Why Disability Mainstreaming is Good for Business: A New Narrative

Journal of Business Ethics - In developed economies, powerful legislative and regulatory frameworks, for people with disability (PWD) over the last five decades, have provided major motivation for...     

Winning us with trifles: Adverse selection in the use of philanthropy as insurance

Research Summary: We study the use of corporate philanthropy as a form of reputation insurance, developing a formal model of such insurance to examine how the terms of insurance in equilibrium change under different assumptions about the firm and its stakeholders. We then test the predictions from this model in the U.S. petroleum industry and find that philanthropic donations offer insurance‐like benefits, but are also positively associated with subsequent oil spills—firms that give more, spill more—with this association being stronger for spills that are under firms’ control and in states with low civic capacity. These results are consistent with an adverse selection/moral hazard equilibrium and suggest that the use of philanthropy as reputation insurance may benefit firms at the cost of society. Managerial Summary: Firms that donate to social causes develop a reputation for being socially responsible, and are often given the benefit of doubt when negative information about them comes to light. But are philanthropic firms truly more responsible? We argue that firms that donate more may be more likely to do harm—those that expect to do harm later are likely to give more now, and those that know their reputation protects them may become less careful. Evidence from the U.S. petroleum industry is consistent with this argument, with firms that give more having more subsequent oil spills, but only the type of spills that are under the firm's control, and only in states where the firm faces weaker scrutiny.     

Demand Curves for Stocks Do Slope Down: New Evidence from an Index Weights Adjustment

Weights in the Toronto Stock Exchange 300 index are determined by the market values of the included stocks' public floats. In November 1996, the exchange implemented a previously announced revision of its definition of the public float. This revision, which increased the floats and the index weights of 31 stocks, conveyed no information and had no effect on the legal duties of shareholders. Affected stocks experienced statistically significant excess returns of 2.3 percent during the event week, and no price reversal occurred as trading volume returned to normal levels. These findings support downward sloping demand curves for stocks.     

Value versus Glamour

The fragility of the CAPM has led to a resurgence of research that frequently uses trading strategies based on sorting procedures to uncover relations between firm characteristics (such as “value” or “glamour”) and equity returns. We examine the propensity of these strategies to generate statistically and economically significant profits due to our familiarity with the data. Under plausible assumptions, data snooping can account for up to 50 percent of the in‐sample relations between firm characteristics and returns uncovered using single (one‐way) sorts. The biases can be much larger if we simultaneously condition returns on two (or more) characteristics.     

Green marketing,public policy and managerial strategies

Green marketing subsumes greening products as well as greening firms. In addition to manipulating the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) of the traditional marketing mix, it requires a careful understanding of public policy processes. This paper focuses primarily on promoting products by employing claims about their environmental attributes or about firms that manufacture and/or sell them. Secondarily, it focuses on product and pricing issues. Drawing on multiple literatures, it examines issues such as what needs to be greened (products, systems or processes), why consumers purchase/do not purchase green products and how firms should think about information disclosure strategies on environmental claims. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

A critical 'post' to critical realism

The aim of this paper is to initiate a dialogue between criticalrealism (CR) and what is termed a ‘post'ist perspective’.This amalgamated perspective is composed of relatively recenttransdisciplinary theoretical approaches such as poststructuralism,deconstruction, feminism and postcolonial theory. Such a conversationbetween CR and post'isms within economics has not been attemptedbefore. I shall argue that this uncommon methodological exchangeis worth pursuing, since it allows us to raise important newquestions. After the initial stage-setting, the dialogue proceedsin two parts. In the first part, aspects of CR are evaluatedusing post'ist insights. In the second part, certain underconsideredtheoretical domains in CR are highlighted. I conclude by sketchingthe outline of a possible non-universalist and strategicallyessentialist way of considering knowledge—as a ContextualSocial Political Economy praxis.