Do Corporations Invest Enough in Environmental Responsibility?

Proponents of corporate environmental responsibility argue that corporations shortchange shareholders by investing too little in environmental responsibility. They claim that corporations can improve their financial performance by increasing their investment in environmental responsibility. Opponents of corporate social responsibility argue that corporations shortchange shareholders by investing too much in environmental responsibility. They claim that corporations can improve their financial performance by reducing their investment in environmental responsibility. Yet, others claim that corporations serve their shareholders well by investing just enough in social responsibility, not too little and not too much. If so, corporations increase their investment in environmental responsibility when an increase improves financial performance and reduce their investment in environmental responsibility when a decrease improves financial performance. Our evidence is consistent with this last claim. We find that the behavior of corporations is consistent with the claim that they act in the interest of shareholders, increasing or decreasing their investment in environmental responsibility as necessary to improve their financial performance.     

Provision of Public Services to the Post-Nomadic Bedouin Society in Israel

Bedouin nomads in southern Israel have been sedentarising and semi-urbanising in recent decades. During this process, they have become part of a public service provision system. This is a unique process as usually nomads rely on internal resources for attaining the goals of these services, whereas here they are obliged to use external resources. Such a process, therefore, is bound to be a conflictual one with many barriers. An analysis of provision of public educational and health services reveals that they have been spatially, functionally and culturally constrained, thus putting the Bedouin within a stressful situation.     

On distances and goodness-of-fit tests for detecting multimodal distributions

Various distances between distributions and between densities are considered. The corresponding goodness-of-fit tests derived from them are examined for their abilities to detect multimodal alternatives. It is found that many well known techniques fail to detect such alternatives, while others do better in terms of their power results. These are mainly the tests derived from the variational metric which are based on spacings and gaps.     

The relationship between securities' abnormal price movements and Wall Street Journal news

This study investigates the nature of the news which appear in the Wall Street Journal in the periods surrounding abnormal price movements of securities. A news classification system is developed. This system classified the news for a sample of firms whose stock underwent abnormal price changes. Our findings are inconsistent with the efficient market hypothesis. The nature of the news regarding the average firm precedes the abnormal price changes.     

The use of a bankruptcy forecasting model to analyze corporate behavior in Israel

Most models used in predicting business failure actually rank the firms involved according to the probability of their financial distress Such ranking may also be used to explain patterns of corporate behavior and economic developments, as is shown in this paper Israeli manufacturing corporations are ranked here according to a multivanate index of risk based on five financial ratios that have been shown to successfully predict financial distress three years prior to the actual failure. Greater use of supplier credit and recourse to more than one bank are significantly linked to a higher degree of risk as measured by the index Extension of customer credit is conversely related to this risk status of the firm, while there does not seem to be a clear and significant relationship between such status and the growth in sales.     

THE EFFECT ON POVERTY STATUS IN ISRAEL OF CONSIDERING WEALTH AND VARIABILITY OF INCOME

This paper assesses the effects of including wealth and the variability of income on the incidence of poverty and the degree of income inequality in Israel. A special survey, which includes data on the wealth and income of a national sample of Israeli families in 1963–64 and 1964–65, allows us to go beyond measures based on current income alone.
The first section reviews earlier studies of poverty in Israel. The next section looks at poverty and inequality in terms of current income, current wealth, and a combined measure of income and wealth. The combined measure is the Hansen-Weisbrod measure (HW), which equals income plus the annuity value of wealth, assuming all wealth is just consumed at the time of death. It is interesting that, in spite of the much higher wealth inequality than income inequality, the HW measure was slightly more equally distributed than income. This result occurred because the annuity component made up a low share of the total HW measure and the correlation between income and wealth was well under 1. Although overall inequality and poverty were similar for income and HW measures, the incidence of poverty by subgroup depended on the measure used.
The final section presents a dynamic view of poverty and inequality. Year-to-year changes in poverty were substantial. Because of the use of a relative poverty concept and the rise in real incomes, the real income poverty line rose by 15 percent between 1963 and 1964. Still, of those in income poverty in 1963, 37 percent managed to escape poverty in 1964. The paper shows how the degree to which poverty was stable or transitory varied substantially by age and country of origin.