The effect of cash holdings on firm performance in large Italian companies

This paper examines the relationship between cash holdings and performance in Italy over 36 years. Specifically, in light of the presence of conflicting evidence concerning the worth of cash stock, which could lead to a positive effect rather than a negative one, the role of moderating factors that can shape the magnitude of this relationship is investigated. The results show that the value of cash holdings is affected by firm‐specific characteristics, as well as factors related to the institutional context. Although other studies have analyzed moderators one at a time, this is the first work to consider how they jointly work. When the moderators are considered together, some of them become no longer statistically significant while others become even more economically and statistically relevant.     

Higher education and stakeholders’ donations: successful civic crowdfunding in an Italian university

Can civic crowdfunding be used to improve the structures and services offered by public universities? Are stakeholders willing to make donations to such projects? This paper answers these questions by analysing a successful civic crowdfunding project in an Italian university. Stakeholders were found to be willing to engage in crowdfunding and make donations. The key to success is to ensure effective communication and to draw on feelings of belonging to the institution.     

EXTREME VALUE THEORY IN FINANCE: A SURVEY

Extreme value theory is concerned with the study of the asymptotic distribution of extreme events, that is to say events which are rare in frequency and huge in magnitude with respect to the majority of observations. Statistical methods derived from it have been employed increasingly in finance, especially for risk measurement. This paper surveys some of those main applications, namely for testing different distributional assumptions for the data, for Value‐at‐Risk and Expected Shortfall calculations, for asset allocation under safety‐first type constraints, and for the study of contagion and dependence across markets under conditions of stress.     

Modeling innovative points of sales through virtual and immersive technologies

This study examines the benefits of virtual and augmented reality for retailing in order to propose a theoretical framework for the development of innovative and efficient stores. The purpose is to investigate the relevance of advanced technologies in the points of sale from user’s standpoint for deeply understanding their influence on consumer’s perception. The study gathers data from 150 respondents for investigating the influence on consumers in terms of ease of use, enjoyment and store perception. To achieve this goal, the research focuses on Structural Equation Model (SEM) approach to map the correlations among variables.The results illustrate consumer’s response towards the introduction of virtual and immersive technologies in traditional points of sales. Specifically, they are prompted to use these stores, which became more attractive and appealing.Managerial and marketing implications are also theoretically discussed, showing how an immersive store might represent the starting point for further advances in retailing.     

Corporate social responsibility and earnings forecasting unbiasedness

We investigate the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and I/B/E/S analysts’ earnings per share (EPS) forecasts using a large sample of US firms for 1992–2011. Based on literature findings, we decompose the CSR effect into four factors: accounting opacity, corporate governance, stakeholder risk, and overinvestment. We find that all of them significantly affect both the absolute forecast error on EPS and its standard deviation controlling for forecast horizon; number of analysts and forecasts; and year, industry, and broker house effects. Consistently with our ex ante hypotheses, overinvestment, stakeholder risk, and accounting opacity have a positive effect, increasing both dependent variables, while corporate governance quality has a negative effect. A crucial aspect of our findings is that high CSR quality in terms of the four factors (i.e., accounting transparency, high corporate governance quality, stakeholder risk mitigation, and absence of overinvestment) contributes to making earnings forecasts unbiased as unbiasedness is generally met in the subsample of the Top CSR quality companies and markedly violated in the subsample of the Bottom CSR companies. We also document that overinvestment and stakeholder risk are sufficient to produce this effect.     

Public sector motivation and development failures

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the relationship between public sector motivation and development. In the model the public sector produces a public good and workers are heterogeneous in terms of public sector motivation (PSM). Wages in the private sector increase with the quality of the public good. In this context, public sector wage premia (PSWP) have two opposite effects: low PSWP helps screen workers with PSM into the public sector, while high PSWP helps motivate workers to be honest. Raising PSWP may not improve the quality of governance and multiple equilibria might arise. The model highlights that the relative importance of workers selection and provision of ”on the job” incentives in the public sector varies in systematic ways with wages in the private sector. We provide anecdotal and original empirical evidence consistent with the theoretical predictions and discuss some policy implications for public sector reforms in developing countries.     

