On the Efficiency of Bankruptcy Law: Empirical Evidence in Spain

The current economic crisis is showing one of the main problems that many companies in financial distress have to face, namely, the impact of bankruptcy law in relation to companies and firms. This paper aims to analyze the bankruptcy law ex‐ante efficiency when companies are in financial distress. To test it out, two research questions are submitted: (i) Is solvency, the criterion used in the Spanish law, the best one to assess the relative significance of the main indicators, which determine bankrupt firms? (ii) Is the Spanish bankruptcy law efficient according to solvency or are there better criteria? To answer them, a logistic regression model is conducted. The sample embraces 1,387 firms in Spain, the data being obtained from 12 Commercial Justice Courts complemented with financial information. The main conclusion is that the solvency criterion is adequate to classify bankrupt companies although currently Spanish Bankruptcy law is not as efficient as it could be. Additionally, the relevant companies' indicators, which explain the financial distress procedure, are presented. Copyright © 2013 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

Fixed investment and economic growth: new results on causality

This study re-examines the issue of causality between investment shares and economic growth. A methodology is applied based on Arellano and Bond (1991), and Holtz-Eakin, Newey and Rosen (1988) to quinquennial panel data on growth and investment shares for the post war period and shows that, contrary to previous results in the literature, causality between fixed investment and growth runs in both directions. Investment shares Granger-cause growth rates and growth rates Granger-cause investment shares. Granger causality from investment shares to growth rates is found to be negative. The result is in contrast with a capital fundamentalist view which sees fixed investment as the key to long run growth, but is fully consistent with the predictions of Solow-type growth models.     

Reconciling quantile autoregressions of firm size and variance–size scaling

The aim of this paper is to understand what economic mechanisms may cause the Law of Proportionate Effect to break down for fast-growing and shrinking firms. Recent evidence has highlighted that the first-order coefficients of quantile auto-regression of firm size decline across quantiles. Our theoretical results show that negative variance–size scaling is sufficient to yield a decline in quantile auto-regression coefficients if firm log-size is Laplace-distributed, conditional on size one period ahead. However, it is sufficient only for declining auto-regression coefficients for fast-growing firms under Asymmetric Laplace conditional log-size if skewness is decreasing with size. In other words, if the growth of large firms is less dispersed and more left-skewed, size is a disadvantage for the growth of fast-growers, but not necessarily an advantage for fast-decliners. Thus, size-related determinants of negative growth skewness, such as diseconomies of growth, market power, and managerial attention issues, impact on how the LPE is violated. Using data on Dutch manufacturing companies from the Business Register of Enterprises observed between 1994 and 2004, our empirical estimates of quantile regression models confirm the evidence of declining quantile regression coefficients for small–medium firms (20–199 employees) mainly in the right-most quantiles, and for the same subsample, we find that growth rates variance and skewness are decreasing with size. The theoretical propositions of the paper are thus corroborated.     

Housing and cost of living: Application to the Spanish regions

Spain is a home-owner economy, and housing is a key good for determining the cost of living. However, its treatment in indices such as the Spanish Consumer Price Index (CPI) makes it impossible to measure the real impact of housing on the cost of living. This issue is especially relevant at the regional level, where the differences in the housing markets are very substantial. This paper demonstrates the importance of taking account of owner occupied housing in a measure of the cost of living for Spain.     

Board Determinants in Banking Industry. An International Perspective

This paper explores the factors influencing the board composition of an international sample of commercial banks over the period 1996–2006. After considering the dual role of the board as monitor and advisor, our analysis shows that no one board composition is optimal for the banking industry and that any such recommendation could harm bank governance. Our results suggest that more complex banks that have a low ownership concentration and are headquartered in a civil law country should have larger and more independent boards. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Production smoothing in a serial supply chain: A laboratory investigation

The purpose of this paper is to examine production smoothing in supply chains. Using the controlled setting of the laboratory, we systematically investigate supply chain features that lead to production smoothing. In contrast to prior laboratory studies of the bullwhip effect, we find that the bullwhip effect disappears in several of our experiments. More importantly, our study shows that when customer demand has a predictable seasonal component, retailers smooth orders. This behavior is more pronounced when changing order levels is costly. The results demonstrate how simplifying the structure of the supply chain leads to production smoothing behavior.     

Fixed versus variable supply in the public provision of goods

Using discriminatory price auctions with variable supply, we explore a situation in which a corruptible public employee is in charge of producing and allocating a finite number of goods among consumers with uniformly distributed valuations. The negative effects of corruption are lower when the employee‘s task is to “provide at least q₀ goods” than when the employee is required to “provide exactly q₀ goods”.     

The effects of mergers and acquisitions on the firm size distribution

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the shape of the firm size distribution, by using data of the population of manufacturing firms in the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that M&As do not affect the size distribution when we consider the entire population of firms. When we focus on the firms involved in an M&A event, we observe a shift of the firm size distribution towards larger sizes. Firm size distribution becomes more concentrated around the mean, less skewed to the right hand side, and thinner at the tails as a whole. The shift toward higher sizes due to M&A is not uniform but affects firms of different sizes in different ways. While the number of firms in the lower tail decreased, the number of firms in the central size classes increased substantially and outweighed the increase in the number (and mean size) of firms in the upper tail of the distribution (consequently the overall market concentration measured by the Herfindahl index declines). M&As lead to a departure from log-normality of the firm size distribution, suggesting that external growth does not follow Gibrat’s law. Our counterfactual analysis highlights that only internal growth does not affect the shape of the size distribution of firms. On the contrary, it suggests that the change in the size distribution is almost entirely due to the external growth of the firms.

Women's employment,children and transitionAn empirical analysis for Poland1

This article empirically investigates how the transition to a market economy affected the relationship between motherhood and labour force outcomes in Poland. We estimate different probit models on two panel datasets covering a three‐year period before the reform (1987–1989) and a three‐year period afterwards (1994–1996). Contrary to a priori expectations, our findings indicate that during transition young children were much less of a deterrent to the employment probability of their mother than they were before transition.     

A Multidimensional Approach to the Influence of Environmental Marketing and Orientation on the Firm’s Organizational Performance

Since it implies a reduction in the quality and the quantity of the natural resources, environmental degradation is a present day problem that requires immediate solutions. This situation is driving firms to undertake an environmental transformation process with the purpose of reducing the negative externalities that come from their economic activities. Within this context, environmental marketing is an emerging business philosophy by which organizations can address sustainability issues. Moreover, environmental marketing and orientation are seen as valuable strategies to improve a firm’s competitiveness. However, the literature that has analyzed the link between environmental strategies and firms’ results has been inconclusive and contradictory. In this study, we propose and test a model that analyses how the implementation of ecological issues within a firm’s marketing strategy and orientation influences organizational results. Data were obtained through a survey sent to Spanish manufacturing firms. The results show that environmental marketing positively affects firms’ operational and commercial performance and this improvement will influence their economic results. Moreover, environmental marketing is revealed as an excellent strategy to obtain competitive advantages in costs and in product differentiation. Thus, this study agrees with the researchers who affirm that environmental strategies positively affect firm’s competitiveness while reducing environmental impact.