Were the peseta exchange rate crises forecastable during target zone period?

During the 1990s several fixed or quasi-fixed exchange rate systems collapsed. Currency crises have happened in both developed and emerging countries so it is necessary to forecast and avoid them. However, financial market crises have been extremely difficult to forecast. Economic agents' expectations are nonobservable variables that cannot be ignored in the models. In addition, if it is required to study the European case during the 1990s, the censored disposition of the exchange rate cannot be ignored either. A discrete time target zones model is proposed where these aspects are taken into account. It will be tested in a peseta/deutsche mark exchange rate framework, from June 1989 to December 1998. The results indicate differences between before and after the shift in band widths in August 1993.     

Health insurance and lifestyles

This article contributes to the discussion surrounding the existence of ex ante moral hazard and propitious selection in a voluntary private health insurance scenario. Moreover, it provides an estimation of the determinants of lifestyle choices and of private health insurance demand. A multivariate probit is estimated for health insurance demand and lifestyle decisions to take into account the potential endogeneity of these decisions. The results indicate that there is evidence of ex ante moral hazard in deciding to do sports and eating healthy snacks. Hence, no propitious selection has been found for these decisions. Another relevant result shows that there is no individual heterogeneity for the lifestyle choices, except for smoking, and private health insurance choice. Evidence from the results also supports the idea that there are nonobservable variables playing a role in the lifestyle decisions. These results provide some directions for policymakers, such as the promotion of precautionary behaviours and the use of implicit lifestyle drivers to promote healthy choices by people.     

Determinants of the acquisition of listed versus unlisted firms in different legal and institutional environments

The aim of this article is to analyse the determinants of the decision to acquire unlisted rather than listed firms in different legal and institutional environments. We estimate a probit model considering the mergers and acquisitions (M&As) announced by European listed firms (19 countries) that acquires worldwide listed or unlisted firms (36 countries) in the period 2002–2007. Our results show that managerial opportunism is a determinant in the acquisition of listed firms, occurring with greater probability in acquiring countries with low shareholder and minority shareholder protection. Information asymmetry is another relevant determinant that promotes the acquisitions of unlisted firms. Furthermore, the less developed the capital market in the country of the acquired firm, the greater the probability of acquisitions of unlisted firms. This article contributes to the M&A literature by showing that in addition to managerial opportunism and information asymmetry, the legal and institutional environments in both the acquiring and the target countries are also relevant aspects explaining the decision of whether to acquire listed or unlisted firms.     

Multi-unit versus single-unit franchising: assessing why franchisors use different ownership strategies

The aim of this article is to examine what factors underlie the choice of organisational form when franchisors add new franchised units to their networks. Franchisors may grant new units to existing franchisees (multi-unit franchising (MUF)) or to new franchisees (single-unit franchising). We find that this choice depends on the existence of contractual problems (namely adverse selection and moral hazard) and several network characteristics influence the magnitude of these problems. In particular, we found a positive relationship between the intensity of the use of MUF and network size, geographical concentration of the units of the network, and industries where customers tend to be non-repetitive.     

All wired up but where to go?

Through a selective review of the fluctuating prospects of new media technologies in Europe, Isabel Bass questions assumptions about the transition to an ‘information age’.     

Changes in the intellectual structure of strategic management research: a bibliometric study of the Strategic Management Journal, 1980–2000

The aim of this paper is to identify the works that have had the greatest impact on strategic management research and to analyze the changes that have taken place in the intellectual structure of this discipline. The methodology is based on the bibliometric techniques of citation and co‐citation analysis which are applied to all the articles published in the Strategic Management Journal from its first issue in 1980 through 2000. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Institutional Investor Protection Pressures versus Firm Incentives in the Disclosure of Integrated Reporting

Corporate disclosures aim to decrease the expectation gap between investors, decrease the advantage of informed investors and consequently reduce information asymmetry. However, the existence of higher numbers of companies’ reports makes the decision making of firms’ stakeholders difficult. To avoid these problems, companies have started to disclose integrated reports. Previous studies have observed that this voluntary corporate disclosure is a consequence of large firms’ incentives associated with preventing abnormal earnings. In this paper, we examine whether these internal factors have a lower/higher impact than institutional contracting pressures. Our results are evidence that firms’ incentives are the main determinants of the voluntary disclosure of integrated reports, and we observe that there is a substitutive role between institutional country pressures and firms’ transparency decisions. However, the contracting environment plays a complementary role when firms suffer from lower asymmetry problems.     

Game,set and match: the favourite-long shot bias in tennis betting exchanges

We test for the existence of Favourite-Longshot Bias (FLB) in tennis betting exchanges. Despite these being order-driven markets, with no direct participation from bookmakers, we have found very similar results to those obtained by Lahvi?ka (2014) for bookmakers’ betting markets: the bias is stronger in matches between lower-ranked players, in later round matches and in high profile tournaments. This suggests that bookmakers’ adjustments to respond to informed betting are not the main driver of FLB. The varying magnitude of the bias across different types of event in the main market also weakens arguments linking FLB to gamblers’ risk preferences, and suggests the need to consider the microstructure features of the market together with the cognitive biases highlighted in the behavioural finance literature.     

Tax on emissions or subsidy to renewables? Evaluating the effects on the economy and on the environment

We examine the relationship between the economy and the environment in a model where production uses nonpolluting renewable and polluting nonrenewable resources. There is policy intervention through a tax on emissions and a subsidy to renewables extraction/production. Results show that both instruments are able to decrease emissions intensity of output. However, when used together, the desired effect is higher. Empirically it is shown that the subsidy achieves higher renewables intensity and although present emissions per output are similar for both instruments, the subsidy achieves lower future levels.