Tolerance for uncertainty and the growth of informationally opaque industries

Hofstede's [Hofstede, Geert H. 1980. Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.] cross-country psychological survey of IBM employees finds that some countries (societies) are systematically less tolerant of uncertainty, while uncertainty-tolerance is shown by some theoretic models to be essential to the growth of emerging sectors about which less is known. This paper first uses Durnev, Morck, and Yeung's [Durnev, Art, Morck, Randall, and Yeung, Bernard. 2004. Value-enhancing capital budgeting and firm-specific stock return variation. The Journal of Finance. 59(1): 65–105.] methodology to identify these informationally opaque industries. The hypothesis is then made that countries characterized by high uncertainty aversion (measured by Hofstede's indicator, and two other alternative indicators) will grow disproportionately slower in industrial sectors where information is less available. Using the Rajan and Zingales [Rajan, Raghuram G. and Zingales, Luigi. 1998. Financial Dependence and Growth. American Economic Review. Vol. 88(3): 559–586.] “difference-in-differences” methodology, which is relatively free from the endogeneity problem, the study provides robust evidence of such an industrial growth pattern in 34 countries and 36 manufacturing industries. It also shows that national uncertainty aversion is not driven by underdevelopment of financial sector, inadaptability of civil law systems, lower level of economic or human capital development, labor market inflexibility, or any of many other institutional factors. The results remain robust when religious (Catholic vs. Protestant) composition is used as an instrumental variable for national uncertainty aversion. The international evidence presented helps explain why some countries are slower in embracing “new” (vs. traditional) industries.     

Distance and trade: Disentangling unfamiliarity effects and transport cost effects

This paper provides evidence supporting Grossman's (Comments on Alan V. Deardorff, Determinants of bilateral trade: Does gravity work in a neoclassical world?. In: Jeffrey A. Frankel (Ed.), The regionalization of the world economy. Chicago: University of Chicago for NBER; 1996) claim that not only transport costs but also unfamiliarity can explain the negative correlation between geographic distances and bilateral trade volumes. A gravity model that controls for as many natural causes of trade as possible reveals that countries high in uncertainty-aversion (based on Hofstede's survey) export disproportionately less to distant countries (with which they are presumably less familiar). More important, this result is mainly driven by differentiated products, not by products with international organized exchanges or with reference prices. For transport costs alone to explain such a trade pattern, one would have to assume that distance-related ad valorem transport costs are higher when a trade route originates from a high uncertainty-aversion country, which is unlikely. This trade pattern is easy to explain, however, if one accepts that geographic distance is a proxy for unfamiliarity and that exporters in high uncertainty-aversion countries are more sensitive to informational ambiguity. A further result is that high uncertainty-aversion countries trade less and thus grow poorer in the long run, which suggests that cultural factors are as important as geographic ones in determining trade openness and prosperity.     

What drives organic food consumption in Lebanon?

To increase the sparse knowledge about what drives organic food consumers in developing markets, Lebanese consumers' reasons and motives for buying organic food are studied in the framework of means‐end chain theory. A sample of N = 180 Lebanese consumers was interviewed in several retail outlets using a hard laddering questionnaire. The data were subjected to frequency analysis, cluster analysis, and structural equation modelling. Hierarchal value maps constructed from the laddering interviews revealed that “quality of life,” “pleasure,” and “peace of mind” are the main values driving organic food consumption in Lebanon. Frequent organic consumers displayed higher concern for their family's health and for the environment, whereas occasional organic consumers cared more about their own pleasure and were more likely to perceive organic food as a traditional and nostalgic product. Structural equation modelling revealed that “care for nature” and “care for children's health” significantly affect consumers' (self‐reported) purchasing behaviour. The found means‐end chains are a useful basis for marketing campaigns for organic food products in the Lebanese market. One focus of marketing campaigns should be raising consumers' awareness on the environmental benefits of organic production and the fact that it does not allow the use of harmful chemical products.     

A tale of minorities: evidence on religious ethics and entrepreneurship

Does Protestantism favour entrepreneurship more than Catholicism does? We provide a novel way to answer this question by comparing Protestant and Catholic minorities using Swiss census data. Exploiting the strong adhesion of religious minorities to their denomination’ ethical principles and the historical determination of the geographical distribution of denominations across Swiss cantons, we find that Protestantism is associated with a significantly higher propensity for entrepreneurship. The estimated difference ranges between 1.5 and 3.2 % points, it is larger the smaller the size of the religious minority, it is mainly driven by prime age male entrepreneurs and it stands up to a number of robustness checks. No effects are found when comparing religious majorities, suggesting that the implications of religious ethical norms on economic outcomes emerge only when such norms are fully internalized.