Contextualizing Corporate Political Responsibilities: Neoliberal CSR in Historical Perspective

This article provides a historical contextualization of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and its political role. CSR, we propose, is one form of business–society interactions reflecting a unique ideological framing. To make that argument, we compare contemporary CSR with two historical ideal-types. We explore in turn paternalism in nineteenth century Europe and managerial trusteeship in early twentieth century US. We outline how the political responsibilities of business were constructed, negotiated, and practiced in both cases. This historical contextualization shows that the frontier between economy and polity has always been blurry and shifting and that firms have played a political role for a very long time. It also allows us to show how the nature, extent, and impact of that political role changed through history and co-evolved in particular with shifts in dominant ideologies. Globalization, in that context, is not the driver of the political role of the firm but a moderating phenomenon contributing significantly to the dynamics of this shift. The comparison between paternalism, trusteeship, and contemporary CSR points to what can be seen as functional equivalents—alternative patterns of business–society interactions that each correspond, historically, to unique and distinct ideological frames. We conclude by drawing implications for future theorizing on (political) CSR and stakeholder democracy.     

Defining the frontiers of the firm through property rights allocation: The case of the French retailer cooperative Leclerc

France harbours three large retailer cooperatives which, put together, account for more than a third of the national market share. The largest of these is Leclerc, a leading firm on the French territory. The paper presented here shows how, through the particular distribution of property rights and decision patterns, this cooperative, although hampered by an unstable size, manages to compete with integrated firms. Indeed, the processes that have been developed enable the cooperative to acquire long-term property rights on the specific assets (stores), while remaining in the cooperative framework. The system built is efficient because incentives remain high for members to increase their own performance.     

Anti-competitive effects of resale-below-cost laws

We show that resale-below-cost laws enable producers to impose industrywide price-floors to retailers. This mechanism suppresses downstream competition but also dampens upstream competition, leading to higher prices. Price-floor may be more profitable for producers than resale price maintenance contracts and, while resale price maintenance may have ambiguous effect on welfare, price-floors always harm welfare. Retailers' buyer power appears as a key element for a price-floor to work out.     

The shape of hiring and separation costs in France

In this article, we estimate the structure of costs of hiring, terminating, and retiring employees in France. We use a representative panel data set of French establishments that contains direct measures of these various costs as well as measures of entries and exits for the years 1992 and 1996.First, we show that our panel data source is able to reproduce results obtained by Abowd and Kramarz (2003) when we use the cross-section dimension. Our estimates show that collective terminations are much more expensive than individual terminations: legislation, namely the requirement to set up a “social plan” in case of collective terminations, magnifies firing costs. Collective terminations entail very large fixed costs. Termination costs are essentially linear in the number of terminated workers, with collective terminations being much more expensive. The costs of retirement are concave in the number of retired workers with a fixed cost component which is smaller than the one estimated for terminations, and quite smaller than that obtained by Abowd and Kramarz (2003). Finally, we find that hiring costs are small and seem only present when hiring on CDI; costs of hiring on short-term contracts are almost zero. Finally, the fixed (firm-specific) component of hiring costs is very small.     

Spatial fiscal interactions among French municipalities within inter-municipal groups

Based on a unique data set of French municipalities and a large number of budgetary variables, we estimate the extent of spatial fiscal interaction among the 33,484 French municipalities in 2008 by accounting for inter-municipal cooperation. Using a spatial autoregressive model with inter-municipal group fixed effects, we show that spatial interactions among French municipalities are inflated by correlated effects that affect similarly municipalities that cooperate together. Removing these confounding effects leads to considerably smaller positive spatial interactions for tax decisions and even negative ones for capital expenditures. In addition, we observe a clear distinction between complementary choices on current budget items and substitutable choices on capital budget items.     

Chamberlin without differentiation: Soft capacity constrained price competition with free entry

We show that the long-term properties of price and cost in Chamberlin's monopolistic competition model can be reproduced with a soft capacity constrained price competition oligopoly model for a homogeneous good with free entry.