Price premiums,payment delays,and default risk: understanding developing country farmers’ decisions to market through a cooperative or a private trader

Smallholder farmers in developing countries face a competitive disadvantage in modern agricultural supply chains. Joint marketing through cooperatives is a potential tool to mitigate these disadvantages; yet cooperatives’ success in these settings is uneven at best. We develop an analytical model to study a farmer's choice of selling to a private trader who pays cash on delivery but may exercise market power or a cooperative that promises a price premium but delays payment and carries a concomitant risk of default. In the presence of impatient and risk‐averse farmers, we show that these factors can severely limit smallholder patronage of a cooperative, despite a promised price premium. We then construct and parameterize a simulation model to fit a profile of heterogeneous farmers within a prototype developing‐country village, and study the optimal decisions of farmers regarding marketing through a cooperative versus a private trader. Results suggest that modest improvements in either timeliness of payment or probability of default can induce a substantial increase in a cooperative's market share and economic viability. Extending the simulation analysis to a dynamic setting shows how implementing reasonable policies to improve a cooperative's payment timeliness and default probability can markedly improve its growth trajectory.     

Institutional dynamics and organizations affecting the adoption of sustainable development in the United Kingdom and Brazil

This paper provides an exploratory comparative assessment of the institutional pressures influencing corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a developed country, UK, vs. a developing country, Brazil, based on a survey of different actors. Information on sustainability concerns, organizational strategies and mechanisms of pressure was collected through interviews with environmental regulatory agencies, financial institutions, media and non‐governmental organizations. Our results confirm that the more advanced awareness and CSR responsiveness in the UK is a consequence of a predominance of coercive and normative forces on the organizational field. The institutional forces tend to build a Brazilian organizational field that is relational based and risk intensive. The findings lend support to the view that CSR responses are unlikely to be easily transformed into uniform standardized practices across the globe. This paper contributes to a collective understanding of the organizational field and a common template for CSR in the context of developed and developing countries.     

Toward the system theory of dependence: Further general theoretical remarks

This paper forms another part of a more extensive study inspired by the authors' aims to contribute to the elaboration of the social systems theory of dependence and to better understand the behavior of the global system of human beings and of its subsystems. The theory of dependence, by elaborating an abstract theoretical model of the dependence space, aims at a better understanding of social change (or resistance to change) on the micro, medium and macro-levels of the social systems. In this paper some features of a crude model have been presented at a high level of abstraction. A minimum set of concepts, such as dependence relation, dependence coupling, dependence boundary, dependence capacity, entropy of behavior, systems need relations and possibilities, etc., have been defined and formalized. Some propositions have been formulated. We hope that, in spite of the high level of abstraction and of an insufficient amount of data supporting our propositions which are based mainly on the general systems taxonomy and on the hypothetical-deductive method, the conclusions will have some heuristic value for further inquiries into the theory of modelling the guidance systems of social processes.     

Information revelation in auctions

Auction theory has emphasized the importance of private information to the profits of bidders. However, the theory has failed to consider to what extent initially private information will remain private. We show that in a variety of contexts bidders will reveal their information, even if this information revelation is (ex ante) detrimental to them. Similarly, a seller may reveal her information although this revelation lowers revenues. We also show that bidders may be harmed by private information, even in contexts where more information has traditionally been presumed to be beneficial.     

Scale and Scaling in Ecological and Economic Systems

We review various aspects of the notion ofscale applied to natural systems, in particularcomplex adaptive systems. We argue that scalingissues are not only crucial from the standpointof basic science, but also in many appliedissues, and discuss tools for detecting anddealing with multiple scales, both spatial andtemporal. We also suggest that the techniquesof statistical mechanics, which have beensuccessful in describing many emergent patternsin physical systems, can also prove useful inthe study of complex adaptive systems.     

