Above and beyond? How businesses can drive sustainable development by promoting lasting pro-environmental behaviour change: An examination of the IKEA Live Lagom project

Current global changes require new business approaches driving sustainable development on all fronts. To date, most business approaches have focused on sustainable marketing and corporate social responsibility initiatives. In this field study, we examine IKEA's Live Lagom project, a 3-year behaviour change initiative that aimed to explore how to go above and beyond conventional approaches demonstrating how businesses could support sustainable development by supporting their customers' attempts to live more sustainable lifestyles. We examined the effectiveness of the project involving multifaceted behaviour change interventions, testing for behavioural changes both during and after the project period. In addition, we explored changes in participants' attitudes towards the company. Findings show that the extensive set of interventions led to changes in pro-environmental behaviours across all three participant groups with potentially positive impacts on the customer–company relationship. The article thus provides a call for further businesses to engage in similar behaviour change projects that would allow citizens to engage in more sustainable lifestyles and behaviours across contexts.     

Regreso al futuro. Continuidad del diálogo sobre el trabajo y la tecnología en la OIT

La preocupación por el desempleo tecnológico no es nueva. Los debates que tuvieron lugar en el decenio de 1960 sobre la automatización reflejaban tanto optimismo como preocupación por la potencial destrucción de empleo causada por la tecnología. Al estudiar los archivos de la OIT, y en particular la información recopilada por su ṢOficina de Automatizaciónṣ, se observa que muchas propuestas actuales se debatieron durante aquel periodo, aunque nunca se tradujeron en políticas de reglamentación. La autora reabre este antiguo debate, como un buen punto de partida para abordar los problemas actuales en consonancia con el mundo del trabajo que aspiramos a construir.     

Gasto en seguridad social y rendimiento empresarial. El caso de las pymes en Indonesia

A pesar de la amplia bibliografía sobre la relación entre cotización social y rendimiento empresarial, la evidencia relativa a las pymes de las economías en desarrollo es escasa. Se examina aquí el caso de Indonesia utilizando datos censales empresariales de 2010 a 2014. Un aumento del gasto en seguridad social del 10 por ciento se asocia a un aumento del ingreso empresarial por trabajador de hasta el 2 por ciento. Los beneficios no disminuyen con el aumento del gasto en protección social, lo que sugiere que la ampliación de las prestaciones sociales puede ser una inversión empresarial que vale la pena.     

Substantial effect of voluntary policy interventions on aircraft ground handling safety

Managing safety and health matters require comprehensive policy intervention to change the existing culture in the ground handling operations and reducing the safety performance outcomes. This study aims to investigate the relationship between safety culture and safety performance outcome with voluntary policy intervention as the moderating effect of the relationship. The study employed a quantitative method through a survey instrument, which was participated by 423 ground handling workers from six international airports in Malaysia. The results indicated seven hypotheses in direct relationships have positive association between safety culture and safety performance construct. While for moderator relationships, there were five hypotheses found to be statistically significant and supported. The presence of voluntary policy interventions were found to be beneficial or detrimental elements for the insignificant relationships of the study. The ground handling organisation is expected to utilise these results by strengthening their organisation safety culture and prioritise safety and health matters over demand and cost.     

Auditors' Responses to Workload Imbalance and the Impact on Audit Quality*

Using detailed data for fieldwork hours and audit hours by rank from audit engagements in Korea, we examine whether audits conducted under workload imbalance, proxied by busy‐season audits, impair audit quality, and how auditors adjust staff assignments for busy‐season audits. We generally find that busy‐season audits are associated with lower audit quality, and that audit firms reduce the involvement of senior auditors during busy‐season audits. In addition, the greater the involvement of senior auditors and junior auditors, the lesser the deterioration in audit quality. Finally, although there is no increase in interim audits in response to workload imbalance during busy seasons, increasing interim audits can mitigate the negative impact of busy‐season audits on audit quality. Our results are relevant to auditors and regulators, who have expressed concerns about the adverse effects of workload imbalance on audit quality.     

