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.     

Estimating global bank network connectedness

We use LASSO methods to shrink, select, and estimate the high‐dimensional network linking the publicly traded subset of the world's top 150 banks, 2003–2014. We characterize static network connectedness using full‐sample estimation and dynamic network connectedness using rolling‐window estimation. Statically, we find that global bank equity connectedness has a strong geographic component, whereas country sovereign bond connectedness does not. Dynamically, we find that equity connectedness increases during crises, with clear peaks during the Great Financial Crisis and each wave of the subsequent European Debt Crisis, and with movements coming mostly from changes in cross‐country as opposed to within‐country bank linkages.     

Environmental Policy and GHG Emissions: The Case of Southern Europe

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Secrets to design an effective message on Facebook: an application to a touristic destination based on big data analysis

The objective of this research is to identify which are the key variables for designing a message in a social network that can be used by an advertiser to generate Positive/Negative Engagement. The message’s design variables have been classified into four main groups: (i) Message Tools (presence of text, images, video, labels, applications, interactive games and events calendar or others), (ii) Appropriate Message Structure (length and intelligibility), (iii) Informative Cues (links to the brand, orientation towards the product or the brand, topics relevant to the audience, and a remuneration’s promise) and (iv) Persuasive and Emotional Cues (emotional signals, valence, endorsement and influencer mentions). The focus has been a tourist destination: Brand Spain that is advertised through Facebook. A content analysis was carried out and regression analysis with optimal scaling was used on 180 Spain brand’s publications; 57,626 audience reactions to such publications; and 1361 audience comments on the Brand Spain Official Fan Page. According to our results, from the four blocks of predictive variables, only two of them are useful to predict Positive/Negative Engagement: (i) the use of Message Tools (videos), and (ii) the use of informative cues (relevant topics, links on posts, and post’s orientation towards product).     

Unpredictable times: the extent,characteristics and correlates of insecure hours of work in Britain

This article presents new British evidence that suggests that cutting working hours at short notice is twice as prevalent as zero-hours contracts and triple the number of employees are very anxious about unexpected changes to their hours of work. The pay of these employees tends to be lower, work intensity higher, line management support weaker and the threat of dismissal and job loss greater. In addition, the well-being of these employees is lower and they are less committed to the organisations that employ them. However, the prevalence of insecure working hours is reduced by workplace level employee involvement exercised individually or through collective representation.     

Random Effects Misspecification Can Have Severe Consequences for Random Effects Inference in Linear Mixed Models

There has been considerable and controversial research over the past two decades into how successfully random effects misspecification in mixed models (i.e. assuming normality for the random effects when the true distribution is non‐normal) can be diagnosed and what its impacts are on estimation and inference. However, much of this research has focused on fixed effects inference in generalised linear mixed models. In this article, motivated by the increasing number of applications of mixed models where interest is on the variance components, we study the effects of random effects misspecification on random effects inference in linear mixed models, for which there is considerably less literature. Our findings are surprising and contrary to general belief: for point estimation, maximum likelihood estimation of the variance components under misspecification is consistent, although in finite samples, both the bias and mean squared error can be substantial. For inference, we show through theory and simulation that under misspecification, standard likelihood ratio tests of truly non‐zero variance components can suffer from severely inflated type I errors, and confidence intervals for the variance components can exhibit considerable under coverage. Furthermore, neither of these problems vanish asymptotically with increasing the number of clusters or cluster size. These results have major implications for random effects inference, especially if the true random effects distribution is heavier tailed than the normal. Fortunately, simple graphical and goodness‐of‐fit measures of the random effects predictions appear to have reasonable power at detecting misspecification. We apply linear mixed models to a survey of more than 4 000 high school students within 100 schools and analyse how mathematics achievement scores vary with student attributes and across different schools. The application demonstrates the sensitivity of mixed model inference to the true but unknown random effects distribution.     

Impact of Auditor Report Changes on Financial Reporting Quality and Audit Costs: Evidence from the United Kingdom

While substantial revisions to auditor reporting requirements are being implemented internationally, the impact of these reforms on financial reporting quality is unknown. We exploit the United Kingdom's recent auditor reporting changes and find that the United Kingdom's new reporting regime is associated with an improvement in financial reporting quality as proxied by significant decreases in absolute abnormal accruals and the propensity to just meet or beat analyst forecasts, and a significant increase in earnings response coefficients. As for audit costs, we do not find a significant change in audit fees or audit delay surrounding the implementation of the new reporting regime. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that new auditor reporting requirements are associated with a significant improvement in financial reporting quality without detecting a significant increase in audit costs.     

Using Compulsory Mobility to Identify School Quality and Peer Effects

Education production functions that feature school and student fixed effects are identified using students' school mobility. However, student mobility is driven by factors like parents' labour market shocks and divorce. Movers experience large achievement drops, are more often minority and free meal students, and sort endogenously into peer groups and school types. We exploit an English institutional feature whereby some students must change schools between grades 2 and 3. We find no evidence of endogenous sorting of such compulsory movers across peer groups or school types. Non‐compulsory movers bias school quality estimates downward by as much as 20% of a SD.     

Loss-leader pricing and upgrades

A new theory of loss-leader pricing is provided in which firms advertise low (below cost) prices for certain goods to signal that their other unadvertised (substitute) goods are not priced too high. The theory is applied to the pricing of upgrades. The results contrast with most existing loss-leader theories in that firms make a loss on some consumers (who buy the basic version of the good) and a profit on others (who buy the upgrade).