Showing papers in "International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research in 2010"

Internet Addiction among Greek University Students: Demographic Associations with the Phenomenon, Using the Greek Version of Young's Internet Addiction Test

Abstract: Internet addiction (IA) is a new disorder described in 1996 by the psychologist Kimberly Young. The aim of this paper is to estimate the percentage of IA among Greek university students. Results of a sample survey among 1876 Greek university students, 18-27 years old, are presented. The questionnaire consisted of eight questions from Young’s Diagnostic Test for Internet Addiction (YDTIA) as well as an inventory including demographic factors and questions about academic performance, computer and Internet use. YDTIA had a good reliability and diagnostic accuracy, tested with Cronbach’s alpha (0.71) and sensitivity analysis. Results show that the percentage of IA (5-8 YDTIA criteria) is 11.6%, while problematic Internet users were (3-8 YDTIA criteria) 34.7%. Men were more likely to be addicted to the Internet than women, and Internet addicted students were associated with poorer academic performance. Multiple logistic regression showed that significant predictors of IA included increased hours of daily Internet use, increased hours visiting chat rooms, sex pages and blogs, male gender, divorced status, poor grades, and accessing the Internet outside of the home. The results of this study will allow health officials to recognise students who are Internet addicted or on the verge of becoming addicted and stress risk factors indicating a need for intervention in order to prevent the appearance of IA.

The Renaissance of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: A 'New' Standard in Twenty-First Century Marketing Management?!

Abstract: In this paper the importance of word of mouth for marketing management in the twenty-first century will be discussed. After a short introduction, there will be a focus on the demarcations and problems of traditional marketing. Then, in the third section, word of mouth (WOM) and word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) as a ‘new’ standard in modern marketing are described. The fourth section broaches the importance of word of mouth and word-of-mouth marketing from the point of view of business and consumers, and then in the fifth section their importance for the Internet is considered. Finally, in section six evangelism marketing is discussed as the most effective form of word-of-mouth marketing. Section seven concludes the paper with a short summary. The paper focuses on scholarly articles and current research so as to keep theory as close as possible to reality.

Does Human Capital Cause Economic Growth? A Case Study of India

Abstract: This study examines the time series behavior of investment in physical capital, human capital (comprising education and health) and output in a co-integration framework, taking growth of primary gross enrolment rate and a dummy for structural adjustment programme (openness which has been initiated in 1991) as exogenous variables in India from 1960 to 2006. The results suggest that physical capital investment has no long-run nor short-run effect but the human capital investment has significant long-run effect on per capita GNP; the stock of human capital measured by primary gross enrolment rate (lagged by three years) and openness is found to have a significant effect on growth of per capita GNP. The Generalized Impulse Response Function confirms that the innovation in per capita GNP growth can only explain the movements of the growth of per capita GNP (itself) and investment in education human capital positively and significantly only for a short period of time but does not explain the movements of the investment in physical capital and health human capital. Moreover, the innovation in change in education human capital investment significantly and positively explains the movement of the changes in education human capital investment (itself), health human capital investment and growth of GNP per capita; the innovation in health human capital investment significantly explains the changes of education and health human capital investment only. This study may help towards policy modeling of economic growth in India, taking into account the relevance of endogenous growth.

Financial development and economic growth: An empirical analysis for Ireland

Abstract: This study investigated the relationship between financial development and economic growth for Ireland for the period 1965-2007 using a vector error correction model (VECM). Questions were raised whether financial development causes economic growth or reversely taking into account the positive effect of industrial production index. Financial market development is estimated by the effect of credit market development and stock market development on economic growth. The objective of this study was to examine the long-run relationship between these variables applying the Johansen cointegration analysis taking into account the maximum eigenvalues and trace statistics tests. Granger causality tests indicated that economic growth causes credit market development, while there is a bilateral causal relationship between stock market development and economic growth. Therefore, it can be inferred that economic growth has a positive effect on stock market development and credit market development taking into account the positive effect of industrial production growth on economic growth for Ireland.

The Role of Savings in the Economic Development of the Republic of Azerbaijan

Abstract: This article aims to analyze the possibilities of the accumulation and mobilization of savings and their role in the economic development of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Currently, the national economic growth is mostly based on the resource components; crude oil, natural gas and oil products. For the development of the non-oil sector the mobilization of domestic savings into investments would prove very useful. Savings of people should be the most important investment resource for the development of the non-oil sector, as the foreign capital is mostly involved in production of natural resources like oil and gas. The mobilization of domestic savings is crucial for raising the economic growth and promoting development, as it is the private savings that affect the domestic investments significantly. The most of the savings are made when they are fully channeled into the productive investments. As a result, this will lead to the solution of problems of employment and economic growth.

Responsiveness of Trade Flows to Changes in Exchange rate and Relative prices: Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract: This paper examines the long-run and short-run impacts of exchange rate and price changes on trade flows in Nigeria using exports and imports functions. The bounds testing (ARDL) approach to cointegration is applied on a quarterly data from 1980Q1 to 2007Q4. The results indicate that in both the short-run and long-run Nigeria’s trade flows are chiefly influenced by income- both domestic and foreign-, relative prices, nominal effective exchange rates and the stock of external reserves. The results also reveal that in the long-run, devaluation is more effective than relative prices in altering imports demand at both baseline and augmented models. The reverse is, however, the case for exports demand. Furthermore, the sum of the estimated price elasticities of export and import demand in Nigeria exceeds unity indicating that the Marshall-Lerner (ML) condition holds thus implying that a devalued naira might hold considerable promise as the panacea to rising trade deficits.

