Salespersons' self‐monitoring: Direct,indirect, and moderating effects on salespersons' organizational citizenship behavior

Research into self‐monitoring (SM) confirms that people differ when it comes to how much they observe, regulate, and control themselves in certain social settings and interpersonal relationships. Research also shows that high self‐monitors, as opposed to low self‐monitors, perform better in boundary‐spanning positions that require good communication skills. Therefore, it is a matter of interest to analyze the effects of SM on salespeople's behavior, and on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in particular. It has been proven that this behavior affects the performance of organizations and influences supervisors' evaluations of subordinates. Although a number of studies examine the antecedents of OCB, certain relationships have yet to be looked at. This study proposes and tests a model stating that salespersons' OCB is determined by salespersons' SM, with this relationship being mediated by salespersons' person–organization (PO) fit and job satisfaction. This study also analyzes the moderating effect of salespersons' SM on PO fit to job satisfaction relationships, as well as on job satisfaction to OCB relationships. Data collected from 122 supervisor–salesperson dyads in 35 companies across 9 different sectors confirm the proposed model. In fact, the results show that SM, both directly and indirectly, has a positive effect on OCB due to the way in which it influences salespersons' PO fit and job satisfaction. The results also confirm the moderating role of SM in the relationships between job satisfaction and OCB, and between PO fit and job satisfaction. Certain implications of this study, as well as directions for future research, are also addressed. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Spatial modeling of stock market comovements

We model the complex global dependencies in international financial markets using spatial techniques. Our methodology allows us to go beyond conventional correlation analyses and volatility-spillover models confined to studying pairwise relationships, and improves the accuracy of return predictions. We find that stock market comovements are unrelated to geographical proximity, and that financial linkages, as measured by foreign direct investment (FDI) ties, are important in accounting for markets comovements. Our results suggest that the proposed measure of financial distance, coupled with spatial methodology, captures fairly accurately the dependencies in the world financial markets, providing important implications for policymaking and portfolio management.     

Modelling the linkages between US and Latin American stock markets

This paper examines the linkages between US and Latin American stock markets during the 1995–2002 period using recently developed cointegration techniques that allow for structural shifts in the long-run relationship. Results suggest that when conventional cointegration tests are applied, a long-run relationship is found only in the cases of Brazil and Mexico for the Dow Jones (DJ) index, and in the case of Brazil for the Standard and Poor's 500 (SP500) index. In contrast, if the possibility of structural breaks is introduced, strong evidence is found in favour of such a relationship between the Argentine, Chilean and Venezuelan indices and the DJ index after the 1998 financial turmoil, and between the Brazilian and Mexican indices and the DJ index before such turbulence, while some marginal cointegration is detected between the Mexican and DJ indices from February 1998. Additionally, evidence is found of a cointegrating relationship between the Argentine, Chilean and Mexican indices and the SP500 index from August 1998, April 1999 and October 1999, respectively, and between the Brazilian and the SP500 indices before November 1997, as well as some marginal cointegration between the Mexican and SP500 indices before October 1999. The results suggest that the gains from international diversification for investors with long holding periods is limited.     

The Market Concept: A Characterization from Institutional and Post‐Keynesian Economics

The neoclassical concept of the market is built on a number of assumptions that lead one to view it as a type of ether, devoid of any institutional content. In opposition to this point of view, this article proposes an alternative characterization of markets based on the fundamental principles of institutional and post‐Keynesian economics. After reviewing the main features that characterize the behavior of economic agents, we analyze the set of interrelations between these agents within markets and the role of institutions in the regulation of these interrelations. Finally, we discuss some of the consequences generated by the institutional dimensions of markets with regard to their origins and evolution, the justification for their existence, or the evaluation of their results.     

