Adoption des Politiques de Protection de l'Environnement et performance des Entreprises Camerounaises

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the environmental protection policies of by Cameroonian firms on their performance. It uses the endogenous switching regression technique and propensity scores applied to micro-data from 639 firms in Cameroon. The results show that only 17% of firms adopt these measures, while on average 85% of firms produce solid, gaseous or liquid waste. The results also indicate that the adoption of these environmental protection policies increases operating costs while significantly improving the turnover and the performance of the productive capacity of the company. These increases are 39.11%, 58.6%, and 38.63% for operating costs, turnover and return on productive capacity of the company, respectively. However, firms can also suffer significant losses resulting from the non-adoption of environmental policies. In fact, firms that do not adopt environmental protection policies have their performance reduced by an average of 1.625 percentage points.     

Trauma epidemiology in Puerto Rico: in-hospital morbidity and mortality from 2002 to 2011

This study aimed to describe the distribution of injury mechanisms and to assess the impact of those mechanisms on the morbidity and mortality of trauma. All patients admitted to Puerto Rico Trauma Hospital (2002–2011) for road-traffic collisions (RTCs, 5,371), gunshot wounds (GSWs, 2,946), falls (2,319), pedestrian accidents (1,652), and stab wounds (SWs, 1,073) were selected. Gunshot victims were 1.19 (95%CI: 1.07–1.33) times as likely as road-traffic victims to have an ISS ≥25. Pedestrians were 1.76 (95%CI: 1.49–2.09) times more likely to have a GCS ≤8 than road-traffic victims were. The risk of dying was 2.64 (95%CI: 2.20–3.16) times higher for gunshot victims and 1.51 (95%CI: 1.23–1.86) times higher for pedestrians compared to patients who had had RTCs. Gunshot victims and pedestrians had the worst clinical outcomes. Accordingly, these patients should receive the most aggressive clinical management. Furthermore, it is imperative to develop public health campaigns on trauma prevention.     

Situating the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in the context of global economic governance

The creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)was welcomed by the World Bank but opposed by the Obamaadministration. The paper explains China’s positive relationshipwith the Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment (OECD) in terms of the mission of the Bank, sharedby the OECD, to develop and deepen the global economy. The AIIBand the related Belt and Road initiative promise to do this throughinvestment in infrastructure and connectivity in and around thepoorly integrated Eurasian landmass. But while the current Chineseleadership has supported an inclusive global economy based uponfree trade and supported by multilateral institutions, China’s controlof resources outside the multilateral framework and adherence topractices that challenge liberal principles prompt suspicions thatthese commitments are either disingenuous or anyway subjectto reversal. In itself, therefore, the AIIB provides no conclusiveevidence either way on China’s future course.     

Fixed-Term Contracts and Labor Market Duality in France

The French labor market is segmented between permanent and temporary workers. The second category has difficulty in getting an open-ended contract. This paper aims at depicting workers on short-term contracts and shows the consequences on their professional career are negative and significant. A large part of the wage gap between permanent and temporary workers remains unexplained by observable characteristics. They receive less on-the-job training and their likelihood of obtaining a stable job is lower than 30% after 1 year and a half. They have also a higher probability of being the adjustment variable in case of an economic negative shock. These different findings show the importance of using public policies to encourage transitions from fixed-term to permanent employment and reducing labor-market duality.     

Past price ‘memory’ in the housing market: testing the performance of different spatio-temporal specifications

Recent methodological developments provide a way to incorporate the temporal dimension when accounting for spatial effects in hedonic pricing. Weight matrices should decompose the spatial effects into two distinct components: bidirectional contemporaneous spatial connections; and unidirectional spatio-temporal effects from past transactions. Our iterative estimation approach explicitly analyses the role of time in price determination. The results show that both spatio-temporal components should be included in model specification; past transaction information stops contributing to price determination after eight months; and limited temporal friction is exhibited within this period. These findings highlight the decidedly non-linear temporal patterns of such information effects.     

