The role of institutional investors in propagating the 2007 financial crisis in Southern Europe

The 2007 financial crisis has affected Southern European companies (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Greek) more than others. From a Minskyan bubble-burst cycle perspective (Minsky, 1986), we study the relation between institutional ownership structure and corporate risk-taking for a sample of non-financial listed companies from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece for the period 2001–2014. Our results suggest that the financial deregulation process, that lead to the financialization of the world economy before the 2007 financial crisis and the favourable macroeconomic scenario encouraged corporate risk-taking in those countries. We also find that the lack of effective control mechanisms provided an incentive for investment funds to assume a proactive role, encouraging companies to overinvest in risky projects.     

On Economic Space notion

This paper introduces Economic Space notion to expand capacity for economic and financial modeling. Introduction of Economic Space allows defining economic variables as functions of time and coordinates and opens the way for treating economic and financial relations similar to mathematical physics equations. Economic Space allows study of economic models on discreet and continuous spaces with different dimensions. The number of risks measured simultaneously determines Economic Space dimension. We present examples of modeling on Economic Space: option pricing and derivation of Black–Scholes–Merton equation on n-dimensional Economic Space; Markov processes and derivation of Fokker–Plank Equations. Usage of Economic Space allows construing approximations of Economics and Finance similar to physical kinetics and hydrodynamics and derives Wave Equations for Economic and Financial variables.     

Political structure as a legacy of indirect colonial rule: Bargaining between national governments and rural elites in Africa

Alliances between national governments and rural elites are observed in postcolonial Africa. Governments rely on rural elites to control rural regions, guaranteeing them a degree of authority and revenue in return. This paper provides a model to analyze the forging of such alliances. Without cooperation between the national government and rural elite, the power of the two competing authorities to compel farmers’ obedience determines the revenue of the government extracted from cash crop production. Hence, with a powerful rural elite, the national government has a weak bargaining position and agrees to a large transfer to the rural elite. Furthermore, the government’s capacity to compel rural residents’ obedience is endogenously determined by the level of cash crop production and the power of rural elites. Because indirect colonial rule is a significant source of the elite control over residents in rural areas, cross-regional variations in colonial policies lead to various forms of postcolonial alliances between African national governments and rural elites.     

Is green growth relevant for poor economies?

To be relevant to developing countries, green growth must be reconciled with the two key structural features of natural resource use and poverty in these countries. First, primary products account for the majority of their export earnings, and they are unable to diversify from primary production. Second, many economies have a substantial share of their rural population located on less favored agricultural land and in remote areas, thus encouraging “geographic” poverty traps. If green growth is to be a catalyst for economy-wide transformation and poverty alleviation in developing countries, then it must be accompanied by policies aimed directly at overcoming these two structural features. Policies and reforms should foster forward and backward linkages of primary production, enhance its integration with the rest of the economy, and improve opportunities for innovation and knowledge spillovers. Rural poverty, especially the persistent concentration of the rural poor on less favored agricultural lands and in remote areas, needs to be addressed by additional targeted policies and investments, and where necessary, policies to promote rural-urban migration.     

Dark side of reciprocity norm: Ethical compromise in business exchanges

In this research, we investigated the impact of the reciprocity norm on ethical compromise likelihood in managerial decision-making. We developed the ‘reciprocity norm-ethical compromise thesis’, postulating that the norm of reciprocity is positively related to ethical compromises in business exchanges. Specifically, the norm of reciprocity, potentially through its moral and instrumental forces, compels a party in a reciprocal exchange relationship to advocate an ethically questionable or even unacceptable practice requested by the other party in the relationship. We also examined the role of environmental uncertainty and exchange partner's retaliatory power status as boundary conditions of the reciprocity norm-ethical compromise relationship, in addition to trust and perceived future gain opportunity in the relationships as potential mediating mechanisms of the reciprocity norm-ethical compromise relationship. The results of two experiments with business professionals have yielded support for the interaction effects of this norm and its boundary conditions on the likelihood of ethical compromise. In addition, the results yielded support for perceived future gain opportunity in exchange relationships as an instrumental mechanism linking the reciprocity norm to ethical compromises in business exchanges. Finally, the experimental results did not support the notion of trust as a moral mechanism that links the reciprocity norm to ethical compromises in business exchanges.     

A strategic planning model for the railway system accident rescue problem

The present study examines the location of emergency rescue problems for urban ambulance and railway emergency systems. The proposed model considers probabilistic rescue demand, independent busy fractions of ambulances, and the corresponding risk levels in railway segments. We formulate the proposed model using fuzzy multi-objective programming and solve it using a generic algorithm and a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II. Computation results are analyzed by applying the model to a real-world Taiwan railway system. Analytical results demonstrate that a proper adjustment of the rescue resource location improves rescue effectiveness for railway rescue and urban medical service demand.     

The composite iteration algorithm for finding efficient and financially fair risk-sharing rules

We consider the problem of finding an efficient and fair ex-ante rule for division of an uncertain monetary outcome among a finite number of von Neumann–Morgenstern agents. Efficiency is understood here, as usual, in the sense of Pareto efficiency subject to the feasibility constraint. Fairness is defined as financial fairness with respect to a predetermined pricing functional. We show that efficient and financially fair allocation rules are in one-to-one correspondence with positive eigenvectors of a nonlinear homogeneous and monotone mapping associated to the risk sharing problem. We establish relevant properties of this mapping. On the basis of this, we obtain a proof of existence and uniqueness of solutions via nonlinear Perron–Frobenius theory, as well as a proof of global convergence of the natural iterative algorithm. We argue that this algorithm is computationally attractive, and discuss its rate of convergence.     

Pattern mining in tourist attraction visits through association rule learning on Bluetooth tracking data: A case study of Ghent,Belgium

The rapid evolution of information and positioning technologies, and their increasing adoption in tourism management practices allows for new and challenging research avenues. This paper presents an empirical case study on the mining of association rules in tourist attraction visits, registered for 15 days by the Bluetooth tracking methodology. This way, this paper aims to be a methodological contribution to the field of spatiotemporal tourism behavior research by demonstrating the potential of ad-hoc sensing networks in the non-participatory measurement of small-scale movements. An extensive filtering procedure is followed by an exploratory analysis, analyzing the discovered associations for different visitor segments and additionally visualizing them in ‘visit pattern maps’. Despite the limited duration of the tracking period, we were able to discover interesting associations and further identified a tendency of visitors to rarely combine visits in the center with visits outside of the city center. We conclude by discussing both the potential of the employed methodology as well as its further issues.     

The impact of firm-provided training on productivity,wages, and transition to regular employment for workers in flexible arrangements

This paper examines the incidence and density of firm-provided training for workers in flexible work arrangements – i.e., non-regular employees who are working part-time or with fixed-term employment contracts – and analyzes the effect of this training on skills, productivity, and wage growth, using a unique survey of Japanese workers. Among non-regular employees, those who work on a full-time basis are found to receive a higher density of both on-the-job training (OJT) and off-the-job training (Off-JT). Participation in firm-provided training is shown to improve job skills and productivity, but does not appear to impact the wage growth of non-regular workers. However, training participation is shown to make the transition from non-regular to regular employment in the current occupation more likely, enhancing the probability of future wage increases.