Another empirical look at the Kuznets curve

Abstract: This paper examines the functional relationships between income inequality, economic factors, institutions, and Kuznets’ inverted-U hypothesis. A model that ncorporates interactive as well as direct effects of several factors to capture their combined effect on inequality is developed. The model is estimated using two popular measures of inequality—the Gini coefficient, and the ratio of income shares in income distribution—using a panel data set for 57 countries from 1987 to 2006. The results provide support for Kuznets' hypothesis; however, the relationship between growth and inequality is conditioned by a host of economic and institutional factors.

A Time-Varying Parameter Vector Autoregression Model for Forecasting Emerging Market Exchange Rates

Abstract: In this study, a vector autoregression (VAR) model with time-varying parameters (TVP) to predict the daily Indian rupee (INR)/US dollar (USD) exchange rates for the Indian economy is developed. The method is based on characterization of the TVP as an optimal control problem. The methodology is a blend of the flexible least squares and Kalman filter techniques. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the TVP-VAR model is evaluated against the simple VAR and ARIMA models, by employing a cross-validation process and metrics such as mean absolute error, root mean square error, and directional accuracy. Out-of-sample results in terms of conventional forecast evaluation statistics and directional accuracy show TVP-VAR model consistently outperforms the simple VAR and ARIMA models.

The Impact of Stock, Energy and Foreign Exchange Markets on the Sugar Market

Abstract: This study examines the effect of financial factors on the sugar market by using Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models. The results show that changes in capital and energy markets returns have a positive impact on the mean returns of Sugar futures as opposed to changes in volatility returns of the exchange rate of the U.S. Dollar/ Yen that affect it negatively. Finally, the structural analysis of volatility with the GARCH model has shown that current volatility is more influenced by past volatility rather than by the previous day shocks.

Do dividend announcements affect the stock prices in the Greek Stock Market

Abstract: This paper examines the reaction of the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) to dividend announcements by a sample of firms listed at the FTSE/ATHEX 20 and FTSE/ATHEX Mid 40 for a fixed period 2004-2008. It also provides analytical information about the Greek Stock Market and the regulations underlying it, which have been taken into account in the present thesis. Moreover, previous studies of important academic scholars are presented and discussed, in order for the reader to attain the appropriate theoretical knowledge about the examined issue. Finally, significant abnormal activity is documented throughout the multiple event-windows that are employed and therefore, the null hypothesis, which supports the irrelevance theory as introduced by Miller and Modigliani (1961), is rejected.

A VAR Analysis of FDI and Wages: The Romania's Case

Abstract: According to Lall (1997), the FDI are strongly interconnected with a series of variables, such as: economic conditions (markets, natural resources, competitiveness), host country policies (macro policies, private sector, trade and industry, FDI policies), as well as MNE strategy (risk perception, location, sourcing of products/inputs, integration transfer). Recent studies have shown that the relationship ‘FDI-Wages’ is significant and the two variables have one on one influence. More precisely, the low wages have the role to attract FDI and the high volume of FDI generates the increase of the wages on the destination’s country labor market. Also, the FDI augmentations determine inequalities on the structure of the wages. The paper analyses the ‘behavior’ of the relationships between the volume of FDI and the level of wages, in Romania, using an unrestricted vector autoregressive model (Unrestricted VAR). Based on the impulse functions generated by the model, some principal conclusions have resulted: (1) The impact of the FDI on the wages is not uniform during the year, depending usually on the FDI flow and also on the self-regulation way and reaction of the wages on the labor market; (2) The impact of the wages on the FDI is temporally sinuous in short term. In this situation, the FDI flow does not depend entirely on the signals received by investors regarding the level of wages in the destination country.

Differences in Management accounting between family enterprises and non-family enterprises: A Statistical Approach

Abstract: Management accounting deals with the subject family enterprises rather little in spite of its high economical relevance. This paper questions, weather general objectives of family enterprises differ from those of non-family enterprises. Based on the hypothesis that family enterprises aim at humane objectives to a greater extent and at financial objectives to a lesser extent than non-family enterprises the results of an empirical study for the region Upper-Austria are presented. The conclusion is that apart from the extent of return on equity objectives of family enterprises do not differ much from those of non-family enterprises. The second point of interest is to analyse differences in objectives between medium and large sized enterprises.

Modeling Labor Supply through Duality and the Slutsky Equation

Abstract: In the present paper an analysis of the neo-classical optimization model with linear constraints is proposed. By introducing the dual problem it is shown that the solution to the maximization problem is also a solution to the minimization problem. The purely theoretical model proposes a universal equation, similar to the Slutsky equation as derived in the consumption theory. Another application is needed, different from the standard applications of the model found in economic literature. This application is based on the study of the change in optimality caused by the taxes on labor. The application focuses on how they impact the optimal decision in the choice between leisure and labor through the application of the classification derived on the basis of the Slutsky equation.

Euro and technology effects on job turnover in Greek manufacturing

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of Greece’s European Union (EU) accession and European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) entry, as well as R&D intensity and industry concentration on job creation and job destruction in the Greek manufacturing sector. The study is based on firm-level economic data of 1418 firms and covers the time period from 1995 to 2004. The econometric model, besides other firm-level determinants used in similar studies, incorporates variables that capture the potential impact of EU accession and EMU entry. In addition, the effects of variables, such as R&D, size, age, exports, new investment, profitability and industry concentration ratios are examined. The study reveals that EMU has a substantial negative effect on employment growth in the Greek manufacturing sector. However, it strengthens the effect of exports, new investments in tangible assets and R&D expenditures on the creation of new work positions.