Carleton University

About: Carleton University is a education organization based out in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 15852 authors who have published 39650 publications receiving 1106610 citations.

Place branding: Evolution, meaning and implications

Abstract: Place image has traditionally been important in areas including tourism, country positioning in international relations, the protection of local producers from imports through ‘buy domestic’ campaigns and the export promotion of agricultural and manufactured products. Research and practice in each area, however, has developed independently of the others, even though they all revolve around the same notions of place-based marketing, whether practised systematically or not. More recently, the opening of new emerging markets, health scares including mad cow disease and avian flu, the events of September 11, 2001, labour shortages in technology, and the overall globalisation of markets, have resulted in greatly intensified global competition for increasing exports and for attracting everything from investment and tourism to foreign students and skilled labour. In turn, this has served to focus attention on place equity and systematic marketing, which is likely to have a major impact worldwide: developed nations now weigh-in the global arena with coordinated country branding campaigns, leading to intensified competition among them and a potentially significant disadvantage for weaker countries. This paper reviews place branding, discusses implications for government, business and research, and calls for integration of the various streams of thought in order to enhance our understanding of the field.

Regime switching in stock market returns

Abstract: An extension of Hamilton's Markov switching techniques (Hamilton, J. B., 1989, A new approach to the economic analysis of nonstationary time series and the business cycle, Econometrica, 57, 357–84) is used to describe and analyse stock market returns. Using new tests, very strong evidence is found for switching behaviour. A major innovation is to use a multivariate specification that allows examination of whether the price/dividend ratio has marginal predictive power for stock market returns after accounting for state-dependent switching. We find strong evidence of predictability. The response of returns to the past price/dividend ratio is strongly asymmetric - about four times larger in the low-return state than in the high-return state. A second innovationis to allow the probability of transitions from one regime to another to depend on economic variables; again there is an asymmetric response to the past price/dividend ratio.