Search results

The purpose of this paper is to comparatively examine the cost and the overlooked revenue efficiency of Islamic and commercial banks in the aftermath of the crisis, operating in nine MENA-based countries during the 2010-2017 financial period, where the established empirical work is relatively limited. The authors also update the research where they use recent data sets and they provide for a targeted, structured literature review pre- and post-crisis in the Gulf region.

The authors examine cost and revenue efficiency of 25 major Islamic banks (IBs) and 25 major conventional banks (CBs). They conduct tests on the determinants of such variables. In the first stage of the analysis, they measure efficiency by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique. The analysis performs regressions where these also reveal that the bank efficiency index is influenced by various bank type-specific attributes. It also seems that tighter restrictions on bank activities are negatively associated with bank efficiency. Second stage analysis, which accounts for banking environment and bank-level characteristics, confirms these results.

Conventional banks are both more cost and revenue efficient than Islamic banks over the period under examination. The analysis also reveals that the bank efficiency index is influenced by bank-type attributes. Greater presence of fixed capital resources has positive effects on growth in both Islamic and conventional banking. The major constraints impeding Islamic banking growth include labour costs. The authors examine whether and how bank-type orientation affects the cost and revenue efficiency of conventional and Islamic banks. They find that post-crisis Islamic banks underperform their conventional counterparts on both accounts within a mixed banking system.

This study did not include comparative data before the 2008 financial crisis. There is also a great deal of heterogeneity among Islamic banks in the samples that have been examined here and by other researchers and the constructed efficiency scores should be interpreted cautiously as divergent Islamic banks are pooled in the same samples.

This study identified factors that may help bank managers to improve their financial outlook by controlling revenue and cost efficiency profitability. These factors could as well help to understand how some indicators affect both cost and revenue efficiency, particularly in Islamic banking. It also seems that tighter restrictions on Islamic bank activities are negatively associated with bank efficiency. Islamic banks that directly compete with their conventional counterparts in the aftermath of the crisis are less efficient on both the cost and revenue frontiers. They are potentially hindered by the differential regulations of supervising authorities in dual banking systems.

The authors provide recommendations regarding regulatory and other issues that are relevant to Islamic banking and further research is suggested. Findings are relevant to a variety of stakeholders (managers, policymakers and regulators). Islamic banking authorities could re-examine the benefits of partially moving to a more standardized/conventional system of banking by lifting some trading restrictions. In addition, developing and maintaining managerial skills is an indispensable instrument for the long-term endurance of any system. A related aspect is thus an effort to determine the holistic efficiency (including managerial) of Islamic banks as a guide for policymakers to improve managerial performance.

There is relatively limited empirical work that investigates the efficiency between Islamic and conventional banking in the aftermath of the crisis in the Gulf region despite the growing importance of this region on political and economic levels. The authors also examine the revenue efficiency measure often under-researched in the literature and particularly important for comparative studies. Overseas-owned banks have attained much higher infiltration levels in middle-eastern countries over the past decade. It has also been suggested that market penetration differences may also be related to bank efficiency concerns among countries and their financial systems as opposed to types of banks.

Drawing on the service-dominant logic and the institutional theory, this paper aims to explore the value-creating mechanisms of branding in the destination context and the brand co-creation process at and between different levels of a service ecosystem.

An exploratory research design was used to generate qualitative data from 18 in-depth interviews with important stakeholders and investigate how and why brand co-creation is fostered in the service ecosystem.

The study proposes a stepwise process of strategic imperatives for brand co-creation in the destination context. It presents the multi-directional flows of the brand meaning across levels of the tourism ecosystem and thereby interprets stakeholders’ efforts to co-create sustainable brands that gain prominence in the global tourism arena.

Future research might validate the framework in a quantitative research setting. The extended analysis of the value-creating ecosystem could investigate the role of institutions and brand value propositions across levels.

Acknowledging their limited control over the brand co-creation process, tourism practitioners are offered step-by-step guidance to help shape a destination brand that may retain relevance in the tourists’ minds. Critical insights are provided into resource sharing between actors and subsequent responsibilities for a sustainable destination branding strategy.

The paper considers the significance of the various levels in the ecosystem and the underlying mechanisms of brand co-creation in a somewhat neglected branding domain.

The authors propose an alternative robust technique to test for discontinuities in distributions and provide consistent evidence of discontinuities around zero for both scaled and unscaled earnings levels and changes. The advantage of the proposed test is that it does not rely on arbitrary choice of bin width choices.

To evaluate the power of the test, the authors examine the density function of non-discretionary earnings and detect no evidence of discontinuities around zero in levels and changes of these non-discretionary earnings. As robustness, the authors use pre-managed earnings excluding accrual and real manipulation and find similar evidence.

The finding using our technique support the Burgstahler and Dichev (1997) interpretation on earnings management, even for smaller sample sizes and reject the theory that discontinuities arise from scaling and sampling methods.

The study provides an overview of those studies that support and those that oppose using “testing for discontinuities” as a way to examine earnings management. The authors advance the literature by providing an alternative methodology supporting the view that the kink in the distribution represents earnings management.

