Competition,transmission and bank pricing policies: Evidence from Belgian loan and deposit markets

This paper addresses the pass-through from market interest rates to retail bank interest rates. The paper advocates a heterogeneous approach and applies it to the Belgian banking market. A substantial proportion of the heterogeneity in bank pricing policies can be explained by the bank lending channel and the relative market power hypothesis. The results also suggest that the long-term pass-through is typically less than one-for-one, rejecting the completeness hypothesis. While there is no convincing evidence for asymmetry in retail rates, large deviations from equilibrium mark-ups are faster reduced than small deviations. Overall, conditions for corporate loans are more competitive compared to consumer loans. Demand and savings deposits have, by far, the most rigid prices.     

Encouraging employees to co-operate: the effects of sponsored training and promotion practices on employees' willingness to work overtime

The ‘mutual-investment’ model argues that when employers invest more in the social exchange relationship between them and their employees, their employees will show more effort. In this paper we relate the ‘mutual-investment’ model to training and promotion (possibilities) and examine if these kinds of career-enhancing measures influence the willingness of employees within organizations to work overtime. To test this hypothesis, a vignette experiment was conducted in five organizations (N = 388; 1,531 vignettes). Multilevel analyses show that employees are more willing to work overtime when their employer has provided for training, when the employee recently was promoted, when the supervisor was supportive in the past and when co-workers approve of working overtime and behave similarly. But we did not find that future promotion chances affect willingness to work overtime.     

Management Students’ Attitudes Toward Business Ethics: A Comparison Between France and Romania

This study focuses on the differences in the perception of business ethics across two groups of management students from France and Romania (n = 220). Data was collected via the ATBEQ to measure preferences for three business philosophies: Machiavellianism, Social Darwinism, and Moral Objectivism. The results show that Romanian students present more favorable attitudes toward Machiavellianism than French students; whereas, French students valued Social Darwinism and Moral Objectivism more highly. For Machiavellianism and Moral Objectivism the results are consistent with the literature and our hypotheses. However, contrary to our expectations, we find that Social Darwinism is more important in France than Romania. The results indicate that religious practice does not influence preferences for the three business philosophies. In terms of gender differences, women have less favorable attitudes toward Machiavellianism and more favorable attitudes toward Moral Objectivism than men.     

Modeling the Impacts of Corporate Commitment on Climate Change

The aim of this paper is to propose an integrative framework for understanding the determinants of business strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the impact of these determinants on performance. The proposed structural equation model is based on a survey of 319 Canadian manufacturing firms. The study calls into question the traditionally positive relationship between a firm's environmental commitment and its economic motivations. However, the results also show a win–win relationship between the commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and financial performance. This study contributes to the understanding of the motivations underlying the efforts manufacturers make to tackle climate change and their economic benefits. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Relative deprivation,reference groups and the assessment of standard of living

This paper proposes two new indices of relative deprivation, derived from an extension of the concept of generalized Gini to the measurement of distributional change. Population- and income-weighted relative deprivation indices are then defined and, using panel data from the Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio-Economic Research (CHER), we check which of the various ways of defining individual deprivation best fits the answers given by individuals on the degree of their satisfaction with income. We find that the deprivation indices proposed are consistently and negatively correlated with income satisfaction as reported by respondents, that income weighted measures fit better than population weighted measures and that this fit improves with countries that experienced deep institutional changes such as the transitional economies of Eastern Europe.     

A GENERALIZED OLIGOPOLY MODEL WITH CONJECTURAL VARIATIONS

This paper considers a generalization of the Stackelberg model to cover a T‐stage framework with several leaders and followers who compete on quantities. Assuming a linear demand function and constant marginal costs, we introduce constant conjectural variations in order to capture various structures of competition. First, we characterize the equilibrium market outcome. Second, we study the influence of conjectures on welfare. We notably propose a welfare comparison for six symmetric equilibria. Third, we consider convergence analysis, and we also show that the competitive equilibrium is a consistent oligopoly equilibrium.     

Identification of critical operational performance measures— a research note on a benchmarking study in the transportation and distribution sector

In this paper the results presented are of an empirical benchmarking study investigating which operational performance measures in the transportation and distribution sector are the most important for financial performance. In the existing literature, the selection of operational performance measures is mostly derived from strategy, using interviews and discussions with management. The main contribution of this paper is to show how an application of benchmarking can identify the relative importance of different operational performance measures and to set standards for those measures.$g0     

Using life cycle approaches to enhance the value of corporate environmental disclosures

As the focus of environmental policy and management shifts from cleaner production at the process level towards greener products as a whole, stakeholders ask for transparency throughout the entire value chain. This article assesses the comprehensiveness and the value of currently reported quantitative environmental disclosures of 97 listed companies from the automotive, banking, pharmaceutical and electronic hardware sectors. Findings indicate that quantitative environmental disclosures have many limitations, including incompleteness and inconsistency regarding corporate activities and sites, and limited internal data coherence. For many sectors, corporate disclosures only cover a very small share of the total environmental burden of products. A stepwise procedure is proposed to verify and improve the quality and completeness of reporting using life cycle approaches. We present simple data quality tests, and we introduce the concept of the environmental influence matrix, which provides a solid basis for the identification and prioritization of key performance indicators and areas of action. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Un siècle d'histoire coopérative à travers les statistiques de L'A.C.I.

Many authors have studied the quantitative evolution of the cooperative movement but their analysis was generally limited to a sector, a region or a specific period of time. Thanks to a collection by A. Leclerc (Moncton University, Canada) of all statistical information in possession of the International Cooperative Alliance, this study can rely on an exceptional database relating to the number of members affiliated to ICA since 1896. On the basis of this inventory, the authors try to determine the main orientations of the cooperative membership evolution over a period of nearly a century. In this article most of the results are presented by splitting the studied period into four development phases of the worldwide cooperative movement.     

Optimal search auctions

We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction. With independent bidders’ types and possibly interdependent valuations, the seller's problem can be reduced to a search problem in which the surplus is measured in terms of virtual utilities minus search costs. Compared to the socially efficient mechanism, the optimal mechanism features fewer participants, longer search conditional on the same set of participants, and inefficient sequence of entry.