Socio‐economic transitions and everyday life changes in the rural world: Pyrenean households and their contemporary economic history

This article focuses on understanding rural life and how agrarian everyday life changes as a consequence of the radical socio‐economic transformations that, across the world, have accompanied rural communities in their transition from economies of subsistence to industrial production, and, in some areas, from there to providers of service to the tourism‐oriented leisure economy. In the last century in the Alt Urgell District (Spanish Pyrenees), many communities went from a production model based on subsistence farming and livestock breeding first to a specialization in milk production and later to tourism. The industrialization of milk production, the radical transformation of the scale of their operations, and the monetization of life transformed the identity and structure of these communities. The subsequent transformation of many of these farms to accommodate the leisure industry changed the shape of these households again. This paper reflects on how science, governance, commodification, and technology played a role on the transformation of the rural mountain areas, their people, and their everyday life.     

A mixed-mode sensitive research on cannabis use and sexual addiction: improving self-reporting by means of indirect questioning techniques

In this article, we describe the methods employed and the results obtained from a mixed-mode “sensitive research” conducted in Spain to estimate certain aspects concerning patterns of cannabis consumption and sexual addiction among university students. Three different data-collection methods are considered and compared: direct questioning, randomized response technique and item sum technique. It is shown that posing direct questions to obtain sensitive data produces significantly lower estimates of the surveyed characteristics than do indirect questioning methods. From the analysis, it emerges that male students seem to be more affected by sex addiction than female students while for cannabis consumption there is no evidence of a predominant gender effect.     

CONTINUOUS PREFERENCE ORDERINGS REPRESENTABLE BY UTILITY FUNCTIONS

This paper surveys the conditions under which it is possible to represent a continuous preference ordering using utility functions. We start with a historical perspective on the notions of utility and preferences, continue by defining the mathematical concepts employed in this literature, and then list several key contributions to the topic of representability. These contributions concern both the preference orderings and the spaces where they are defined. For any continuous preference ordering, we show the need for separability and the sufficiency of connectedness and separability, or second countability, of the space where it is defined. We emphasize the need for separability by showing that in any nonseparable metric space, there are continuous preference orderings without utility representation. However, by reinforcing connectedness, we show that countably boundedness of the preference ordering is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a (continuous) utility representation. Finally, we discuss the special case of strictly monotonic preferences.     

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.     

Mapping global sustainability report scoring: a detailed analysis of Europe and Asia

This study maps the General Reporting Initiative (GRI) relations for a set of global enterprises. Enterprise interrelationships are built using the Mutual Information (MI) of the data reported by enterprises. From the MI topology, we describe interrelationships among the enterprises using chord diagrams to represent the inter- and intra-connectivity between geographical regions and economic sectors globally, by continent and country. Detailed maps are presented for European and Asian regions/sectors, including the relationship between Europe and Asia’s top reporting countries. Our findings reinforce previous research regarding the role of Europe as a driver of sustainability and its influence worldwide. We also determined that Spain is a major player in Europe and that Northern Europe does not have the assumed leading role mentioned in related studies. Eastern Asia is, by far, the leader of the region, and the GRI maps demonstrate the preponderant role of China in the region and the minimal role of India. MI topology maps outline the behavior of the economic sectors, for all the studied regions. Furthermore, a measure that relates the inter- to intra-connections is presented to describe the internal an external relationships among regions/sectors.     

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WILLINGNESS OF COMPANIES TO INVEST AFTER THE FINANCIAL CRISIS? EVIDENCE FROM LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES

In this article we investigate the changes in corporate investment dynamics in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Using firm-level data from six Latin American countries from 2002 to 2015, we show that firms are less constrained and have greater ability to invest after the crisis. However, the willingness of firms to invest optimally is reduced. This is supported by strong evidence that during the postcrisis period investment–cash flow sensitivity disappears, investment-q sensitivity increases, and the estimated speeds of adjustment for target investment decrease. Moreover, after the crisis, firms notably increase their efforts to attain optimal cash and leverage levels. Our analysis implies that firms may not always be willing to invest optimally. The willingness to invest optimally appears to be time variant and moves together with the dynamics of cash and leverage policies, albeit in opposite directions.     

A Geometrical Interpretation of Collinearity: A Natural Way to Justify Ridge Regression and Its Anomalies

Justifying ridge regression from a geometrical perspective is one of the main contributions of this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this question has not been treated previously. This paper shows that ridge regression is a particular case of raising procedures that provide greater flexibility by transforming the matrix X associated with the model. Thus, raising procedures, based on a geometrical idea of the vectorial space associated with the columns of matrix X , lead naturally to ridge regression and justify the presence of the well-known constant k on the main diagonal of matrix X ^′ X . This paper also analyses and compares different alternatives to raising with respect to collinearity mitigation. The results are illustrated with an empirical application.     

Relation between social-environmental responsibility and performance in hotel firms

In the present work we first theoretically contextualise the importance of social and environmental responsibility in the firm, at the same time analysing the relation between this variable and firm performance, for which the literature provides contradictory results. In the hotel sector this controversy is particularly relevant, given the intense relations and dependencies that this industry has with its environmental context. Subsequently, we conduct an empirical study centring on the Spanish hotel sector, whose findings point to a strong and positive relation between both variables.