Money and the emergence of knowledge in society

This paper deals with money’s epistemic relevance in society. Money presents theoretical difficulties for neoclassical economics, which treats it as a cost-reducing tool, leading to a socially neutral, aseptic view on money. Drawing from complexity and social theory I provide a socio-epistemic rationalization for money’s irreplaceable role. Building upon Ingham’s Money Is a Social Relation, I argue that money generates a new orderly system of complex social relations that in turn engenders knowledge as an emergent social and ontological phenomenon irreducible to the fragmented knowledge held by members of society. I show that ultimately money cannot be separated from economic knowledge and market rationality. This paper provides sociological and ontological accounts for the emergence of knowledge crucial to coordinate societies, thus extending recent explorations of the ontology of money.     

Sustainable Entrepreneurship Research: Taking Stock and looking ahead

The recognition of entrepreneurship as a solution to, rather than a cause of, environmental degradation and social inequality moved the field to identify a new type of entrepreneurial activity, namely sustainable entrepreneurship. Scholarly interest has spiked in recent years; however, aside from its aspirational appeal, there remains a lack of understanding of the nature of the phenomenon and the future of sustainable entrepreneurship in theory and practice. This review seeks to provide a conceptual basis for stimulating scholarly thought and improving our collective understanding of sustainable entrepreneurship as a distinct subdomain within entrepreneurship research. Based on boundary definition and delineation of main features, this review critically discusses the main challenges ahead and elaborates on the research implications and future research directions beyond current, dominant approaches to entrepreneurial action. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Specialisation of retail streets as a result of an evolutionary process

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the historical formation of the specialised retail street Santa Ifigênia (São Paulo, Brazil), and links it with concepts based on an evolutionary framework. Testing of the theory is based on historical data of firms from 1857 to 2010. The research has found that the current specialisation in the electro-electronic sector (from the 1940s onwards) is the third one that has taken place in the street, replacing the previous fashion sector (between the 1910s and the 1940s), which in turn outcompeted the original specialisation of the food sector (from the 1870s to the 1910s). It also highlights the historical and contingent events that changed the trajectories of the retail evolution of the street.     

Political budget cycles and voting within a federal country: The influence of political alignment

We study how distributive politics affects political budget cycles and voting within a federal country. Our model predicts not only that the president favors politically aligned governors with larger transfers, but also that voters favor gubernatorial candidates aligned with the expected presidential incumbent because larger transfers are expected in the future. These predictions are upheld by the data from Argentinean provinces during the 1984–2014 period. Our findings imply that political alignment can trump the selection effect of voting the most competent candidate. This can help explain in particular coattail effects when gubernatorial and presidential elections are concurrent.     

Existence,uniqueness, and stability of optimal payoffs of eligible assets

In a capital adequacy framework, risk measures are used to determine the minimal amount of capital that a financial institution has to raise and invest in a portfolio of prespecified eligible assets in order to pass a given capital adequacy test. From a capital efficiency perspective, it is important to be able to do so at the lowest possible cost and to identify the corresponding portfolios, or, equivalently, their payoffs. We study the existence and uniqueness of such optimal payoffs as well as their behavior under a perturbation or an approximation of the underlying capital position. This behavior is naturally linked to the continuity properties of the set‐valued map that associates to each capital position the corresponding set of optimal eligible payoffs. Upper continuity can be ensured under fairly natural assumptions. Lower continuity is typically less easy to establish. While it is always satisfied in a polyhedral setting, it generally fails otherwise, even when the reference risk measure is convex. However, lower continuity can often be established for eligible payoffs that are close to being optimal. Besides capital adequacy, our results have a variety of natural applications to pricing, hedging, and capital allocation problems.     

