Corporate environmental reporting: Are French firms compliant with the Task Force on Climate Financial Disclosures' recommendations?

This article deals with the practices of French corporate environmental disclosure with a focus on climate-related risks. In particular, it aims to analyse the compliance of CAC 40 firms with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (2017), an international initiative made up by Financial Stability Board to enhance financial transparency. On the basis of a content analysis of firms' reference documents spanning 2015–2018, we constructed the Climate Compliance Index (CCI) to evaluate whether firms disclose information on climate risks and opportunities about governance, strategy, risk management and metrics. Our results highlight a gradual increase of the CCI despite disparities across sectors and management areas. The content analysis allows us to develop a set of indicators frequently reported by domain and to identify and define climate risks and opportunities and their financial impacts per sector, which is a first step to improve the disclosure of non-financial information.     

International Market Segmentation and Cross-Export Strategies Development Case Study: Iranian Furniture Industry

ABSTRACT

By developing an international market and significant differences between countries in this regard, segmentation becomes an increasingly important concept in marketing. In this article, the international market of Iranian furniture industry is segmented and cross-exporting strategies are developed to increase the market share of Iranian furniture in each segment. To achieve this, two distance functions are introduced based on correlation between export groups to cluster countries with k-means algorithm. After market segmentation for increasing sales in each segment, cross-exporting strategies are predicted by extracting association rules in each segment based on Apriori algorithm to set export baskets.     

Psychological Capital: Impacts on Asset Management

Drawing together the areas of behavioral finance and positive psychology, the present research sought to investigate whether the psychological capital of investment fund managers is associated with fund performance in a context of financial instability. The theoretical propositions were presented and evaluated empirically through primary data on investment fund manager profiles and secondary data on the cumulative stock fund returns. The results indicate that funds managed by managers with greater resilience and optimism obtained a higher return than the mean profitability in a period of market instability.     

Non‐Reciprocal Trade Preferences and the Role of Compliance Costs in the Agricultural Sector: Exports to the EU

We investigate whether non‐reciprocal preferential regimes granted by the European Union have an impact on agricultural export flows from beneficiary countries while accounting for the costs of compliance that may prevent exporters from taking full advantage of potential benefits. Compliance costs are heterogeneous and difficult to measure. We proxy their influence and specify a model that allows for a different preferential margin impact according to the proxy costs. Adopting the gravity framework and using a sample of 554 lines of agricultural products for 131 developing countries in 2002, we find that the costs of compliance play a role in making the schemes work: the lower the costs, the greater the impact of the preferential margins. Moreover, the estimated margin effect differs between different regimes.     

Crowding,satiation, and saturation: The days of television series' lives

The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: Niches become saturated—reduced in their ability to support products—as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the United States from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New insights into an old issue – examining the influence of tourism on economic growth: evidence from selected small island developing states

This paper uses relatively new heterogeneous panel autoregressive distributed lag cointegration methods to re-examine the long-run equilibrium and Granger causality relationship between tourism and economic growth for the small island developing states (SIDSs). In addition, the study incorporates energy consumption and foreign direct investment (FDI) as alternative growth determinants, during the period 1995–2014. After allowing for the heterogeneous country effect, a positive and statistically significant long-run equilibrium relationship between tourism, energy consumption, FDI, and gross domestic product, with a moderate convergence rate towards the long-run path is confirmed. The panel Granger causality test as proposed by Dumitrescu and Hurlin [(2012). Testing for Granger non-causality in heterogeneous panels. Economic Modelling, 29(4), 1450–1460.] shows bidirectional causality running from tourism to economic growth, from tourism to energy consumption and from energy consumption to economic growth, and unidirectional causality between FDI and tourism, between economic growth and FDI, and between FDI and energy consumption. Our empirical findings provide support for tourism-induced growth, tourism-induced energy consumption, tourism-induced investment, and the energy consumption-economic growth relationship in the case of SIDSs. Our empirical results resonate with the existing findings with major policy implications for the SIDSs.     

End-of-life aircraft treatment in the context of sustainable development,lean management,and global business

Dealing with retired aircraft taking into account the environmental, social, and economic impacts is emerging as an air transportation problem for the near future. The players involved in the problem wish to solve this challenge in a systematic way to benefit from the value extracted from the core activities of the end-of-life (EoL) aircraft treatment, decrease the environmental impacts, and at the same time maximize the social value. This paper proposes a holistic approach to EoL aircraft treatment considering lean management, sustainable development, and the global business environment. An integrated optimization framework is proposed to support decision-making at both the strategic and managerial levels. The flexibility of the framework makes it possible to compare different business models, dismantling strategies, and network structures that impact the efficiency, stability, and leanness of the recovery network. A solution methodology based on the joint application of fuzzy interactive approach and genetic algorithm is introduced. The application perspective and guidelines for pilot study are also provided. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that recovery of EoL aircraft is considered based on three aspects of sustainability, lean, and global business. Therefore, this study provides many promising perspectives in this context to enrich the literature of EoL aircraft as a new aviation industry challenge and opportunity.     

One size does not fit all: Heterogeneous economic impact of integrated pest management practices for mango fruit flies in Kenya—a machine learning approach

Most previous studies evaluating agricultural technology adoption focus on estimating homogeneous average treatment effects across technology adopters. Understanding the heterogeneous effects and drivers of impact heterogeneity should enable interventions to be better targeted to maximise benefits. We apply machine learning using data from a randomised controlled trial to estimate the heterogeneous treatment effect of fruit fly IPM practices (i.e., parasitoids, orchard sanitation, use of food bait, biopesticides, male annihilation technique, and their combinations) in Central Kenya. Results suggest significant heterogeneity in the effect of IPM practices conditioned on household characteristics. The most important covariates explaining differences in treatment effects are wealth, distance to the mango fruit market, age of the household head, labour and experience in mango farming. Results further indicate that those with fewer mango trees benefit more from most IPM practices. Additional analysis across other covariates shows mixed results but generally suggests significant differences between households benefiting the most and those benefiting the least from IPM practices.     

Acreage Response to Whole Farm Income Stabilisation Programmes

This article investigates whether Canadian whole farm programmes, which fall under the WTO category of Green Box subsidies, are truly production neutral. Theory suggests that with non‐constant risk aversion, risky decisions can be influenced by both the level of expected wealth (i.e. the wealth effect) and the variability of wealth (i.e. the insurance effect). Unlike previous approaches, this article is able to extend a framework developed by Chavas and Holt to formally incorporate the insurance effect into the acreage allocation decisions. By applying the theoretical model to acreage data in the Canadian Prairies, the results reveal that the whole farm income stabilisation programmes had large impacts on acreage choices through wealth and insurance effects. From a WTO perspective, the results underline the inherent difficulty in designing programmes that will reduce the risk faced by farmers without altering behaviour.     

Similarity and Competition in the Agri-Food Trade among European Mediterranean Countries

ABSTRACT

Using Eurostat and OECD data on agri-food exports, this article provides a picture of the evolution in the similarity between Italian and other European Mediterranean countries’ exports, before and after the recent financial crisis. Considering different indexes, the similarity is somewhat moderate and does not vary noticeably among the indexes when considering the EU-25 market. By contrast, a strong qualitative dissimilarity is recorded in the North American market. Overall, France and Spain appear more similar to Italy and likely to compete in the same agri-food market segments. The crisis seems associated to a slight modification of the exports structure.