Sustainable Development and the Financial System: Society's Perceptions About Socially Responsible Investing

The debate surrounding the financial needs of investors and the impact on society of investment is considered to be an important research topic due to the growth of socially responsible financial markets. The main objective of this research is to study society's perception about socially responsible investing (SRI) and to identify investor's preferences regarding environmental, social and governance criteria, their real‐life investment needs and the most relevant sustainable financial products. To examine society's perception of SRI, we conducted a field survey among Spanish investors. The results show that SRI is at an early stage and Spanish investors need more exact information regarding social, environmental, and governance criteria in order to invest in socially responsible companies and products. This paper offers some guidelines that could be used by Spanish institutions, managers and investors and by foreign managers when approaching the Spanish market, in order to promote the growth of socially responsible financial products. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Expiration and maturity effect: empirical evidence from the Spanish spot and futures stock index

The paper studies how the time remaining to the expiration date of derivative markets affects the volatility of the IBEX-35 index (expiration effect) and its futures market (maturity effect). The innovation of the study lies in both effects being studied together for the Spanish stock market using bivariate ECM-GARCH including dummy variables that express the time left to expiration day. The results obtained show that, during the week of the expiration day, the conditional variance of both markets increases without presenting any significant behaviour in the correlation level. During the second week, however, the conditional variance diminishes and the degree of correlation between both markets increases.     

Organizational culture and human resources in the environmental issue: a review of the literature

From the resourced-based view, the weakness of organizations' business culture and their shortcomings in human resources may be important obstacles in the process of environmental action. However, as the number of works on these questions is still limited, our aim is to integrate the classical literature concerning business culture and human resources and the small number of works concerning these aspects of environmental management. Several issues, such as managerial duties, the role of organizational culture in the formation of environmental internal stakeholders' awareness, organizational involvement in environmental issues, environmental training and concern, environmental motivation and incentives and implementation and organizational innovations, may be very important for thesuccess of companies' environmental strategy. However, it seems necessary to carry out studies in which qualitative and quantitative methodologies are applied.     

Sampling method for monitoring the alternative accommodation market

Tourism is an extremely competitive industry where effective destination management is necessary to compete. One of the main destination management stakeholders is the hotel industry. Since the advent of the Internet websites that facilitate the sharing economy, the hotel industry has had to compete with an alternative accommodation market. This alternative market is difficult to monitor as there is no official data. Current research works on developing methods for calculating tourism metrics for a destination based on digital footprint with the objective of offering figures to complement official statistics. The objective of our research is to develop a method to monitor the alternative accommodation market based on data collected from Airbnb. This paper reports the results of the first step: the design of a sampling method for data scraping from this website that provides a representative sample of the accommodation offer of the Basque Country distributed through it and its prices. The results show that the length-of-stay (LOS) parameter of the queries to the website is key to obtaining a representative sample of the accommodation offered through this channel. A sampling method based on the representative values of LOS inferred from a data sample is proposed.     

Volatility transmission between stock and foreign exchange markets: a connectedness analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically investigates volatility transmission among stock and foreign exchange markets in seven major world economies during the period July 1988 to May 2018. To this end, we first perform a static and dynamic analysis to measure the total volatility connectedness in the entire period (the system-wide approach). Second, we make use of a dynamic analysis to evaluate the net directional connectedness for each market. To gain further insights, we examine the time-varying behaviour of net pair-wise directional connectedness during the financial turmoil periods experienced in the sample period Our results suggest that slightly more than half of the total variance of the forecast errors is explained by shocks across markets rather than by idiosyncratic shocks. Furthermore, we find that volatility connectedness varies over time, with a surge during periods of increasing economic and financial instability.     

PERSPECTIVE: Cross‐Functional Integration in Spanish Firms

Published studies of new product development in Spain provide conflicting evidence regarding the role of cross‐functional integration in new product success. One possible explanation for these results is the use of idiosyncratic scales for measuring the level of cross‐functional integration. This study adopts the scale items used in a previous study and replicates that research process using data collected from managers of 134 Spanish companies involved in new product development. Findings confirm the appropriateness of these scales in a Spanish context and the importance of cross‐functional integration to new product success in Spanish firms. No support is found for the hypothesis that participative management is positively correlated with the level of cross‐functional integration. Cross‐functional integration is found to be negatively related to goal incongruity and positively related to top‐management support for integration.