Why Farmers Quit: A County-Level Analysis

We identify the effects of alternative explanatory variables on the propensity of U.S. farmers to cease farming, with a particular emphasis on understanding the roles of off-farm employment and federal farm program payments. Conventional ordinary least squares analysis using all counties suggests that off-farm employment has no statistical effect on the (net) number of farmers quitting between 1987 and 1997, ceteris paribus . A more refined analysis, which separates counties losing farmers from those that gained farmers, reveals subtle and less clear-cut effects of off-farm employment (and federal program payments) on farm exits.     

Linking Environmental Management to Environmental Performance: The Interactive Role of Industry Context

In the past, corporate sustainability scholars advocated that, for many firms, environmental management could turn into a valuable capability conferring a competitive advantage. However, little attention has been paid to the role of the industry context and its influence on the relationship between environmental management and organizational performance. In this study, we examine the effect on this relationship of three contextual variables: munificence, dynamism and complexity. Drawing on longitudinal data from 336 firms representing 30 industries, we find that munificence enhances the degree to which a firm can leverage its environmental management capabilities to improve environmental performance. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The Carrot or the Stick: Self-Regulation for Gender-Diverse Boards via Codes of Good Governance

Journal of Business Ethics - Scholars have emphasized the potential of self-regulation, realized through ‘codes of good governance’, to improve gender diversity on boards. Yet,...     

Decentralized environmental regulations and plant‐level productivity

Using the framework provided by the Porter hypothesis, we study the impact of environmental regulations and enforcement policies on plant‐level green total factor productivity (TFP) growth and its components related to efficiency change and technical change. The detailed microdata we use are from Sweden and for the pulp and paper industry. This industry is the source of significant amounts of water and air pollution and is one of the most heavily environmentally regulated manufacturing industries. Sweden has a unique decentralized regulatory structure where the manufacturing plants have to comply with plant‐specific regulatory standards stipulated at the national level, as well as decentralized local supervision and enforcement. Our empirical results point to beneficial impacts of the environmental policies on plants' green TFP growth and sustainable production practices. We also find that political economy considerations are important, as the presence of the Green Party and aspects like plant size (with corresponding local and regional economic effects) matter in enforcement of the standards.     

Robust XVA

We introduce an arbitrage‐free framework for robust valuation adjustments. An investor trades a credit default swap portfolio with a risky counterparty, and hedges credit risk by taking a position in defaultable bonds. The investor does not know the exact return rate of her counterparty's bond, but she knows it lies within an uncertainty interval. We derive both upper and lower bounds for the XVA process of the portfolio, and show that these bounds may be recovered as solutions of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The presence of collateralization and closeout payoffs leads to important differences with respect to classical credit risk valuation. The value of the super‐replicating portfolio cannot be directly obtained by plugging one of the extremes of the uncertainty interval in the valuation equation, but rather depends on the relation between the XVA replicating portfolio and the closeout value throughout the life of the transaction. Our comparative statics analysis indicates that credit contagion has a nonlinear effect on the replication strategies and on the XVA.     

Research on target costing: past,present and future

Although target costing is an extensively studied topic in the management accounting literature, a holistic investigation into its methodological development is missing. Therefore, an extensive state-of-the-art analysis is conducted that focuses on articles in highly rated journals. We determine nine distinct research streams that encompass further developments of the traditional target costing methodology. By grouping these streams into three research scopes, we outline the achieved progress as well as remaining tasks for further enhancements. Due to the abundance of these tasks, we align them with six future themes of management accounting that we identified as being particularly influential to target costing. As a result, six promising topics for researchers to advance target costing are determined. Additionally, our findings reveal to managers of which issues they should be particularly aware with respect to the performance of their target costing processes.     

Zahlungsbereitschaft für grünen Strom: Zunehmende Kluft zwischen Wunsch und Wirklichkeit

This paper presents evidence on preferences for green electricity, drawing on two stated-preference surveys conducted in 2013 and 2015 among 6000 households. It uncovers a strong contrast between the households – rising general acceptance of supporting renewable energy technologies and their shrinking individual willingness-to-pay for green electricity.