Does corporate social responsibility make over-educated workers more productive?

This article provides first evidence on whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) influences the productivity effects of over-education. By relying on detailed Belgian-linked employer–employee panel data covering the period 1999–2010, our empirical results exhibit a positive and significant impact of over-education on firm productivity. Moreover, they suggest that the effect of over-education is positively enhanced when the firm implements a CSR process, especially when it aims to have: (i) a good match between job requirements and workers’ educational level, (ii) a diverse workforce in terms of gender and age, and (iii) a long-term relationship with its workers. When focussing on required education and over-education, the results suggest that CSR, besides representing an innovative and proactive approach for the firms’ stakeholders, may also be beneficial for the firm itself through a bigger increase in productivity for each additional year of required education or over-education.     

Does financial development reduce corruption?

We estimate the impact of bank credit to the private sector on corruption, using indicators of a country’s legal origin as instrumental variables to assess causality. We find that bank credit to the private sector reduces corruption, with the result robust to instrumenting for bank credit and for many different controls.     

Does financial globalization promote risk sharing?

In theory, one of the main benefits of financial globalization is that it should allow for more efficient international risk sharing. In this paper, we provide an empirical evaluation of the patterns of risk sharing among different groups of countries and examine how international financial integration has affected the evolution of these patterns. Using a variety of empirical techniques, we conclude that there is at best a modest degree of international risk sharing, and certainly nowhere near the levels predicted by theory. In addition, only industrial countries have attained better risk sharing outcomes during the recent period of globalization. Developing countries have, by and large, been shut out of this benefit. Even emerging market economies, many of which have reduced capital controls and all of which have witnessed large increases in cross-border capital flows, have seen little change in their ability to share risk. We find that the composition of flows may help explain why emerging markets have not been able to realize this presumed benefit of financial globalization. In particular, our results suggest that portfolio debt, which had dominated the external liability stocks of most emerging markets until recently, is not conducive to risk sharing.     

Can country trade flows benefit from improved corporate social responsibility ratings?

We set out in this study to examine the effects of country ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) ratings on the international trade flows of 28 countries. Drawing on categorization theory, we examine whether country CSR engagement is a categorizing factor capable of influencing the overall process of categorization. Based upon a two-stage approach, comprising of gravity and panel Tobit models, we find that a country's CSR rating has significantly positive effects on the country's international trade flows. When the CSR rating of a country is higher than that of another rival trading country, this will have significantly positive effects on the bilateral trade flows between the two countries.     

Can tax regulations moderate revenue diversification and reduce financial distress in nonprofit organizations?

As a result of policies to reduce public deficit, nonprofit organizations have been forced to turn to charitable donations in order to diversify their revenue structure and thus reduce their levels of financial distress. Public administrations have supported this process through tax mechanisms designed to provide a legal framework that will encourage private philanthropy. Our aim is to analyse the role of nonprofit tax regulations in moderating the influence of revenue diversification on insolvency risk. To this end, we drew a sample of 406 nonprofit organizations located in Aragon and Navarre, two European regions with different tax regulations, for the period 2008–2018. Our results reveal that some tax regime requirements, such as the organizational purpose, minimum initial endowment, engagement in commercial activity, and accountability and monitoring standards, have a positive impact on revenue diversification and the reduction of financial distress and vulnerability. However, we also detect differences between regions which suggest that tax harmonization for nonprofit organizations remains a challenge.     

Are corporate social responsibility and advertising complements or substitutes in producing firm reputation?

A firm’s reputation is one of the critical drivers of success, and two of the key levers firms use to influence their perceived reputation are corporate social responsibility (CSR) and advertising. The relationship between CSR and advertising is important because whether they are complements or substitutes has different implications for how firms use these activities. Using a unique panel dataset of US-listed companies between 2005 and 2014, we estimate flexible production functions to identify whether CSR and advertising act as complements or substitutes in the production of firm reputation. A secondary motivation of this paper is to examine whether the use of different stakeholder ratings of firm reputation matters. We find evidence consistent with advertising and CSR being substitutes toward the production of firm reputation. Our results also show that advertising, own-firm CSR activities, and industry-level CSR spillovers contribute positively to firm reputation. Lastly, we find that the effects of CSR and advertising vary across the stakeholder groups (general public, business executives, or CSR experts) used in the analysis.     