The use of models for detecting earnings management in the academic literature, using accrual and real manipulation, is commonplace. The purpose of the current study is to compare the power of these models in a United Kingdom (UK) sample of 19,424 firm-year observations during the period 1991–2018. The authors include artificially-induced manipulation of revenues and expenses between zero and ten percent of total assets to random samples of 500 firm-year observations within the full sample. The authors use two alternative samples, one with no reversal of manipulation (sample 1) and one with reversal in the following year (sample 2).

The authors include artificially induced manipulation of revenues and expenses between zero and ten percent of total assets to random samples of 500 firm-year observations within the full sample.

The authors find that real earnings manipulation models have lower power than accrual earnings manipulation models, when manipulating discretionary expenses and revenues. Furthermore, the real earnings manipulation model to detect overproduction has high misspecification, resulting in artificially inflating the power of the model. The authors examine an alternative model to detect discretionary expense manipulation that generates higher power than the Roychowdhury (2006) model. Modified real manipulation models (Srivastava, 2019) are used as robustness and the authors find these to be more misspecified in some cases but less in others. The authors extend the analysis to a setting in which earnings management is known to occur, i.e. around benchmark-beating and find consistent evidence of accrual and some forms of real manipulation in this sample using all models examined.

This study contributes to the literature by providing evidence of misspecification of currently used models to detect real accounts manipulation.

Based on the findings, the authors recommend caution in interpreting any findings when using these models in future research.

The findings address the earnings management literature, guided by the agency theory.

A computational structural mechanics approach, based on the exclusive use of standard bar elements is utilized in order to investigate the elastic stability of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with atom vacancy defects under axial compressive loads. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The proposed model uses three dimensional, two nodded, linear truss finite elements of three degrees of freedom per node to represent the force field appearing between carbon atoms due to the basic interatomic interactions.

Numerical results concerning the critical forces which cause instability of pristine nanotubes are compared with corresponding data given in the open literature in the effort to demonstrate the good accuracy of the method. Then, it is assumed that SWCNTs present-specific structural defects defined by their length, width, orientation and longitudinal position. The influence of these four geometric parameters of the imperfections considered on the stability of SWCNTs is investigated in detail and essential conclusions are revealed.

To the authors’ best knowledge, is the first time that the specific method is introduced for the prediction of buckling behavior of defective SWCNTs. The structural defect here is considered as atoms vacancy that forms a like-crack defect having a specific length, width, orientation and position along the nanotube length.

The paper focuses on services marketing implementation synthesizing previous knowledge from the fields of internal and external marketing. Although academic debate over the modeling of internal and external market orientation has lately emerged, services marketing literature lacks a relevant theoretical foundation.

Following a qualitative research design applied to the tourism sector, in‐depth interviews were conducted at three different levels (managers, employees and customers). In total, 37 hotel managers, 46 employees and 42 guests participated in the process of capturing the essence of the fragile equilibrium between internal and external marketing adoption.

Findings from the content analysis were consistent with the literature, unveiling an important number of elements, which formulate the components of the balanced market orientation, namely: market orientation adoption, internal marketing implementation and systematic monitoring of the service delivery process.

Highlighting the importance of interrelations and modeling the underlying constructs, the study merges together different research streams from the extant literature. Nevertheless, the relations between the components of balanced market orientation have yet to be examined and validated.

In light of the qualitative findings, the study delves into the main pillars of integrated marketing philosophy, where the external focus on the customer is a sine qua non. Services marketing implementation is delineated into: applying internal marketing practices; periodically assessing employees’ perceptions; adopting market‐oriented behaviour; and measuring its impact on customers.

This paper aims to evaluate and structure the basic heuristics consumers use in evaluating word-of-mouth (WOM) about luxury hotel brands while analyzing the impact of deception in online consumer reviews.

The research used a two-study mixed-methods approach, using interpersonal deception theory and social proof theory as lenses to conduct our analysis. For the first study, a qualitative conceptual mapping analysis was conducted, examining online consumer reviews to identify key concepts and their relationships in the context of luxury hotel brands. In the second study, the themes were further examined using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to analyze their causal complexity and association between variables to determine how they influence the perceived helpfulness of online reviews for luxury hotel brands.

The results underline the importance of functional, objective variables, such as the number of reviews and stars, as social proof heuristics and other factors, including clout, authenticity and analytic tone, as interpersonal communication heuristics. Therefore, consumers use a combination of social and interpersonal communication heuristics to extract information from reviews and manage deception risk.

The paper contributes to the consumer–brand relationship literature by assessing the heuristics consumers use in evaluating online reviews and provides additional information for research in online reputation management.

This study’s results can help marketing practitioners and brand managers manage their online reputations better. It can also aid managers in improving their messaging on hotel websites to entice consumers to complete bookings. Heuristics play an essential role in such messaging and understanding them can help marketers appeal directly to their target market.

This study contributes to the literature on consumer–brand relationships by providing a framework of heuristics that consumers use when evaluating luxury service brands and contributes to WOM and online reputation research by highlighting factors that may make online reviews more helpful.