Political objectives and privatization decisions

In early Romanian privatization a group of firms was explicitly banned from privatization. We use this institutional feature to test which factors contributed to the selection of firms for long‐term state ownership, and find that politicians sheltered from privatization large and inefficient firms which paid low wages and had high overdue payments. These results are consistent with minimization of employment losses, even if efficiency enhancement of privatization had to be sacrificed. We conjecture that the unfavourable economic conditions bringing large employment losses motivated Romanian politicians to fear the possible negative employment effects of privatization.     

Perceived Determinants of Well-Being and Enjoyment Level of Leisure Activities

Two facets of leisure, perceived determinants of well-being and enjoyment of common leisure activities, were investigated in 388 participants. For well-being, a principal components (PCA) analysis yielded five components: competence, relatedness and health, wealth, personal values, and freedom of choice. For the enjoyment of leisure activities, another PCA generated seven components: wellness, sedentary leisure, intellectual leisure, social leisure, routine activities, self-realization, and inner peace. Different leisure enjoyment of young adults (18–30 years old) in contrast to adults and seniors was attributed to social transformations as also predicted by several theories of social change. The relationship between the determinants of well-being and enjoyment of leisure activities was statistically significant but meaningfully debatable.     

How to encourage social innovations: a resource-based approach

During the last decade, social innovation has emerged as an outstanding topic for scholars, businesses, and public institutions. This growing interest is due to its potential positive effects on well-being and sustainable development. This study analyzes social innovation under the umbrella of the transformative service research framework. Adopting a resource-based perspective, the research attempts to determine whether the deployment in service organizations of two types of factors that support dynamic capabilities, i.e. internal market orientation, and information and communication technology competence, impacts the extent to which these organizations develop different kinds of product, process, marketing, and organizational social innovations. The study also assesses the impact of these innovation activities on the organization's transformational performance in terms of increased access to new targets. Empirical research is based on a two-step survey to a sample of Spanish nonprofits (particularly, a representative sample of foundations), since the nonprofit sector provides services that possess inherent transformational characteristics. Results confirm the expected positive effects of these two factors on social innovation and performance, and provide several guidelines for implementing social innovations in service industries.     

Interest Rates and Credit Risk

This paper explores the effects of shifts in interest rates on corporate leverage and default in the context of a dynamic model in which the link between leverage and default risk comes from the lower incentives of overindebted entrepreneurs to guarantee firm survival. The need to finance new investment pushes firms' leverage ratio above some state‐contingent target toward which firms gradually adjust through earnings retention. The response to interest rate rises and cuts is both asymmetric and heterogeneously distributed across firms. Our results help rationalize some of the evidence regarding the risk‐taking channel of monetary policy.     

Analysis of Social Performance in the Spanish Financial Industry Through Public Data. A Proposal

Banking firms are becoming increasingly aware that their clients’ management of environmental and social risks may in term threaten their own business as lenders and investors. In addition, stakeholders are requiring banks to improve their social performance. As a result, some banks are developing corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and management systems to reduce potential risks and improve their performance. In the Spanish financial system, half of the banking firms are savings banks, most of which have always used some Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) criteria in their management. Private Banks have only recently started to integrate social aspects in their performance. However, no formal analysis has been carried out on the impact of CSR strategies. Various initiatives have been launched nationally and internationally to include the social dimension in management systems. The purpose of this research is to analyse the social performance of the main Spanish financial companies through public data such as social or sustainability reports and media sources. In order to do this, we need to determine which CSR criteria most greatly affect banking firms and to choose the most accurate quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure social performance.     

Diversity and business performance: 50 years of research

This study has carried out a review of the literature appearing on diversity in the last 50 years. Research findings from this period reveal it is impossible to assume there is a pure and simple relationship between diversity and performance without considering a series of variables that affect this relationship. In this study, emphasis has been placed on the analysis of results arrived at through empirical investigation on the relation between the most studied dimensions of diversity and performance. The results presented are part of a more extensive research.     

Regional entrepreneurship capital and firm production

Certain theories suggest that the capacity of a region to generate new firms, called entrepreneurship capital, has positive spillover effects on the production of the firms in that region. Evidence generated with aggregated data at the regional level supports this prediction. This paper argues that, using aggregated data at the regional level, entrepreneurship capital could be correlated with regional production even if entrepreneurship capital has no spillover effects on firm production. This will not be the case when data at the firm level are used. This paper provides evidence from a sample of 11,276 Spanish firms during the 2004–2012 period. Positive spillovers are estimated in between effects models, but such spillovers are only found in technological firms when within effects models have been estimated. Thus, the regional entrepreneurship capital spillovers are unclear when data at the firm level are used. Plausible interpretations and implications are discussed.     

The impact of science and technology parks on firms’ product innovation: empirical evidence from Spain

Science and Technology Parks (STP) have attracted considerable attention and public funds in recent years. However, the conclusions on their effectiveness remain mixed. This work evaluates the impact of STP on firm product innovation in the Spanish context, as an example of a less developed innovation system in which regional and national governments are prioritizing STP initiatives. This work draws on a large sample of firms provided by the Spanish Survey on Technological Innovation that is conducted annually by the National Statistical Institute. We explore alternative econometric methods to obtain average treatment effects for firms located in 22 Spanish STPs. Our results show that Spanish STPs have a strong and positive impact on the probability and amount of product innovation achieved by STP located firms. These results hold when the endogeneity of STP location is taken into account.     

Identifying crime generators and spatially overlapping high-risk areas through a nonlinear model: A comparison between three cities of the Valencian region (Spain)

The behavior and spatial distribution of crime events can be explained through the characterization of an area in terms of its demography, socioeconomy, and built environment. In particular, recent studies on the incidence of crime in a city have focused on the identification of features of the built environment (specific places or facilities) that may increase crime risk within a certain radius. However, it is hard to identify environmental characteristics that consistently explain crime occurrence across cities and crime types. This article focuses on the assessment of the effect that certain types of places have on the incidence of property crime, robbery, and vandalism in three cities of the Valencian region (Spain): Alicante, Castellon, and Valencia. A nonlinear effects model is used to identify such places and to construct a risk map over the three cities considering the three crime types under research. The results obtained suggest that there are remarkable differences across cities and crime types in terms of the types of places associated with crime outcomes. The identification of high-risk areas allows verifying that crime is highly concentrated, and also that there is a high level of spatial overlap between the high-risk areas corresponding to different crime types.