In this paper, we investigate the effect of an epidemic outbreak on consumer expenditures. In light of scanner panel data on consumers’ debit and credit card transactions, we present empirical evidence that outbreaks cause considerable disruption in total consumer expenditures with significant heterogeneity across categories. Our findings strongly imply that customers alter their behaviors to reduce the risk of infection. The estimated effect of an epidemic outbreak is qualitatively different from that of other macroeconomic factors. The implications of this research provide important guidance for policy interventions and marketing decisions aimed at sustaining economic growth.

The European carbon emission trading market is critical in achieving planned carbon emission reduction for global sustainable growth. This paper investigates various statistical methods in forecasting the European carbon emission (CO₂ hereafter) price movements. The paper builds a predictive regression model of CO₂ price movements with past returns of various commodities and financial products. In the paper, 22 functional forms of five different classifiers are employed and CO₂ price movements are forecast. Results indicate that the past returns of Brent crude futures, natural gas (NG), Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 (FTSE100), Deutscher Aktienindex (German stock index) 30 (DAX30), Cotation Assistée en Continu (French stock index) 40 (CAC40) and Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P500) are statistically significant in forecasting the current CO₂ price movements. The authors also found that the bagged decision tree of the ensemble classifier best forecasts the CO₂ price movements. The result should be relevant to firms that wish to trade European carbon emissions.

Research on total quality management (TQM) has mainly focused on the consequences of TQM such as firm performance and the drivers of TQM such as top management team support, while the conditions that moderate the relationship between TQM and firm performance have seldom been considered. Thus, this paper attempts to investigate the conditions in which the effects of TQM are either intensified or weakened, with a sample set of 565 Korean manufacturing firms. This paper adopts a strategic perspective that considers TQM as a source of competitive advantages. The positive effect of TQM on firm performance could be measured by sales and revenue; more importantly, the results suggested that the positive effect of TQM was stronger when a firm pursues a proactive strategy (internal strategic factor) and when a firm is in its growth stage in terms of the product lifecycle (external strategic factor). Thus, managers should implement TQM earlier than their competitors to fully benefit from TQM. This study provides a more complete overview of TQM research by incorporating a strategic perspective and adding empirical evidence.