Debabrata Talukdar

Does the Private Sector Help or Hurt the Environment? Evidence from Carbon Dioxide Pollution in Developing Countries

Abstract How does the nature of enterprise ownership affect the environment in an economy? Conventional wisdom and theoretical conjectures are split on this important question. In this paper we estimate a reduced-form, random-effects model using data from 44 developing countries over nine years (1987–95) to study for any systematic empirical relationship between the relative level of private sector involvement in an economy and the environmental performance of the economy in terms of its emission of industrial carbon dioxide. We control for both observed and unobserved crosscountry heterogeneity along various institutional and structural dimensions such as the scope of financial market, industrial sector composition and level of foreign direct investment. The regression results indicate that the higher the degree of private sector involvement in a developing economy, the lower is its environmental degradation. In addition, its environmental degradation is likely to be further reduced in presence of a well-functioning domestic capital market and through increased participation by developed economies in its private sector development.

The Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Price Search: Insights from Matching Household Survey and Purchase Data

Price promotions are pervasive in grocery markets. A household can respond to price promotions by effectively cherry-picking through (1) spatial price search across stores and (2) temporal price search across time. However, extant research has analyzed these two dimensions of price search only separately and therefore underestimates both the consumer response to price promotions and the impact of promotions on retail profit. In this article, the authors introduce an integrated analysis of spatial and temporal price search. They seek answers to three questions: First, what are the predictors of household decisions to perform either spatial or temporal price search? Second, how effective are the temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal price search strategies in obtaining lower prices? and Third, what is the impact of alternative price search strategies on retailer profit? The authors use a unique data collection approach that combines household surveys with observed purchase data to address these questions. Their key results are as follows: Geography (the spatial configuration of store and household locations) and opportunity costs are useful predictors of a households price search pattern. Households that claim to search spatiotemporally avail approximately three-quarters of the available savings on average. Households that search only temporally save about the same as those that search only spatially. The negative effect of cherry-picking on retailer profits is not as high as is typically believed.

Poverty, living conditions, and infrastructure access: a comparison of slums in Dakar, Johannesburg, and Nairobi

In this paper the authors compare indicators of development, infrastructure, and living conditions in the slums of Dakar, Nairobi, and Johannesburg using data from 2004 World Bank surveys. Contrary to the notion that most African cities face similar slum problems, find that slums in the three cities differ dramatically from each other on nearly every indicator examined. Particularly striking is the weak correlation of measures of income and human capital with infrastructure access and quality of living conditions. For example, residents of Dakars slums have low levels of education and high levels of poverty but fairly decent living conditions. By contrast, most of Nairobis slum residents have jobs and comparatively high levels of education, but living conditions are but extremely bad . And in Johannesburg, education and unemployment levels are high, but living conditions are not as bad as in Nairobi. These findings suggest that reduction in income poverty and improvements in human development do not automatically translate into improved infrastructure access or living conditions. Since not all slum residents are poor, living conditions also vary within slums depending on poverty status. Compared to their non-poor neighbors, the poorest residents of Nairobi or Dakar are less likely to use water (although connection rates are similar) or have access to basic infrastructure (such as electricity or a mobile phone). Neighborhood location is also a powerful explanatory variable for electricity and water connections, even after controlling for household characteristics and poverty. Finally, tenants are less likely than homeowners to have water and electricity connections.

To Buy or Not to Buy: Consumers' Demand Response Patterns for Healthy Versus Unhealthy Food

The authors integrate research on impulsivity from the psychology area with standard economic theories of consumer demand to make novel predictions about the effects of market price changes on consumers’ food consumption behavior. The results from multiple studies confirm that consumers exhibit undesirable asymmetric patterns of demand sensitivity to price changes for healthy and unhealthy food. For healthy food, demand sensitivity is greater for a price increase than for a price decrease. For unhealthy food, the opposite holds true. The research further shows that the undesirable patterns are attenuated or magnified for key policy-relevant factors that have been shown to decrease or increase impulsive purchase behavior, respectively. As the rising obesity trend brings American consumers’ food consumption behavior under increased scrutiny, the focal findings hold significant implications for both public policy makers and food marketers.

