On the Discursive Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility in Advertising Agencies

As the interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) within advertising industry is growing, this paper explores the discourse on CSR among employees in advertising agencies. Different sensemaking dimensions are taken into account to examine how employees, as one of the key stakeholders involved in the joint meaning construction, make sense of CSR. In addition, this paper studies the legitimation approaches that employees use to address CSR of advertising agencies. The empirical evidence of discursive examples also indicates that there is a linkage between sensemaking and legitimation perspective in CSR discourse analysis and supports the idea that both may be a potential route toward institutionalization of CSR inside organizations or sectors.     

Accommodating or compromising change? A story about ambitions and historic deterministic scenarios

Despite the basic idea of scenarios as providing a heuristic for identifying, understanding and responding to changed conditions, many scenario studies are criticized for treating the future as an incremental continuation of the past. To understand this discrepancy between theoretical ambitions and actual practice with regard to accommodating change we followed professional futurists around. We observed that futurist curtail and slice time and we identified two temporal repertoires that inhibit different views on how (academic) knowledge about past and present is used in assessing the future: historic determinism and futuristic difference. Our empirically informed analysis is a story about ambitions in line with the futuristic difference, the re-introduction and rise of historic determinism and finally the fall of futuristic difference. Our analysis of foresight in action and foresight output yields that the retreat to historic determinism is a major pitfall for futurists in general. Our story suggest that the futures studies community needs to develop and encourage more adequate responses to the ‘siren’ of historic determinism. Practitioners who aim to employ futuristic difference throughout the foresight endeavour would then be better equipped to succeed in their ambitions.     

Wage Dispersion and Firm Productivity in Different Working Environments

This article investigates the impact of wage dispersion on firm productivity in different working environments. More precisely, it examines the interaction with: (i) the skills of the workforce, using a more appropriate indicator than the standard distinction between white‐ and blue‐collar workers, and (ii) the uncertainty of the firm economic environment, which has, to our knowledge, never been explored on an empirical basis. Using detailed cross‐sectional linked employer–employee data for Belgium, we find a hump‐shaped relationship between (conditional) wage dispersion and firm productivity. This result suggests that up to (beyond) a certain level of wage dispersion, the incentive effects of ‘tournaments’ dominate (are dominated by) ‘fairness’ and/or ‘sabotage’ considerations. Findings also show that the intensity of the relationship is stronger for highly skilled workers and in more stable environments. This might be explained by the fact that monitoring costs and production–effort elasticity are greater for highly skilled workers, and that in the presence of high uncertainty, workers have less control over their effort–output relation, and associate higher uncertainty with more unfair environments.     

On the dynamics of national scientific systems

Coauthorship links actors at the micro-level of scientists. Through electronic databases we now have enough information to compare entire research disciplines over time. We compare the complete longitudinal coauthorship networks for four research disciplines (biotechnology, mathematics, physics and sociology) for 1986–2005. We examined complete bibliographies of all researchers registered at the national Slovene Research Agency. Known hypotheses were confirmed as were three new hypotheses. There were different coauthoring cultures. However, these cultures changed over time in Slovenia. The number of coauthored publications grew much faster than solo authored productions, especially after independence in 1991 and the integration of Slovenian science into broader EU systems. Trajectories of types of coauthorship differed across the disciplines. Using blockmodeling, we show how coauthorship structures change in all disciplines. The most frequent form was a core-periphery structure with multiple simple cores, a periphery and a semi-periphery. The next most frequent form had this structure but with bridging cores. Bridging cores consolidate the center of a discipline by giving it greater coherence. These consolidated structures appeared at different times in different disciplines, appearing earliest in physics and latest in biotechnology. In 2005, biotechnology had the most consolidated center followed by physics and sociology. All coauthorship networks expanded over time. By far, new recruits went into either the semi-periphery or the periphery in all fields. Two ‘lab’ fields, biotechnology and physics, have larger semi-peripheries than peripheries. The reverse holds for mathematics and sociology, two ‘office’ disciplines. Institutional affiliations and shared interests all impact the structure of collaboration in subtle ways.     