Group Affiliation and Ownership Concentration as Determinants of Capital Structure Decisions: Contextualizing the Facts for an Emerging Economy

This study considers the firm’s affiliation with business groups and the ownership structure as determinants of leverage decisions in Chilean firms. The major findings show that group-affiliated firms take advantage of internal capital markets and transactions with related parties (e.g., low transference price or loans at competitive interest rates) that reduces the demand for external debt. Majority shareholders in affiliated firms behave as controllers of managers, on the one hand, and avoid the supervisory role of debt, on the other hand. In stand-alone firms, supervision led by majority shareholders is complemented by the monitoring role of debt through higher levels of leverage. We conclude that further developments in capital structure theories adjusted to the particularities of the different institutional contexts are needed.     

When Does University Research Get Commercialized? Creating Ambidexterity in Research Institutions

We examine the tensions that make it difficult for a research‐oriented university to achieve commercial outcomes. Building on the organizational ambidexterity literature, we specify the nature of the tensions (between academic and commercially‐oriented activities) at both organizational and individual levels of analysis, and how these can be resolved. We develop hypotheses linking specific aspects of the organization and the individual researcher to the likelihood of their research projects generating commercial outcomes, and we test them using a novel dataset of 207 Research Council‐funded projects, combining objective data on project outcomes with the perceptions of principal investigators. We show that the tension between academic and commercial demands is more salient at the level of the individual researcher than at the level of the organization. Universities show evidence that they are able to manage the tensions between academic and commercial demands, through for example their creation of ‘dual structures’. At the individual level, on the other hand, the tensions are more acute, so that the people who deliver commercial outcomes tend to be rather different to those who are accustomed to producing academic outcomes.     

Corporate Governance When Managers Set Their Own Pay

This paper presents a model of the firm in which the manager has discretion over his own compensation, constrained only by the threat of shareholder intervention. The model addresses two main questions. How does shareholder power affect managers' compensation and their incentives to maximise firm value? And what is the optimal level of shareholder power? Expectedly, the model shows that increasing shareholder power leads to lower managerial pay. Greater shareholder power, however, also weakens the manager's incentives to maximise value and may even lead to lower profits for shareholders. There might, thus, be too much, as well as too little, shareholder power. The model characterises the optimal level of shareholder power and yields predictions about the relation between shareholder power, managerial pay, performance and firm characteristics.     

Technology revenue management system for customer groups in hotels

This paper discusses revenue management; a technique that focuses on decision making that will maximize profit from the sale of perishable inventory units. New technologies management plays an important role in the development of revenue management techniques. Each new advancement in technology management leads to more sophisticated revenue business capabilities. Today decision support revenue management systems and technologies management are crucial factors for the success of businesses in service industries. This paper addresses the specific case of customer groups in hotels. This paper introduces a new decision support system that sets the revenue maximization criteria for a hotel. The aforementioned system includes a set of demand forecasting methods for customers and addresses a general case considering individual guests and customer groups. The system also incorporates deterministic and stochastic mathematical programming models that help to make the best decisions. The actual revenue depends upon which reservation system the hotel uses. A simulation engine makes a comparison between different heuristics of room inventory control: the results include performance indexes such as occupancy rate, efficiency rate, and yield; it compares results and chooses one of them. The system proves its suitability for actual cases by testing against actual data and thus becoming an innovative and efficient tool in the management of hotels' reservation systems.     

Improving the “Leader–Follower” Relationship: Top Manager or Supervisor? The Ethical Leadership Trickle-Down Effect on Follower Job Response

Since time immemorial, the phenomenon of leadership and its understanding has attracted the attention of the business world because of its important role in human groups. Nevertheless, for years efforts to understand this concept have only been centred on people in leadership roles, thus overlooking an important aspect in its understanding: the necessary moral dimension which is implicit in the relationship between leader and follower. As an illustrative example of the importance of considering good morality in leadership, an empirical study is conducted in which a good performance of the “leader–follower” relationship is reflected when individuals perceive ethical leadership in higher hierarchical managerial levels. To be precise, findings of this study demonstrate that follower job response is improved through an ethics trickle-down partial effect from the Top Manager to the immediate supervisor, and also reveal both key aspects and managerial level on which the practice of ethical leadership should rest upon to have a stronger effect on the follower positive job response. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are finally presented.