Living Conditions, Rents, and Their Determinants in the Slums of Nairobi and Dakar

Using data from 3,715 slum households in Nairobi and Dakar, we find living conditions for tenants are worse than for owners, although tenants pay significant rents. Compared to Nairobi, both nominal rents and living conditions are higher in Dakar. Despite differences in respective slum rental markets, determinants of rent in both cities are strikingly similar. Analysis suggests that tenure mix—proportion of tenants to owners—affects what is available for rent and overall living conditions. Ensuring a certain proportion of housing is owner occupied may be instrumental for delivering greater choice for tenants and better living conditions for all slum residents. (JEL R21)

Marketing and Public Policy: Transformative Research in Developing Markets

Developing markets are a challenge for researchers who study them and for governments, business leaders, and citizens who strive to improve the quality of life in them. The limitations of the dominant development paradigm coupled with the need to focus on consumers provide tremendous opportunities to engage in truly transformative research. Toward this outcome, several interactive forces must be understood and addressed during research design, management, and implementation. The purpose of this essay is to provide a synthesis—that is, a framework in the form of a conceptual model—with practical applications to transformative research in developing markets and, ultimately, with the broader objective to stimulate new conceptualizations, research, and best practices to transform consumer well-being.

Customer Orientation in the Context of Development Projects: Insights from the World Bank

Approximately half of the worlds current population lives in poverty, and more than 90% of those people live in developing countries with limited access to basic social and economic amenities. Mired in such widespread poverty, developing countries thus appear to offer little opportunity for the traditional role of marketing to facilitate the monetized exchange of private goods. However, as this synthesized review of the practice of customer orientation at the World Bank shows, fundamental marketing principles and practices play an important role in incorporating the voice and interest of the poor in the provision of public goods that are designed to improve their quality of life and standard of living. This role for marketing in developing economies helps create the necessary socioeconomic infrastructure to facilitate the emergence of vibrant exchange markets for private goods in which the traditional role of marketing plays out. This article helps develop a better appreciation of a typically overlooked dimension in marketings relationship to society in developing countries.

Do Store Brands Aid Store Loyalty

Do store brands aid store loyalty by enhancing store differentiation or merely draw price-sensitive customers with little or no store loyalty? This paper seeks to answer this question by empirically investigating the relationship between store brand loyalty and store loyalty. First, we find a robust, monotonic, positive relationship between store brand loyalty and store loyalty by using multiple loyalty metrics and data from multiple retailers and by controlling for alternative factors that can influence store loyalty. Second, we take advantage of a natural experiment involving a store closure and find that the attrition in chain loyalty is lower for households with greater store brand loyalty prior to store closure. Together, our results are consistent with evidence for the store differentiation role of store brands. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing .

Research productivity patterns in the organizational behavior and human resource management literature

Closely following the analysis approach used for similar studies in the economics and finance literature, we present the first study to examine if there exists an empirical regularity in the bibliometric patterns of research productivity in the organizational behavior (OB) and human resource management (HRM) literature. Our results present strong evidence that there indeed exists a distinct empirical regularity. It is the so-called Generalized Lotkas Law of scientific productivity pattern: The number of authors publishing n papers is about 1/nc of those publishing one paper. The observed pattern in the OB and HRM area is interestingly very consistent with those in much older, related business disciplines.

Informal Rental Markets: The Low-Quality, High-Price Puzzle in Nairobi’s Slums

In The Challenge of Slums the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat, 2003) estimates that 870 million people in developing countries lived in urban slums in 2001. It also estimates that if present trends continue unchecked, the number of slum residents will grow to approximately 1.43 billion by 2020. The influential development targets known as the Millennium Development Goals, agreed to by world leaders at UN-sponsored summits in 2000 and 2002, include a commitment to significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020 (UN-Habitat, 2003). In Kenya, similar to other developing countries, this commitment now appears in national development plans and is highlighted as a key task in the National Economic Recovery Strategy (Government of Kenya, 2003).