Suchergebnisse

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/
In the existing literature on foreign direct investment, it is often assumed that multinational corporations and their direct investments reduce institutional differences among economies. Building upon this assumption, those influenced by management studies and mainstream economics see multinational corporations as an agent that upgrades local business conventions to global standards. Geographers do not usually accept this convergence theory and claim differences among host economies prevents convergence in business practices. The difference between these groups of scholars is that the non-convergence camp acknowledges the resilience of local business practices while the convergence camp does not.
The papers comprising this special issue question this shared assumption of foreign direct investment as a cause of convergence. As outlined in this introductory paper, and explored in detail in the following papers, we pay attention to the simple fact that the foreign direct investment is from a company or individual whose business practices are inherently influenced by their experiences of business in the nation or region of origin, and these experiences indelibly influence, to varying degrees, their local operations in investment destination. Once we accept such an obvious fact, recent debates on variety of capitalism and related literatures on the developmental state, welfare regime and other concepts all become relevant to understanding of the local operation of foreign-owned businesses.

Employing data from Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan over the period between January 2004 to December 2017, this study investigates the relationship between investor sentiment and stock returns. We analyze two reversed sentiment indicators, namely Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) and Volatility Index (VIX), in two conversing situations: low and high sentiment. The empirical evidence suggests that sentiment has a significant link with concurrent returns, but its influence seems to wipe out quickly as the little to no return predictability is detected. More importantly, we find that "investor fear gauge" (VIX) generates a more significant contemporaneous effect on market returns than investor confidence. The impact on future returns, on the contrary, is inconclusive since low CCI and VIX dominate the opposite ones most of the time.

Developing normative indicators to measure governments' consent to, promotion of, and compliance with international laws prohibiting genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other norms constituting the International Criminal Court (ICC) demonstrates that it is possible to calibrate variation in state conduct over time and to compare one state to another. The indicators make compliance more visible and amenable, both to encouragement by nongovernmental organizations and states, and to enforcement by the ICC. They show that legalization of these norms is currently progressing. Tracing the stances of selected states demonstrates the empirical and theoretical utility of the indicators.