Social Return on Investment (SROI) and Performance Measurement

Abstract

Social enterprises are being promoted as responsive and innovative way to deliver public services. As part of this promotion, these organizations are being required to demonstrate the social and economic value they generate. Social return on investment (SROI) is a performance measurement tool currently being encouraged to capture this impact. This paper draws on survey and interview data to analyse how SROI is used and understood in health and social care settings. It indicates that despite being accepted as an internationally recognized measurement tool for social enterprise, SROI is underused and undervalued due to practical and ideological barriers.     

International commodity taxation in the presence of unemployment

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of commodity tax competition on welfare and employment under the destination and origin principles, when the labor market is imperfectly competitive owing to a binding fixed wage. Our main finding is that commodity taxation causes an employment externality whose signs may be opposite under the two principles. While tax competition leads to inefficient tax rates under both principles, we also prove that the origin principle guarantees lower unemployment and higher welfare when the fixed wage is high. Finally, we show that the employment externality still exists in a standard union model of wage determination.     

Unethical,neurotic, or both? A psychoanalytic account of ethical failures within organizations

This paper aims to integrate insights from psychoanalytic theory into business ethics research on the sources of ethical failures within organizations. We particularly draw from the analysis of sources and outcomes of neurotic processes that are part of human development, as described by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney and more recently by Manfred Kets de Vries; we interpret their insights from a stakeholder theory perspective. Business ethics research seems to have overlooked how “neurotic management styles” could be the antecedents of unethical behavior within organizations. After showing the connection between five managerial neuroses and the corresponding potential ethical failures within organizations that have been already identified within business ethics research, we suggest three organizational strategies to counteract these failures. First, we argue that managers should pay greater attention at the complexity of human motivation, avoiding the simplistic view of compliance‐based approaches. Second, we discuss the importance of developing a conversation around values within organizations, enabling healthy individual growth and limiting the emergence of neurotic processes. Finally, we discuss the role of the business ethicist in facilitating such a process, suggesting a parallel between the role of the business ethicist and that of the psychoanalytic therapist.     

Individual risk tolerance and herding behaviors in financial forecasts

Financial analysts tend to demonstrate herding behavior, which sometimes compromises accuracy. A number of explanations spanning rational economic logic, cognitive biases, and social forces have been suggested. Relying on an experimental setting where participants forecast future earnings from a rich information set, we posit and obtain support for individual risk tolerance (or lack thereof) as an explanatory variable for herding behaviors. Specifically, less risk‐tolerant individuals forecast with less boldness and instead issue forecasts in agreement with the consensus forecast. The results are argued to be at least partially a product of cognitive biases and an intuitive reaction to uncertainty.     

Selling Together: The Benefits of Cooperatives to Women Honey Producers in Ethiopia

Smallholder farmers in developing countries encounter multiple barriers in access to inputs and technology, which prevent them from reaping the benefits from market participation. Women farmers face additional constraints due to gender norms that further limit their engagement in productive activities. While collective action has been shown to improve access to markets and economic outcomes for farmers overall, the evidence on the effects of cooperative membership for women smallholders remains limited. We investigate empirically the economic benefits of collective action for women farmers in the honey sector in Ethiopia. Relying on a rich data set on women honey producers, both cooperative members and non‐members, we evaluate the effects of belonging to a cooperative on three outcome variables through coarsened exact matching and regression analysis. Our results indicate that cooperative membership significantly increases the market price and the production quantity and, while the average effect on the share of product marketed is statistically insignificant, significant differences emerge for women with given characteristics. These results are shown to be robust to a number of tests that address biases from selection on observables and unobservables. An analysis of the heterogeneous effects of household membership in multiple groups finds that membership of self‐help groups or farmer associations amplifies the positive outcomes from belonging to a formal cooperative. Finally, qualitative findings derived from the same communities indicate self‐reported improvements in agency and self‐esteem among women members, thus reinforcing the importance of the quantitative findings.     

The determinants of business contribution to the 2030 Agenda: Introducing the SDG Reporting Score

Within the 2030 Agenda, the United Nations have explicitly required that the Member States introduce within their jurisdictions new forms of regulations about non-financial reporting practices. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects related to the transposition of Directive 2014/95/EU by analyzing firm-level, governance-level, and report-level determinants of business reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To conduct such an analysis, this study defines and introduces the SDG Reporting Score (SRS)—a qualitative proxy representing a firm orientation toward SDG reporting. The study sample includes the non-financial reports of 153 Italian Public Interest Entities. The results show a positive relationship between a firm's SRS and various determinants, such as the presence of independent directors on the board, expertise with non-financial reporting, and length of the report. Finally, the highest levels of SRS are achieved by firms operating in environmental sensitive sectors.     

How Can the European Union Adapt to Climate Change?

Intereconomics - Europe must increasingly deal with the harmful impacts of climate change, regardless of its success in reducing emissions. These impacts have significant cross-border effects and...     

The Role of Social Capital for Organizational Identification: Implications for Strategic Communication

Scholars in the fields of organization and strategic communication have long been interested in organizational identification as a phenomenon favoring employees’ alignment with corporate values and consequently achievement of the organizational mission. To date, most studies on the subject have relied on social identity theory, which focuses on cognitive categorization processes but overlooks the role of employees’ relationships within their organization. In this research, we introduce a social capital perspective into organizational identification models. We propose and test a model looking at the influence of an individual’s social capital, a variable deriving from different dimensions of an individual’s communication network (i.e., prestige, resourceful others, friendship), on organizational identification, mediated by the attractiveness of perceived organizational identity. The results from a survey conducted in a business organization suggest that a person’s social capital influences organizational identification, both directly and through the attractiveness of perceived organizational identity. Our organizational identification model contributes to extend knowledge on the complementarity of the cognitive and relational perspectives of strategic communication and on the role of relationship building and networks in strategic communication management.     

Capital Structure Theory and the Fisher Effect

This paper incorporates capital structure theory to model the response of nominal interest rates to expected inflation in a world with taxes. Within an otherwise common framework, the model includes Modigliani-Miller (MM) and Miller capital structure theory, as well as a variation of the Miller model with bankruptcy costs, developed by DeAngelo and Masulis. Within this framework, we derive an equation to predict the response of nominal interest rates under each capital structure hypothesis. With MM theory, our model predicts di_D/d_π value consistent with empirically observed ranges. With Miller theory, the predictions are inaccurate. With DeAngelo-Masulis, the predictions vary widely; the midpoint of the predicted range is less accurate than with Miller theory.