From Fiduciary Duty to Impact Fidelity: Managerial Compensation in Impact Investing

Journal of Business Ethics - Investors with standard monetary preferences will give a fund manager incentives to increase firm profits, which can be achieved through a share in profits via carried...     

Producing drama: a comparison of film tax incentives to alternative uses

Incentive packages are popular tools for economic development. However, development projects are often considered in isolation without an analysis of opportunity costs. In this study, we use an intuitive framework for comparing projects and weigh alternate projects against North Carolina’s film incentive programme. The results indicate that there are substantial differences in the economic impact of the projects we consider in this study. Our results suggest that policy decisions by governments and economic development officials should weigh a potential project against alternative uses in order to optimize the use of incentives.     

Patterns of Investor-State Dispute Settlement Decisions

This paper examines the pattern of settlements, investor wins and state wins in investor-state dispute settlement cases, focusing on the impact of arbitration rules, the resources and experience of the litigants, the type of treaty breach under investigation, and the pattern of state intervention. Logistic regression results show that settlements are more likely when investors do not disclose their allegations publicly, when the host state has been involved in a greater number of past cases, and when the respondent state has a higher control-of-corruption rating. Panel awards to investors are more likely in cases of alleged direct expropriation and less likely for indirect expropriation. Panel decisions favoring the state increase with higher per capita income and rule-of-law ratings.     

Cuba,Trade Dependency and the GATT/WTO System

Cuba sought economic independence from the U.S. and its reliance on sugar exports after its 1959 revolution, but subsequently developed new dependency relationships. In the meantime, Cuba remained inside the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), despite conducting most of its trade outside it. This paper explores the political economy of Cuba’s participation in the GATT and later the World Trade Organization (WTO). Documents show that Cuba sought to use its participation to gain new markets and influence in the developing world. While Cuba has gained little economically from its participation, in recent years it has diversified its exports and trade partners, and its trade interests now align more closely with WTO rules. Economic reforms will be necessary in order for Cuba to benefit.     

The importance of career goal in relation to academic performance: a case study of hospitality management students

ABSTRACT

Hospitality management programs have commonly offered exclusive learning opportunities to talented students in order to keep “brains” in the industry. While academic performance indices are often used to identify “brains” in the education sector, scant research has empirically examined whether “brains” are intended to stay in the industry. This study surveyed 304 hospitality management students and examined the relationships between their career-goal related factors and academic performance. Findings indicate that career goal and positive job valence toward the hospitality industry are significantly related to academic performance. The results of this study contribute to the limited literature on the relationship between career goal and academic performance.     

Effects of scale economies and production seasonality on optimal hub locations: the case of regional fresh produce aggregation

Interest in supporting local and regional food systems is rising and food hubs have attracted considerable attention among Federal, State, and local policymakers. This study explores the problem of endogenous hub location in fresh produce value chains in the Northeastern United States. To overcome limitations in the literature, we incorporate the effects of economies of scale and production seasonality into our models. Three experimental models are designed to examine the effects of alternatively applying yearly, quarterly, and monthly data on model solutions. We explicitly assess how interactions of scale economies and seasonality influence the structure and spatial attributes of an optimal regional produce aggregation hub system. The three models generate marketed different solutions and in many respects they lead to different conclusions about developing local/regional supply chains. The monthly model allows for production seasonality and actual hub operation cycle frequency and thus leads to more efficient hub solution with rich policy implications.     

Determinants of materiality disclosure quality in integrated reporting: Empirical evidence from an international setting

This study examines determinants of materiality disclosure quality (MDQ) in integrated reporting (IR) in an international setting. To this purpose, we constructed a novel, hand‐collected MDQ score in line with the <IR> guiding principles introduced by the International Integrated Reporting Council. On the basis of a cross‐national sample consisting of 359 firm‐year observations between 2013 and 2016, we find that MDQ is positively associated with learning effects, gender diversity, and the assurance of nonfinancial information in the integrated report. On the other hand, we find that IR readability, listing in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and earnings management do not affect MDQ. Our results are robust to different statistical models. We expand on earlier empirical findings on IR disclosure quality and provide valuable insights for research, practice, and standard setting.     

Fifty years of The Financial Review: A bibliometric overview

The Financial Review (FR) is a highly regarded journal publishing original empirical, theoretical, and methodological research in all areas of financial economics. It celebrated its golden jubilee year in 2018. Using bibliometric techniques, we analyze the journal's impact, prominent topics, most prolific authors, and their affiliated institutions and countries. Our analysis also identifies the most often cited articles at different points in the journal's history. Using textual data analytics, we identify the most frequent themes discussed between 1969 and 2018 by decade.     

Managerial Political Behavior in Innovation Portfolio Management: A Sensegiving and Sensebreaking Process

By applying formalized innovation portfolio management systems, firms seek to ensure an alignment of their goals and strategy with their employees' different abilities, actions, and outcomes. However, research indicates that nonrational, political behavior also determines formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. Research on political behavior in respect of innovation portfolio management usually conceptualizes political behavior as a set of self‐serving activities, such as negotiation, bargaining, coalition building, and acquiring power, aimed at protecting, maintaining, or promoting an actor's self‐interest and power. Consequently, extant research tends to focus on political behavior's dysfunctional impacts on decision‐making processes and their subsequent outcomes. This paper challenges this negativity bias by exploring a novel, neutral specification of political behavior and its relation to innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. By conducting an automotive industry case study focusing on the innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes, the paper analyzed the data from 43 interviewees. The conceptual model shows that managers' political capabilities determine their ability to behave politically. According to the results, political behavior comprises the activities that prepare the stage and orchestrate others in order to form a political coalition. Furthermore, results show that political behavior functions as a sensegiving and a sensebreaking process, with managers seeking to shape an innovation project's understanding according to their interests and to influence portfolio decisions. The resulting novel specification of political behavior extends the construct's scope and validity by investigating their functional and dysfunctional aspects, and by indicating that a political sensemaking process complements formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes.     

Competitive cross‐subsidization

Cross‐subsidization arises naturally when firms with different comparative advantages compete for consumers with heterogeneous shopping patterns. Firms then face a form of co‐opetition, as they offer substitutes for one‐stop shoppers and complements for multi‐stop shoppers. When intense competition for one‐stop shoppers drives total prices down to cost, firms subsidize weak products with the profits made on strong products. Moreover, firms have incentives to seek comparative advantages on different products. Finally, banning below‐cost pricing increases firms' profits at the expense of one‐stop shoppers, which calls for a cautious use of below‐cost pricing regulations in competitive markets.