Nonfinancial Considerations in Eco-Innovation Decisions: The Role of Family Ownership and Reputation Concerns

Societal pressures for greater sustainability can encourage firms to target part of their innovation activities at ecological initiatives (i.e., eco-innovation). Yet, depending on their value function, firms can respond differently to such pressures and exhibit variance in their eco-innovation activities. In this paper, we investigate the idea that a firm’s ownership structure may play a significant role in determining its engagement in eco-innovation. Specifically, we propose that ownership by family blockholders increases the value attached to the company’s reputation and that this, in turn, stimulates higher levels of eco-innovation. In other words, we model the company reputation motive as a key mediator in the relationship between family ownership and firm-level eco-innovation. To account for family firm heterogeneity, we also model the moderating role of owners’ intention to pass the business on to the next family generation (transgenerational intentions) and of the extent to which these owners reside in the firm’s local community (local embeddedness). As theoretical backdrop, our study builds on institutional theory and the mixed gamble logic. To test our hypotheses, we use a large sample of German firms and nonlinear moderated mediation regression analysis. Results reveal that family ownership is positively related to the introduction of eco-innovations by firms, in part because of the stronger emphasis being placed on the company’s reputation. We find that this effect is strongest when the owning-family has transgenerational intentions. As such, this study advances our understanding of firm-level drivers of eco-innovation. In view of the prevalence of family-owned firms and the mounting importance of ecological sustainability, it is valuable to extend knowledge on the contingent and indirect effect of family ownership on eco-innovation.     

When trade unions turn to litigation: ‘getting all the ducks in a row’

Driven by their members' demands and the need to adopt more combative legal strategies in order to oppose the deterioration of working and employment conditions, British trade unions have developed in‐house legal expertise and supported many individual and multiple claims. This article investigates the variation in unions' legal practices and examines their organisational responses to law and the role of compliance professionals in the regulation of employment litigation. It provides a nuanced account of the influence of legal rationality on the framing of union strategies and shows that, under certain conditions, trade unions are able to build multi‐pronged tactics by using litigation as a complement to other forms of action.     

Academic leadership and commercial activities at research institutes: German evidence

This paper focuses on entrepreneurship by academic leaders. With the use of patents, inventions, and spin‐offs to measure commercialization, and directors, research group leaders, and business owners as academic leaders, results, using a sample of more than 2,500 German researchers, show differences across academic leaders and commercialization. Findings for spin‐offs are different from those for patents and inventions. Academic leaders in sciences were more likely to commercialize. Doctoral degrees helped patents by business owners and spin‐offs by group leaders, whereas female business owners and female group leaders faced challenges patenting and inventing, respectively. For business owners, age increased the likelihood of patenting but lowered spin‐offs.     

Information and Knowledge as Antecedents of Consumer Attitudes and Intentions to Buy and Recommend Fair-Trade Products

The authors propose and empirically test a causal model to understand how the availability of fair-trade information and consumer knowledge about this issue affect consumers’ attitudes and intentions toward fair-trade products. The model is built upon the attitude-behavior paradigm and the premises of agency theory. It is tested through structural equation modeling with a sample of 292 Spanish consumers. The findings are that consumers do not have good knowledge about fair trade and that this is significantly determined by the lack of information about this in the market. It is also observed that consumers’ perceptions about the availability of fair-trade information have negative effects on their concern about this issue and that such information as is available is not effective in reducing consumer skepticism. The research represents an extension of previous fair-trade literature because the role of information and communication in improving consumer attitudes and buying intentions has rarely been explored in the case of ethical products.     

Approximate maximum likelihood estimation for stochastic differential equations with random effects in the drift and the diffusion

Consider N independent stochastic processes \((X_i(t), t\in [0,T])\), \(i=1,\ldots , N\), defined by a stochastic differential equation with random effects where the drift term depends linearly on a random vector \(\Phi _i\) and the diffusion coefficient depends on another linear random effect \(\Psi _i\). For these effects, we consider a joint parametric distribution. We propose and study two approximate likelihoods for estimating the parameters of this joint distribution based on discrete observations of the processes on a fixed time interval. Consistent and \(\sqrt{N}\)-asymptotically Gaussian estimators are obtained when both the number of individuals and the number of observations per individual tend to infinity. The estimation methods are investigated on simulated data and show good performances.