The colors of investors’ money: The role of institutional investors around the world

We study the role of institutional investors around the world using a comprehensive data set of equity holdings from 27 countries. We find that all institutional investors have a strong preference for the stock of large firms and firms with good governance, while foreign institutions tend to overweight firms that are cross-listed in the U.S. and members of the Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index. Firms with higher ownership by foreign and independent institutions have higher firm valuations, better operating performance, and lower capital expenditures. Our results indicate that foreign and independent institutions, with potentially fewer business ties to firms, are involved in monitoring corporations worldwide.     

Conditional Cash Transfers, Schooling, and Child Labor: Micro-Simulating Brazil's Bolsa Escola Program

A growing number of developing economies are providing cashtransfers to poor people that require certain behaviors on theirpart, such as attending school or regularly visiting healthcare facilities. A simple ex ante methodology is proposed forevaluating such programs and used to assess the Bolsa Escolaprogram in Brazil. The results suggest that about 60 percentof poor 10- to 15-year-olds not in school enroll in responseto the program. The program reduces the incidence of povertyby only a little more than one percentage point, however, andthe Gini coefficient falls just half a point. Results are betterfor measures more sensitive to the bottom of the distribution,but the effect is never large.     

Calm After the Storms: Income Distribution and Welfare in Chile, 1987-94

After rising during most—but not all—of the 1960–85period, inequality in Chile seems to have stabilized since around1987. Following the stormy period of economic and politicalreforms of the 1970s and 1980s, no statistically significantLorenz dominance results could be detected since 1987. Scalarmeasures of inequality confirm this picture of stability, butsuggest a slight change in the shape of the density function,with some compression at the bottom being "compensated for"by a stretching at the top. As inequality remained broadly stable,sustained economic growth led to substantial welfare improvementsand poverty reduction, according to a range of measures andwith respect to three different poverty lines. Poverty mixedstochastic dominance tests confirm this result. All of thesefindings are robust to different choices of equivalence scales.     

I do not own a car any more: An analysis of possessions’ disposal and changes in consumers’ identities

This research aims to understand the process of cars' disposal, its context, its influences and its impacts on the meanings for consumers and their identities, as well as the new behaviours of these consumers when living without their car(s). We conducted, analysed and interpreted 20 in‐depth interviews with consumers that had previously owned at least one car and had no financial reasons for disposing of their car(s), but had decided to do it, and started to live without them, adopting alternative methods of transportation. Our findings show that these consumers faced a complicated process regarding the disposal of their car(s) but, due to the changes in their circumstances, they re‐signified relevant concepts that were connected to the ownership of a car: Their perception of freedom, comfort, safety and status changed during and after the disposal of their car(s). We also noticed that there were implications in terms of changes in their attitudes and behaviour as both citizens and consumers. As a contribution to the literature, our findings indicate that the re‐signifying of concepts related to possession of the object as well as changes in attitudes and behaviours that consumers undergo in the postdisposal stage, must be included in the model proposed for evaluating consumer behaviour in product disposal.     

Employee brand engagement on social media: Managing optimism and commonality

This article considers how employees engage with B2B firms on social media, a topic that is largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement on social media, we identify two key drivers of employee brand engagement using the content analysis tool DICTION—namely, optimism and commonality. Employees of top-ranked and -rated firms express higher levels of optimism and commonality in their reviews of their employers on social media than do their counterparts in bottom-ranked and -rated firms. This permits the construction of a 2 × 2 matrix that allows managers to diagnose strategies for increasing or improving employee brand engagement. This creates four different kinds of employee brand engagement situations, and offers human resources and marketing managers different strategies in each case. We demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can shed new light on the way stakeholders engage with brands.     

Relevance of corruption on the effect of public health expenditure and taxation on economic growth

We investigate whether corruption distorts the positive effect of public health expenditure and taxation on growth through panel data analysis of 75 developing countries for the period from 1995 to 2014. The findings indicate that, although both public health expenditure and taxation can increase economic growth, in countries with more corrupt governments this effect is reduced.     

Language ability and entrepreneurship education: Necessary skills for Europe’s start-ups?

Language ability and entrepreneurial education are seen as essential resources for start-ups operating in intensified landscapes of internationalisation and globalisation. Deemed as the necessary skills for corporate effectiveness vis-à-vis rivals, this paper responds to calls for increased understandings of cultural components as vital to entrepreneurship and the product of institutional forces. Thus, it explores (a) the impact language ability has on start-up expansion; (b) the perceptions of international relations as based on language ability as a tool for cross-cultural communication; and (c) the role of educational context from the entrepreneurs’ perspective. Based on interviews from European online start-ups across three discrete contexts—Finland, Portugal and Sweden—it concludes that contextual trends regarding language and education are founded upon the cultural-cognitive and normative pillars of institutionalisation. Further, by combining actor-context perspectives, it poses that language ability and education are resources borne from the domestic environment which positively moderate the start-up’s international success. Nevertheless, the notion of learnt entrepreneurship remains contested. Taken together, this study contributes by offering deeper insight into the role of context on entrepreneurial tendencies by combining resource and institutional perspectives.     

Optimal fiscal policy in sunspot‐driven oligopolistic economies

Economies with oligopolistic markets are prone to inefficient sunspot fluctuations triggered by autonomous changes in firms equilibrium conjectures. A well‐designed taxation‐subsidization scheme can eliminate these fluctuations by coordinating firms in each sector on a single equilibrium, left unaffected. The optimal taxation scheme must select the number of active firms that makes the best trade‐off (in terms of consumer welfare) between the markup and the scale inefficiency distortions. Implementing such stabilization policy leads to significant welfare gains, attributable to an “efficient stabilization effect,” typically ignored in usual computations of the welfare costs of fluctuations.     

Working sick and out of sorts: a cross-cultural approach on presenteeism climate,organizational justice and work–family conflict*

Abstract

A climate of presenteeism has important effects on employee well-being and the organization itself. Our study, based on surveys of health sector employees in six different countries (Brazil, Ecuador, Lebanon, Portugal, Russia and Spain) examines whether organizational justice plays a mediating role in the relationship between a presenteeism climate in the organization and work–family conflict (WFC). Our results indicate that the perception of organizational justice and the presenteeism climate do influence WFC. Moreover, higher levels of WFC were found in non-Latin countries. This study contributes to the work attendance and life balance field by providing cross-cultural empirical evidence corroborating the effect of justice and presenteeism climate on the WFC.     

Memberships Levels in U. S. Private Clubs During the 2008–2010 Economic Downturn

This study measured membership changes in private clubs in the United States during the economic downturn from 2008 to 2010. Specifically examined were the changes clubs experienced with their number of members, waiting lists, and attrition rates. A letter was sent via e-mail to the same 1,000 private clubs that were sent a survey in a similar study conducted by Ferreira and Gustafson (2006 Ferreira, R. R. and Gustafson, C. M. 2006. Declining memberships during an economic downturn in U.S. private clubs. International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration, 7(2/3): 3–18. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) The managers of these clubs were members of the Club Managers Association of America. The majority of respondents managed country clubs and member-owned clubs, representing different areas of the United States. An overall response rate of 53% was achieved. Most clubs experienced a decrease in the overall number of members and an increase in annual attrition rate. Fewer clubs reported having a waiting list of members wanting to join. The clubs without waiting lists reported a larger number of membership openings in their clubs. The results of this study suggest the levels of memberships in many private clubs are heavily influenced by economic conditions. An implication from this study is that clubs need to implement membership development strategies during economic downturns because of the decline in the number of members, candidates proposed, and waiting lists during these periods.