Search results

The purpose of this paper is to seek to investigate public trust as an important factor of performance in the charitable sector, and explain the necessity of including public trust assessment in charity performance measurement.

Two focus group interviews were conducted in the UK to investigate the reasons for trust and lack of trust in charities, which contributed to the identification of the relation between public trust and charity performance measurement.

Indicators of public trust in charities are not only related to some conventional criteria for evaluating charity performance, but also shed light on “soft” factors which are relatively new criteria used to assess performance. Furthermore, measuring public trust is an indispensable supplement to existing approaches of performance assessment in the charitable sector. It remedies the drawbacks of previous studies by employing a “bottom-up” approach to evaluation that avoids the conflicting demands of different stakeholders when deciding assessment criteria.

Re-conducting the study with larger samples, combining with quantitative surveys, and applying more rigorous approach to data analysis could be helpful for improving the generalizability of the results.

The study highlights the necessity of considering public trust when measuring charity performance. Additionally, it suggests charities to make improvements of their performance based on the reasons for trust and lack of trust.

It provides insight into the public trust of charities and, for the first time, explores the applicability of measuring public trust in charity performance evaluation.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on a large sample of 19 commodity markets.

The authors rely on Jurado et al.’s (2015) measure of macroeconomic uncertainty based on a wide range of monthly macroeconomic and financial indicators and estimate a threshold VAR model to assess whether the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on commodity prices differs under the high- or low-uncertainty state.

The findings show that positive macroeconomic uncertainty shocks affect commodity prices returns negatively on average and the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty is generally higher in high-uncertainty states compared with low-uncertainty states. Besides, although the safe-haven role of precious metals is confirmed, energy and industrial markets are more sensitive to short-run and long-run macroeconomic uncertainty, respectively.

The findings in this study suggest that commodity prices reflect not only the level of economic fundamental but also the volatility of economic fundamental.

This study empirically analyzes and verifies the influence of macroeconomic uncertainty not only on oil prices but also on four groups of 19 raw materials. As for the methodological issues, the authors rely on a structural threshold vector autoregressive specification for modeling commodity price returns to account for potentially different effects depending on the macroeconomic uncertainty states.