El efecto fin de mes en los principales mercados accionarios latinoamericanos

In equity markets, it is common to find calendar anomalies, which have been the subject of several studies in recent decades, even some of them showing that over time these anomalies have disappeared. In this context, this paper analyzes one of these anomalies, the end-of-the-month effect, in both return and volatility in six Latin American stock markets, namely Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Argentina during the period of 1993-2011. The importance of the evidence for the existence of this anomaly is to allow testing whether the effect has been disappearing over time. The findings of this research show the existence of positive abnormal returns and abnormal volatilities on days associated with the change of months for most of the countries under analysis. This research was performed according to three different periods defined in the literature to analyze the impact of the end-of-the-month effect. This research not only examines the key indexes of each market, but also the individual stocks of each, giving a much larger and demanding sample, which can lead to better conclusions about the existence of the phenomenon. Also, the transaction volume analysis is included to validate some hypotheses related with the high cash flow in the turn-of-month period.     

Optimizing suicide and trespass prevention on railways: a problem-solving model from the RESTRAIL project

Suicides and trespassing accidents result in more than 3800 fatalities in Europe, representing 88% of all fatalities occurring within the EU railway system. This paper presents a problem-solving model, which consists of a multistep approach structuring the analysis of a suicide or trespass-related problem on the railways. First, we present the method used to design, evaluate and improve the problem-solving model. Then we describe the model in detail: it comprises six steps with several subsequent actions, and each action is approached through a checklist of prompting questions and possible answers. At the end, we discuss the added value of this model for decision makers and its usability in the selection of optimal prevention measures.     

Stock liquidity and stock prices crash-risk: Evidence from India

In this paper, we examine the role of stock liquidity as a governance mechanism to discipline managers for withholding bad news (stock price crash-risk). This topic is useful to emerging markets because the dominance of controlling owners limits the monitoring of internal governance. Stock liquidity can be altered by the financial market regulations, thereby improving firm-level governance. In empirical analysis, we show that stock liquidity decreases stock price crash-risk. We identify two possible mechanisms through which stock liquidity reduces stock price crash-risk: the threat of intervention and price informativeness.     

Effects of hiring former employees of multinationals in the absorptive capacity of local firms

The attraction of foreign direct investment seeks, among other things, to increase the productivity of local companies through knowledge spillovers. However, the empirical evidence in this regard is contradictory. One influential factor is the absorptive capacity of the local companies. This article analyzes the effect of the presence of former employees of multinational corporations as employees of local companies, on the absorptive capacity of said companies. The study was done in Costa Rica, a country known for its successful strategy in the subject matter. The data come from a survey applied to 1167 companies by the Observatorio Costarricense de las Pymes in 2011. It was found that the hiring of former employees of multinational corporations by local companies has a positive effect on the index of absorptive capacity of companies in all productive sectors. Specifically, this hiring of former employees increases the index of absorptive capacity by nine percentage points, with differences by sector and the size of the company.     

Central banks and macroeconomic policy choices: Relaxing the trilemma

Macroeconomic policy choices in open economies are constrained by the trilemma according to which the objectives of exchange rate stability, monetary independence and capital mobility cannot be attained jointly. This paper shows that foreign exchange interventions provide an effective instrument to relax the trilemma. An active reserve policy allows central banks to pursue independent monetary and exchange rate policies when the capital account is liberalised.We use the framework of the portfolio balance model to show that exchange market interventions may substitute for capital controls. Both allow a country to achieve the other two objectives of the trilemma. Our empirical analysis of a large country panel data set covering the period 1970–2010 confirms this theoretical insight: the weighted sum of the three trilemma objectives increases in the degree of foreign exchange market intervention. The capacity to relax the trilemma constraint has increased over time and has been most effective in emerging markets.