Between Flexibility and Regulation: Rights, Equality and Protection at Work

The year 2000 represented the real year of delivery on Labour's proposals for industrial relations and employment rights. This review focuses on the content of the government's legislative programme, taking account of the impact of public policy at European level and its relationship with national legislation. The government's programme included a number of measures designed to target discrimination and promote equality, and the review examines the form and significance of these changes, in the light of continuing discrimination in the labour market. It then turns to examine the most fundamental legal reform of the year, the introduction of the statutory right to recognition.     

Capital indivisibility and tax competition: Are there too many business areas when some of them are empty?

In this paper, we propose a model where local jurisdictions must engage a development cost before competing for hosting a firm with uncertain preferences among possible sites. We first show that even an optimizing central planner managing all the jurisdictions develops more sites than there are plants to host. Doing so, he diversifies his supply and has a higher probability of hosting the firm. Then, we show that, if every jurisdiction is managed by a local government, there are more developed sites than with the central planner, which implies excess supply.     

Role of education and extension in the adoption of technology: a study of upland rice and soybean farmers in Central-West Brazil

This paper explores reduced form determinants of the adoption of certain technologies by upland rice and soybean farmers in the Center-West region of Brazil. We merge community level data on the availability and quality of publicly provided infrastructure, principally extension, to the farm level data containing information on farmer human capital as well as land quantity and quality. By using community level measures of availability and quality of extension, we avoid problems of endogeneity of farm level measures of extension use. We find positive impacts of farmer education on the diffusion process, in accordance with other studies. We also isolate effects of the quality in regional extension investment as measured by the average experience of technical extension staff. These results indicate that investments in human capital of extension workers does have a payoff in terms of farmer adoption of improved cultivation practices.     

Convergence to competitive equilibria and elimination of no-trade (in a strategic market game with limit prices)

The strategic market games literature contains many results that predict Walrasian equilibria in the competitive limit. However, they usually come at the expense of ad hoc assumptions that rule out “pathological” no trade equilibria. This paper studies a strategic market game with limit prices. The set of Nash equilibrium allocations of this game converges to the set containing all competitive equilibria and no-trade, when players are replicated. Moreover, two rounds of iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies eliminate the no-trade equilibria. Hence, replication paired with two rounds of iterated dominance gives a clean prediction of competitive equilibrium.     

The consumer's relational commitment: main dimensions and antecedents

As in business-to-business relationships, consumers often establish and maintain long-term relationships with firms. This article uses a multidisciplinary approach with the aims of describing the process that a consumer follows until committing to a firm and identifying the main dimensions and antecedents of the consumer's commitment. As antecedents of commitment, the proposed model considers dependence and trust through the reduction in uncertainty and in the perception of opportunism. The empirical study for the consumer–garage relationship suggests that the consumer's trust reduces the fear and perception of the firm's opportunism and engenders affective and temporal commitment.     

A Cross-National Study on Online Consumer Perceptions,Trust, and Loyalty

This article analyzes the validity of signaling theory and relationship marketing in e-commerce and in two different countries with different stages of technology development. We advance a model that reflects the role played by website characteristics as determinant factors of trust and loyalty to the website. The model is tested for young Internet users. It is examined in Spanish and Japanese contexts to ascertain whether any differences emerge due to differing cultures and shopping contexts. Results reveal few differences between Spain and Japan, despite their contrasting development of e-commerce and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Customer service is the most important website signal to engender trust, a feature closely linked to loyalty both in Japan and Spain. However, reputation seems more important when engaging Japanese buyers' trust, whereas only website design has an impact on Spanish buyers' trust.     

Regulatory Sanctions on Independent Directors and Their Consequences to the Director Labor Market: Evidence from China

We investigate the regulatory sanctions imposed on independent directors for their firms’ financial frauds in China. These regulatory sanctions are prima-facie evidence of significant lapses in business ethics. During the period 2003–2010, 302-person-time independent directors were penalized by the regulator (the China Securities Regulatory Commission—the CSRC), and the two stock exchanges. We find that the independent directors with accounting experiences are more likely to be penalized by the CSRC, though they do not suffer more severe penalties than do the other sanctioned independent directors. We also find that independent directors suffer less severe penalties than do the insider directors. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the sanctions on independent directors are tied to their assumed ethical and legal responsibilities. Following a regulatory sanction, penalized independent directors experience a significant decline in the number of other board seats held. However, they can gain board seats in better quality firms. We find that interlocked firms that share penalized independent directors with the fraud firm do not suffer from a valuation decline. Overall, our results suggest that regulatory sanctions have not triggered further sanctions on the penalized directors in the labor market but they have, instead, created a disincentive for these directors to serve on the company boards of high-risk firms.     

Liquidity Constraints,the Composition of Government Expenditure,and Economic Growth

Abstract

This paper explains how and why the stock market, which is regarded as the embodiment of capitalism, has been allowed to develop and gain a prominent place among China's financial markets. That development has been consistent with the changing vested interests of the central government in its attempts to collect quasi-fiscal revenue from the financial sector, reflecting the stock market's growing importance as a tax-collection venue.     

Which Dimensions of Social Responsibility Concern Financial Investors?

Social and environmental ratings provided by social rating agencies are multidimensional. The first goal of our paper is to identify a small number of independent and relevant socially responsible (SR) dimensions reflecting a firms’ coherent posture toward social issues. We put forward that these dimensions are not exactly the same as the ESG ones (Environment, Social, and Governance). Using the six sub-ratings provided by the Vigeo rating agency, we perform a principal component analysis and we highlight three main independent SR dimensions related to (1) business stakeholders (employees, customers, and suppliers), (2) societal stakeholders (environment and society), and (3) financial stakeholders (stockholders and debt holders). The second objective of our paper is to explore the link between stock returns and these three SR dimensions. Our most notable finding is that for each SR dimension, investors ask for an additional risk premium when they accept to hold non-socially responsible stocks. The cost of equity is thus lower for SR firms. The average premium over the period 2003–2010 is larger for the components “business stakeholders” and “financial stakeholders” than for the component “societal stakeholders.” The premium for this last component has only existed since the end of 2008. Since that time, environment and community involvement have become important risk factors strongly considered by investors. For the three dimensions, investors notably penalize large non-social firms and reward small social firms.