The environmental,social and economic effects of recent technological changes in sugarcane on the State of São Paulo,Brazil

From 2007 to 2017, the Agro‐Environmental Protocol of the Sugar and Energy Sector was in force, an agreement between sugarcane mill owners and the State Government of São Paulo, Brazil, proposing to eliminate sugarcane burning as a method to facilitate the harvest. Simultaneously, the sugarcane harvest was becoming widely mechanized while, under the interests of capital accumulation, the mills were entering the information and communication technology era and providing the agricultural processes with more precise and immediate management and technological controls, similar to those implemented in the mills' administrative and industrial operations in the 1990s. Short‐term factors, including environmental factors, favoured sugarcane technological changes. As a result, there was a mass layoff of rural workers and an increasing number of people/workers in agricultural mechanization, transportation and maintenance of machinery and administrative as well. The whole process highlighted the differences between mills, resulting in small and medium sugarcane farmers and mills to become the most impacted, in operational and financial terms, by the accelerating mechanization of the sugarcane industry as a whole.     

Trust and foreign ownership: Evidence from intra‐European foreign direct investments

We use a novel firm‐level dataset to test whether trust affects the volume and the ownership structure FDI across Europe. Our methodology deals with the endogeneity of trust from the investor to the recipient country. We expect such a trust measure to affect investment decisions, and the associated knowledge capital, differently across types of foreign investors. In particular, this effect is expected to be stronger for industrial investors who possess transferable knowledge capital. The data confirm our predictions. Higher trust increases the number and volume of FDIs, but also the probability of co‐investing with a partner from the recipient country.     

Effects of Currency Devaluations on the Economic Growth in Developing Countries: The Role of Foreign Currency-Denominated Debt

Assuming that a developing country has to denominate its debts in the currencies of the principal creditor countries, how is the country??s economic performance affected when currency devaluation occurs? The aim of this paper is to prove that devaluation can be contractionary and that its occurrence can be the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Assuming credit constraints on firms?? borrowing capacity and nominal price rigidities, a sharp change in the value of the domestic currency leads to an increase in the real costs of foreign currency-denominated debt. Hence, firms?? profits as well as their borrowing capacity decrease, provoking a drop in future investment and output. Moreover, expectations about future output can alone trigger a currency devaluation, confirming the initial expectations in a self-fulfilling way. Finally, it is discussed in an empirical analysis the impact of devaluation on the economic growth in a sample of five countries.     

The Role of Stakeholders in Sustainability Reporting Assurance

The main purpose of this exploratory analysis is to understand whether, based on evidence gathered from international best practices selected among corporations which adopt the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines in sustainability reporting (SR), stakeholders are significantly consulted and involved—as international literature would indicate—by assurance providers, during assurance processes of SR. We aim at verifying if this practice—known as stakeholder assurance—is in fact widespread in SR assurance by carrying out empirical research, through content analysis, into a sample of 161 assurance statements of international corporations, in order to test characteristics of any stakeholder assurance implemented.     

Status, the Distribution of Wealth, and Growth

We analyze a simple model of endogenous growth in which individuals care about both consumption and their rank in the distribution of wealth. We show that the steady-growth rate of the economy increases with both the strength of the status-seeking motive and the initial equality of the wealth distribution. Contrary to the basic model of endogenous growth, the equilibrium growth rate is not necessarily smaller than in the social optimum, and we identify the circumstances under which the two coincide.     

RISK PREMIUM EFFECTS ON IMPLIED VOLATILITY REGRESSIONS

This article provides new insights into the sources of bias of option implied volatility to forecast its physical counterpart. We argue that this bias can be attributed to volatility risk premium effects. The latter are found to depend on high‐order cumulants of the risk‐neutral density. These cumulants capture the risk‐averse behavior of investors in the stock and option markets for bearing the investment risk that is reflected in the deviations of the implied risk‐neutral distribution from the normal distribution. We show that the bias of implied volatility to forecast its corresponding physical measure can be eliminated when the implied volatility regressions are adjusted for risk premium effects. The latter are captured mainly by the third‐order risk‐neutral cumulant. We also show that a substantial reduction of higher order risk‐neutral cumulants biases to predict their corresponding physical cumulants is supported when adjustments for risk premium effects are made.