Does corporate governance still affect firm performance after controlling the distress factor?

We explore the impact of corporate governance on firm performance. We first identify whether corporate governance can still be an influential factor or has been largely captured by the traditional Fama-French three-factor model. More importantly, our study adds a financial distress factor to the Fama-French three-factor model to form a four-factor pricing model (labelled as the ‘financial distress four-factor model’). We find that for the US Russell 1000 firms, the financial distress four-factor model is the better model of the two models considered. We further find that the financial distress four-factor model has a higher explanatory power in capturing the return variation. We find that the differences between the return of firms with good (weak) corporate governance and the expected return are insignificantly different from zero for most portfolios in all the two models. The financial distress four-factor model, however, has the fewer portfolios with return difference being significantly different from zero, implying that corporate governance has been better priced in the financial distress factor.     

Does peer group size influence social preferences and risk taking?

This paper examines whether the ex post relative payoffs of peers as well as the size of the peer group impact an agent's willingness to take risks. For example, persons in a flood plain may be less likely to purchase flood insurance if their neighbors also refrain from purchasing. We generalize the Fehr‐Schmidt (1999) model to allow the intensity of the social preferences to vary with the size of the peer group. Our experiment tests whether subjects are more or less likely to choose a lottery over a fixed payment when others have been assigned either the same lottery or the fixed payment. Using both between and within subject designs, we find risk‐taking behaviour is not responsive to the risks faced by others regardless of the size of peer group.     

Does geopolitical risk matter for corporate investment decisions? Evidence from cross-border acquisitions

Heightened geopolitical risk has become the new normal. We study the effects of geopolitical risks on cross-border acquisition activity. Using military alliance to proxy for the degree of geopolitical risks, we find that the formation of military alliance between two countries is associated with greater cross-border acquisition flows. Using the recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization enlargements as identification strategy, we find stronger effects of military alliance, especially with defense pacts. One important channel is that military alliance can substitute for target countries’ institutional quality and minimize extreme geopolitical threats faced by acquirers. We find that countries with poor governance and weaker legal enforcement benefit more from military alliance, especially by receiving inbound acquisitions from major military powers. These findings highlight the role of military alliance in the global market for corporate control by reducing geopolitical risks.     

Does financial development reduce CO2 emissions in Malaysian economy? A time series analysis

This study deals with the question whether financial development reduces CO₂ emissions or not in case of Malaysia. For this purpose, we apply the bounds testing approach to cointegration between the variables. We establish the presence of significant long-run relationships between CO₂ emissions, financial development, energy consumption and economic growth. The empirical evidence also indicates that financial development reduces CO₂ emissions. Energy consumption and economic growth add in CO₂ emissions. The Granger causality analysis reveals the feedback hypothesis between financial development and CO₂ emissions, energy consumption and CO₂ emissions and, between CO₂ emissions and economic growth.     

Getting into the energy efficiency scene: does corporate social responsibility matter for energy efficiency in SMEs?

A growing body of literature argues that improving energy efficiency is an essential step that firms must take to mitigate climate change issues. It is assumed that corporate social responsibility (CSR) in general plays a prominent role in firms’ policies, and this paper specifically investigates the effects of the individual CSR dimensions on SMEs’ energy efficiency improvement. Based on data from a sample of 146 thousand SMEs, and using logit model, and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, the study reveals that high activities in social, environmental and economic CSR dimensions are associated with high energy efficiency. Specifically, the environmental CSR dimension has the highest contribution to improving energy efficiency. Furthermore, this study indicates that energy efficiency improvement can be achieved by large SMEs provided they have developed simultaneously the environmental, social, and economic CSR dimensions. In doing so, this study answers to recent calls for more research on CSR-energy efficiency relationship and addresses with greater precision why it matters to relate the role of the CSR dimensions and energy efficiency. Furthermore, this study can be of value to policymakers who are called to promote CSR practices of SMEs in order to foster their energy efficiency.     