Writing Clearly: The ECB's Monetary Policy Communication

The article presents a novel methodology for measuring the clarity of central bank communication using content analysis, illustrating the methodology with the case of the European Central Bank (ECB). The analysis identifies the ECB's written communication as clear in about 85–95% of instances, which is comparable with, or better than, similar results available for other central banks. We also find that the additional information on risk to inflation and especially projection risk assessment contained in the ECB's Monthly Bulletins helps to improve communication clarity compared to ECB's press releases. In contrast, the bulletin's communication on monetary developments has a negative, albeit small, impact on clarity.     

Developing countries in competition for foreign investment

This study analyzes the competition for foreign direct investment (FDI) among countries at different stages of development. It is assumed that domestic companies in a more-developed country use more capital in production and that wages in a less-developed country are lower. Countries can compete for FDI by increasing the supply of public inputs in the economy, in addition to (or instead of) offering subsidies or tax reliefs to foreign investors. The results reveal that if governments of competing countries are not allowed to discriminate between domestic and foreign firms, there may be situations in which a less-developed economy will attract FDI depending on the labor cost differential and the responsiveness of foreign investor's and domestic companies' output to changes in the supply of public inputs. If tax discrimination between domestic and foreign firms is permitted, both countries will optimally raise the supply of public inputs, but the more-developed country will always win the foreign investment despite higher labor costs. Thus, governments of less-developed countries may have an incentive to work on an international agreement to disallow tax discrimination.     

Trade protection and tax evasion: Evidence from Kenya,Mauritius, and Nigeria

We examine the effect of trade protection rates on evasion in three African countries Kenya, Mauritius, and Nigeria. In capturing the effect of trade protection on tariff evasion, we use a much improved measure of trade protection (MAcMap-HS6 2001 and 2004). For two of these countries, this dataset allows the novelty of using variation in trade protection across product, time, and trading partners leading to significantly refined estimates of evasion elasticity relative to existing studies on tariff evasion. We find a robust evidence for positive elasticity of evasion with respect to tariffs in Kenya and Nigeria with relatively weaker evidence for Mauritius. Our results match the rankings of countries in institutional quality. Greater responsiveness of evasion to the level of tariffs is established in Nigeria (comparatively weak institutional quality) vis-à-vis Kenya, and in Kenya vis-à-vis Mauritius (comparatively good institutional quality). This pattern is preserved even when focusing on same set of trading partners and same set of imported products for the three countries. This result is robust to controlling for protection on related products (that creates incentives/ opportunities for evasion) and also for degree of differentiation of the product and some other characteristics.     

Game hoarding in Europe: stock-price consequences of local bias?

Local bias within a country and between countries is well established in the empirical literature. However, the underlying reasons are less well established. In a simple supply and demand framework, Hong, Kubik, and Stein (hereafter HKS) [2008. The only game in town: Stock-price consequences of local bias. Journal of Financial Economics 90, no. 1: 20–37.] find an ‘only-game-in-town’ effect in the USA – the stock price in a region decreases in the ratio of aggregate book value of listed firms to the aggregate personal income (‘RATIO’). We first replicate the HKS (2008) study using European data and find an opposite effect, a ‘game-hoarding’ effect. We then investigate the underlying factors of RATIO and find that after controlling for differences in origin of law, investor rights, corruption and Euro adoption, neither a game-hoarding effect nor an only-game-in-town effect is strongly supported in the European case. The results are important in understanding the concept of local bias in a cross-country framework.     

An improved convolution algorithm for discretely sampled Asian options

We suggest an improved FFT pricing algorithm for discretely sampled Asian options with general independently distributed returns in the underlying. Our work complements the studies of Carverhill and Clewlow [Risk, 1990, 3(4), 25–29], Benhamou [J. Comput. Finance, 2002, 6(1), 49–68], and Fusai and Meucci [J. Bank. Finance, 2008, 32(10), 2076–2088], and, if we restrict our attention only to log-normally distributed returns, also Ve?e? [Risk, 2002, 15(6), 113–116]. While the existing convolution algorithms compute the density of the underlying state variable by moving forward on a suitably defined state space grid, our new algorithm uses backward price convolution, which resembles classical lattice pricing algorithms. For the first time in the literature we provide an analytical upper bound for the pricing error caused by the truncation of the state space grid and by the curtailment of the integration range. We highlight the benefits of the new scheme and benchmark its performance against existing finite difference, Monte Carlo, and forward density convolution algorithms.