Essay one examines the strategies of supermarket me-too brands. Current research in marketing focuses mainly on the benefits of new feature introduction and overlooks the importance of feature imitation. The prevalence of me-too brands merits investigation. In our sample, for example, there are...

Pioneering a really new product is riskier than pioneering an incrementally new product. This is because there is greater uncertainty about the type and extent of customer needs that will be satisfied by a really new product. Further, there is also technological uncertainty whether the really...

The study consists of two essays investigating different aspects of e-tailing dynamics. The first one uses archival data from public sources on 335 online retailers. Business characteristics covered are order of market entry, single-channel e-tailer, and e-tailer age. After controlling for other...

This dissertation contains three essays concerning two broad areas, namely, optimal capital structure and risky assets modeling. In the first paper, we study corporate debt values, capital structure, and the term structure of interest rates in a unified framework. We employ numerical techniques...

This paper uses the Shapley Value decomposition technique to assess the factors behind the rise of inequality in China. It finds that, in many ways, inequality may have been an inevitable by-product of China's investment and export-led growth model. Between Chinese households, we find that the...

This study examines the impact of corporate site visits on analysts' forecast accuracy based on a sample of such visits to Chinese listed firms during 2009–2012. We find that analysts who conduct visits (“visiting analysts”) have a greater increase in forecast accuracy than other analysts....

This paper studies a merger between price-setting newsvendors in an oligopolistic market. It is well-known that inventory pooling can greatly reduce inventory costs in a centralized distribution system because it helps reduce aggregate demand uncertainty. Although such statistical economies of...

Closed-end country funds are interesting in that they have two sets of prices for the same underlying assets – the net asset value (NAV) of the fund holdings as measured using the underlying firms' stock prices in their home markets and the fund price at which the fund trades on a U.S. stock...

China's over 25% aggregate household saving rate is one of the highest in the world. One popular view attributes the high saving rate to fast-rising housing prices in China. However, cross-sectional data do not show a significant relationship between housing prices and household saving rates....