Communism as the unhappy coming

We show that Eastern Orthodox believers are less happy compared to those of Catholic and Protestant faith using data covering more than 100 countries around the world. Consistent with the happiness results, we also find that relative to Catholics, Protestants and non-believers, those of Eastern Orthodox religion have less social capital and prefer old ideas and safe jobs. In addition, Orthodoxy is associated with left-leaning political preferences and stronger support for government involvement in the economy. Compared to non-believers and Orthodox adherents, Catholics and Protestants are less likely to agree that government ownership is a good thing, and Protestants are less likely to agree that getting rich can only happen at the expense of others. These differences in life satisfaction and other attitudes and values persisted despite the fact that communist elites sought to eradicate church-going in Eastern Europe, since communists maintained many aspects of Orthodox theology which were useful for the advancement of the communist doctrine. The findings are consistent with Berdyaev’s (1933, 1937) hypothesis of communism as a successor of Orthodoxy.     

Training does not imply learning: the individual’s perspective

Using recent empirical findings from an in-depth study in the Financial Services Sector in the UK, this article provides new insights into the association between training and learning from the individual’s perspective. The analysis provides an account of the perceptions of individual managers across three Retail Banks regarding the role, significance and impact of training as a learning opportunity and shows the multiplicity of factors affecting whether individuals actually learn from training. The findings challenge some of the assumptions which have guided our thinking in the management training and development field. The implications of the findings for research and practice are considered.     

The effect of Regulation Fair Disclosure on expectations management: International evidence

We examine whether Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) was effective in limiting the expectations management of US firms as well as ADR and foreign-listed firms to meet or beat analysts’ earnings forecasts. Domestic US firms are required to comply with Reg FD; however, ADR firms are explicitly exempted from its provisions. Thus, ADR firms are thought to represent a control against which US firm expectations management is measured. We find a decrease in expectations management for both US and ADR firms. We find that the post-Reg-FD changes for US and ADR firms are not significantly different. This suggests Reg FD was not effective in limiting forecast guidance or, alternatively, both US and ADR firms responded to Reg FD by reducing forecast guidance. We provide additional evidence that ADR firms experienced a significant decrease in expectations management relative to other foreign-listed firms suggesting that ADR firms voluntarily complied with Reg FD. Overall, our evidence suggests that Reg FD worked to reduce expectations management to meet or beat expectations for both US and ADR firms.     

The Visible Hand of corporate entrepreneurship in state-owned enterprises: a longitudinal study of the Spanish National Postal Operator

This study explores how the corporate entrepreneurship (CE) of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) evolves under varying conditions of state ownership and control, laws and norms, and competence in the market. For this purpose, we present a longitudinal case study focused on the Spanish postal operator Correos using qualitative archival data and interviews. Our results indicate that the willingness and capacity of an SOE to act entrepreneurially depends critically on its degree of autonomy from the state and on the extent to which its legal and market environments increase its dynamism, complexity, and hostility. We also show that the development of CE in an SOE may lead to improved service quality, operational efficiency, and business specialization; facilitate its market positioning; and foster its sustainability through the exploration and exploitation of strategic alliances that can increase its business scope.

     

Value premium and macroeconomic variables

This paper investigates the effect of macroeconomic expectations on the value premium. We introduce a two-pass estimation procedure to extrapolate the impact of investors' macroexpectations on the firm fundamental value of Rhodes-Kropf, Robinson, and Viswanathan. We find that the level and slope of the term structure affect valuation, revealing a heavily industry-dependent effect. The portfolios sorted on metrics orthogonal to macroeconomic variables show a clear association between the misvaluation component of value premium and size risk. By removing the influence of the macroeconomic conditions and size, we separate the portion of the value premium that rewards macroeconomic expectations.     

Workers’ tenure and firm productivity: New evidence from matched employer-employee panel data

Using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian firms, we explore the impact of workers’ tenure on firm productivity. To do so, we estimate production functions augmented with firm-level measures of tenure. We deal with the endogeneity of standard inputs and tenure, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of Ackerberg et al.’s (2015) control function method, which explicitly removes firm fixed effects. Consistently with recent theoretical predictions, our analyses point to positive, but decreasing, returns to tenure. We also find that the impact differs widely across several firm dimensions. Tenure is particularly beneficial for productivity in contexts characterized by a certain degree of routineness and low job complexity. Along the same lines, our findings indicate that tenure exerts stronger positive impacts in industrial and capital-intensive firms, as well as in firms less reliant on ICT-intensive and knowledge-intensive processes.     

The joint influence of Sarbanes-Oxley and FAS123R on financial misreporting

Prior research reports that a manager's equity risk-taking incentive (vega) is positively associated with financial misreporting. FAS 123R led to a significant decrease in vega while SOX increased the cost of financial misreporting. Consistent with the original intent of the legislation, we find that SOX contributed to significant decreases in both fraud restatements and AAERs. Importantly, our results suggest that the SOX-induced decreases in fraud restatements and AAERs have endured to more recent years. On the other hand, while we find evidence that equity-incentive-motivated financial misreporting ceased to exist in the immediate years after FAS 123R, we also find that this was only temporary. In particular, we find strong evidence of a significantly positive association between vega and accrual misreporting in more recent years.     

Risk perception in housing markets: Evidence from a fighter jet crash

In this study, we investigate the capitalization of flight accident risk in housing prices near military bases in Virginia from 2003 to 2016. We focus on a localized shock caused by a fighter jet crash into an apartment complex near the Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. Although flight accident hazards were transparently disclosed by sellers and local governments years beforehand, the crash led to a temporary (approximately 3 years) decline in the prices of properties within accident potential zones (APZ) and by a lesser magnitude, properties slightly outside the APZ boundaries. This analysis sheds light on how market participants react after an extreme event, emphasizing the role of recency in the capitalization of risk.     

Cross-border cooperation: A response to the challenges facing agri-food cooperatives in Southern European countries

All agri-food cooperatives share common interests, irrespective of their geographical borders, which should encourage them to undertake inter-cooperation processes as well as to set up transnational cooperatives. This paper has two objectives. The first is to analyze Spanish and Portuguese cooperative regulations and the Statute for a European Cooperative Society to define how to embark on these processes in the two countries while also pinpointing the conflicts that may arise from the different regulations. Secondly, it seeks to ascertain which Spanish and Portuguese cooperatives have had experience in this field and to characterize them through a multiple-case study, including the rationale for the processes, the advantages and the constraints. The results have revealed five cross-border cooperation categories and show that the Statute for a European Cooperative Society has not had the expected success at the EU level, due to its complexity. However, in general, the lack of expected cross-border cooperative experiences is not due to legal, language or management issues. It is for different reasons. Firstly, cooperatives think that they can achieve the same objectives through inter-cooperative agreements. Secondly, government policies protect the regional nature of their cooperatives, rather than encouraging them to expand their business and therefore their capacity to respond to current challenges.