Enhancement of value investing strategies based on financial statement variables: the German evidence

This paper examines the added-value of combining traditional valuation ratios with each other as well as with some financial statement variables in the German stock markets during the 2000–2015 period. The results show that combination pays off and, moreover, that the benefits of combination are greater in Germany than in most other developed stock markets. Particularly, we find strong evidence of the added-value of using Piotroski’s F-score as a supplementary selection criterion for value stocks as well as for low-accrual stocks. Our results show further that the F-score also boosts the efficacy of other valuation ratios besides the book-to-price ratio. In addition, the inclusion of F-score besides a relative value measure tends to increase the average market equity of portfolio firms. The decomposition of the full-sample-period performance into separate bull- and bear-period performance shows clearly that the better performance of F-score-boosted portfolios is mostly attributable to their outperformance during bearish periods, even though on average, they also generate higher bull-period returns than the comparable value portfolios formed without F-score. The use of F-score as a supplementary criterion also increases the proportion of stocks that earn above-market-average returns during the subsequent holding period. For the first time in the financial literature, we also document a strong relationship between high F-score stocks and momentum stocks.     

How to define an environmental policy to improve corporate sustainability in developing countries

Continual efforts to work with government and society are crucial to persuade businesses to become even better engaged in sustainability practices in developing countries. This study rebuilds the SCP (structure–conduct–performance) paradigm to incorporate environmental variables and to address the environmental strategy choices. Grounded theory was adopted in a systematic collection of data in petrochemical, textile and beverage companies established in different Brazilian states. In‐depth personal interview, site visit and documentary evidence were coded and analysed. The empirical results demonstrate that environmental regulation and enforcement, environmental risk and demands from stakeholders play a central role in increasing the corporate commitment to the natural environment. The study defines four strategic generic types of organization, termed variously as sleeper, reactor, defender and innovator, owing to their solutions to environmental issues. This typology contributes as a roadmap for business decision makers to choose the appropriate environmental strategy in a global economy. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Économie sociale et économie publique: nouvelles formes de coopération à l'ère de la mondialisation

En choisissant le thème du congrès CIRIEC/IFIG 2000 à Montréal, "Économie sociale et économie publique: nouvelles formes de coopération à l'ère de la mondialisation", les instances du CIRIEC international ont voulu inscrire les évolutions récentes des relations entre entreprises publiques et d'économie sociale dans un contexte international en pleine mutation, à l'ère de la mondialisation.     

On the realized volatility of the ECX CO2 emissions 2008 futures contract: distribution, dynamics and forecasting

This article documents the conditional and unconditional distributions of the realized volatility for the 2008 futures contract in the European climate exchange (ECX), which is valid under the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). Realized volatility measures from naive, kernel-based and subsampling estimators are used to obtain inferences about the distributional and dynamic properties of the ECX emissions futures volatility. The distribution of the daily realized volatility in logarithmic form is shown to be close to normal. The mixture-of-normals hypothesis is strongly rejected, as the returns standardized using daily measures of volatility clearly departs from normality. A simplified HAR-RV model (Corsi in J Financ Econ 7:174–196, 2009) with only a weekly component, which reproduces long memory properties of the series, is then used to model the volatility dynamics. Finally, the predictive accuracy of the HAR-RV model is tested against GARCH specifications using one-step-ahead forecasts, which confirms the HAR-RV superior ability.     

Automatic Fiscal Stabilisers: What They Are and What They Do

The global financial and economic crisis has revived the debate in the academic literature and in policy circles about the size and effectiveness of automatic fiscal stabilisers. Especially in the euro area where monetary policy is centralised and discretionary fiscal policy making is constrained by the EU fiscal rules, knowing the size and the effectiveness of automatic stabilisers is crucial. While automatic stabilisers are a fairly established concept in the fiscal policy literature, there is still no consensus about their actual nature and their effectiveness. This paper shows that differences in opinion mirror a deeper disagreement over how the budget would look like without automatic stabilisers. This issue is addressed by defining two types of counterfactual budgets giving rise to two different interpretations about the nature of automatic stabilisation. Simulations with a structural model confirm that the degree of smoothing is conditional on how the counterfactual budget, i.e. the budget without automatic stabilisers, is defined.