Does terrorism reduce life satisfaction?

We study the effect of terrorism on life satisfaction for a sample of 81 countries over the 1994–2009 period. We find that terrorism is robustly associated with less life satisfaction. This effect, however, translates into only modest social costs.     

Does transparency reduce political corruption?

Does a better monitoring of officials' actions (transparency) lower the incidence of corruption? Using a common agency game with imperfect information, we show that the answer depends on the measure of corruption that one uses. More transparency lowers the prevalence of corruption but raises the average bribe as it motivates the corruptor to bid more aggressively for the agent's favor. We show that transparency affects the prevalence of corruption at the margin through a competitive effect and an efficiency effect.     

When does aggregation reduce risk aversion?

We study the problem of risk sharing within a household or syndicate. A household shares risky prospects using a social welfare functional. We characterize the social welfare functionals such that the household is collectively less risk averse than each member, and satisfies the Pareto principle and an invariance axiom. We single out the sum of certainty equivalents as the unique member of this family which is quasiconcave over riskless allocations.     

How have banks fared following a borrower's financial distress?

This paper is the first to study the impact of a borrower's reorganization filing on its lead lending bank and second lending bank. This study analyzes 96 reorganization filings in Taiwan during the period 1995–2006. It is substantiated that the market's reaction to these filings is not indiscriminate and that the forbearance lending to a reorganization filing borrower suggests the lead bank's little concern for its shareholder wealth.     

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate diversification: do diversified production firms invest more in CSR?

A diversification strategy increases the range of stakeholder demands and social issues related to a firm’s operation. Examining the consequence of production diversification strategy at a broader level, not only (short-term) financial performance but also long-term performance, as proxied by corporate social responsibility (CSR), is surprising. We show that a firm’s production diversification is associated with stronger engagement in CSR, particularly for unrelated diversification. And the higher level of diversification is, the more investment in CSR. Our findings lead to the interesting questions regarding diversification discount and the value of unrelated diversification, which has often been criticized because of its negative impact on short-term financial performance.     

Does external shock trigger systemic banking distress?

Before 2007, many studies claimed that wide-scale banking distress in various countries was preceded and could be predicted by deteriorating macroeconomic indicators such as falling GDP growth rate. However, these researches were mostly based on “event studies” which identified crises too late. By using banking sector asset price data, the paper finds that economies still thrive in the “pre-crisis” period in terms of increasing GDP growth. The slowdown of economy in terms of a fall in GDP growth is generally associated with the post-crisis period coinciding with the bubble burst process. Thus, this result supports the policy view that it is not useful to postpone macroeconomic stability to conceal banking sector weakness.     

Does financial inclusion empower women in Africa?

This paper examines the effect of financial inclusion on women's empowerment. We contribute to the growing interest in financial inclusion effectiveness literature by conducting an empirical analysis of 42 African countries to examine the role of financial inclusion in empowering women. We also examine and compare the effectiveness of the three dimensions of financial inclusion viz. usage, access, and quality, and the first most influential indicators, based on their PCA score, of these dimensions. Our findings suggest that financial inclusion has a significantly positive effect on women's empowerment-measured by females' human development index. Examining the relative importance of financial inclusion dimensions, we find access to financial services has a higher effect on women's empowerment. These results are robust to alternative measures of women's empowerment and financial inclusion, and alternative estimation procedures. We also find that the effect of financial inclusion on women's empowerment is higher in low and lower-middle-income countries compared with upper-middle-income countries in the region. This study provides evidence of one of the channels through which financial inclusion contributes to reducing gender inequality, and thereby enhancing economic development.