABJ model) is replicated in Argentina with 667 observations from 96 firms between the years 2004 and 2012. It uses panel data and variables are defined as change rates between two periods. The sample excludes financial and insurance firms. It tests if sticky cost behaviour changes in periods of macroeconomic deceleration, or in firms belonging to industries with different asset intensity levels, or among different cost types.

The analysis shows that costs are sticky in Argentina, where a superb economic outlook is required to delay cutting resources or increasing costs. Cost behaviour is affected by social and cultural factors, such as labour inflexibility driven by powerful unions and not by protective employment laws, asset intensity (industry) and macroeconomic environment. Results suggest that costs are sticky for aggregate samples, but not for all subsamples.

Administrative costs are sticky when GDP grows; but when growth declines, managers or firms do not delay cost cutting actions. Some subsamples are extreme cases of stickiness while others are anti-sticky, casting some doubt on the usefulness of sticky costs empirical tests applied to country-wide samples. Careful selection of observations for sticky costs studies in emerging economies is critical.

Evidence from previous studies show that on average costs are remarkably sticky in Argentina; this study shows that cost reduction activities occur faster but are not persistent enough to change the aggregated long-term results of cost stickiness in the presence of moderate to high inflation. The study contributes to the literature by suggesting that observations used in sticky costs studies from emerging economies might be mainly from positive macroeconomic environments, might have skewed results due to extreme cases of stickiness or might be distorted by inflation.

The purpose of the study is to develop and empirically test a model which examines the relationship between e-servicescape dimensions, website quality dimensions, website stickiness, website loyalty and word-of-mouth (WOM). The role of WOM in influencing consumer behaviour is documented in literature. However, despite its growing importance, research on the antecedents of WOM in the e-retail context is sparse.

Data were collected by circulating the questionnaire using an online survey from the graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in a large university in the northeastern USA. Out of 660 questionnaires distributed, 509 were usable. Data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling.

Results show that website stickiness and website loyalty are two different constructs which form the immediate antecedents of WOM. Results also show the indirect effects of e-servicescape and website quality dimensions on WOM.

The findings of the study provides a better understanding of the factors likely to influence the WOM behaviour of e-retail store customers. Findings also provide valuable insights into the factors which managers need to focus on to make their e-retail website increasingly stickier.

The contribution of the paper lies in eliciting the differences between stickiness to and loyalty to retail websites and extending the research on e-servicescapes.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate whether a firm’s cost structure (specifically, its cost stickiness) is associated with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability factors of performance and disclosure.

Methodology/approach – This study uses MCSI Research KLD Stats (KLD) and Bloomberg databases for the 13-year period from 2003 to 2015 in constructing ESG performance and disclosure variables, respectively. The authors adopt the general cost stickiness models from Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003) and Banker, Basu, Byzalov, and Chen (2016) to perform the analysis.

Findings – The authors find that a firm’s level of cost stickiness is positively associated with certain sticky corporate social responsibility (CSR)/ESG activities (both overall and when separately classified as strengths or concerns) but not with other nonsticky CSR activities. The authors also show that the association between cost stickiness and ESG disclosure is incrementally stronger for firms with CSR activities classified as sticky. Furthermore, the authors provide evidence that ESG disclosure is greater when both cost stickiness and the degree of sticky CSR activities increase. The authors show that when cost stickiness is high and CSR activities are sticky, management has incentives to increase CSR/ESG sustainability disclosure to decrease information asymmetry.

Originality/value – The findings present new evidence to understand how management integrates cost management strategies with various dimensions of sustainability performance decisions and show that not all ESG activities are equally effective when it comes to cost stickiness. The authors also demonstrate that increased sustainability disclosure helps reduce information asymmetry incrementally more when both costs are sticky and CSR activities are sticky.