The copycat CMO: firms’ imitative behavior as an explanation for CMO presence

The present study adds to the CMO literature the perspective of firms’ imitative behavior on why firms have CMOs in their TMT. We propose that a firm’s decision to have a CMO on its TMT is driven not only by contingency-reated considerations but also by social ones, as the decision is significantly influenced by industry peers. Empirical findings based on 505 large US firms from 2000 to 2012 indicate that firms’ imitative behavior is a significant driver of CMO presence, especially when firm uncertainty is strong and inference uncertainty is low. Post hoc analyses indicate that this imitation behavior tends to be performance neutral at best.     

Collateralizing liquidity

I develop a dynamic model of optimal funding to understand why financial assets are used as collateral instead of being sold to raise funds. Firms need funds to invest in risky projects with nonobservable returns. Since holding these assets allows firms to raise these funds, investing firms value the asset more than noninvesting ones. When assets are less than perfectly liquid and investment opportunities are persistent, collateralized debt minimizes asset transfers from investing to noninvesting firms and thus is optimal. Frictions in asset markets lead to an illiquidity discount and a collateral premium, which increase with the asset’s illiquidity.     

Knowledge Spillovers,ICT and Productivity Growth

This paper looks at the channels through which intangible assets affect productivity growth. The econometric analysis exploits a new data set on intangible investment (INTAN‐Invest) in conjunction with EUKLEMS productivity estimates for 10 EU member states from 1998 to 2007. We find that (a) the output elasticity of intangible capital depends upon ICT intensity, consistent with complementarities between ICT and intangible capital; (b) non‐R&D intangible capital has a higher estimated output elasticity than its factor share, as does (c) an index of labour composition. The last two findings are consistent with growth spillovers from investments in knowledge‐based/intangible capital and skills.     

UNIONS' RELATIVE CONCERNS AND STRIKES IN WAGE BARGAINING

We consider a model of wage determination with private information in an oligopoly. We investigate the effects of unions having relative concerns on the negotiated wage and the strike activity. We show that an increase of unions’ relative concerns has an ambiguous effect on the strike activity.     

Threshold estimation of Markov models with jumps and interest rate modeling

We reconstruct the level-dependent diffusion coefficient of a univariate semimartingale with jumps which is observed discretely. The consistency and asymptotic normality of our estimator are provided in the presence of both finite and infinite activity (finite variation) jumps. Our results rely on kernel estimation, using the properties of the local time of the data generating process, and the fact that it is possible to disentangle the discontinuous part of the state variable through those squared increments between observations not exceeding a suitable threshold function. We also reconstruct the drift and the jump intensity coefficients when they are level-dependent and jumps have finite activity, through consistent and asymptotically normal estimators. Simulated experiments show that the newly proposed estimators perform better in finite samples than alternative estimators, and this allows us to reexamine the estimation of a univariate model for the short term interest rate, for which we find fewer jumps and more variance due to the diffusion part than previous studies.     

Supply chain management in the luxury industry: A first classification of companies and their strategies

This paper aims at analysing the supply management strategies in the luxury industry in order to find out (1) whether different clusters of companies could be identified within the luxury industry, on the base of a set of contingent variables derived from previous research, and (2) which supply chain strategy is currently applied within each cluster. Case study methodology is used. A sample of 15 Italian luxury companies, belonging to different industrial sectors, was taken into account.On the basis of five classification variables (company size, selling volume, product complexity, product fashionableness and brand reputation) four clusters are identified; these clusters present differences in terms of Supply Chain strategy, as well as in terms of practices for managing manufacturing, sourcing and distribution processes.     

Affective-symbolic and instrumental-independence psychological motives mediating effects of socio-demographic variables on daily car use

An empirical study investigates the extent to which affective-symbolic and instrumental-independence psychological motives mediate effects of socio-demographic variables on daily car use in Sweden. Questionnaire data from a mail survey to 1134 car users collected in 2007 were used to assess the relationships daily car use as driver or passenger have to sex, household type (single or cohabiting with or without children), and residential area (urban, semi-rural or rural). Reliable measures of affective-symbolic and instrumental-independence motives were constructed. The results show that households with children use the car more than households with no children, that men make more car trips as drivers than women who use the car as passenger more than men, and that households living in rural areas use the car more than households living in semi-rural areas who use the car more than households living in urban areas. An affective-symbolic motive partially mediates the relationship between the number of weekly car trips and sex, the instrumental-independence motive partially mediates the relationships between weekly car use and percent car use as driver and several of the socio-demographic variables (living in urban vs. rural residential area for both measures; sex and living in urban vs. semi-rural residential area for percent car use as driver). Of several other socio-demographic variables (age, employment, and income) affecting car use, only the relationship of the number of cars to percent car use as driver was (partially) mediated by the instrumental-independence motive.