Stakeholders Pressures and Strategic Prioritisation: An Empirical Analysis of Environmental Responses in Argentinean Firms

This article focusses on corporate attitudes to stakeholder environmental pressures in Argentina. It uses a cross section survey of 505 CEOs of Argentinean firms to gather information on environmental attitudes and a stakeholder theory framework to design and interpret the statistical analyses. It is underpinned by theoretical and empirical findings in the literature on stakeholder management, targeting in particular studies that deal with corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Latin America. Its general aim is to gain a deeper empirical understanding of the coherence between managers’ perceptions of stakeholder pressures and the importance they are given in corporate CSR strategies through an empirical investigation of environmental management (EM) decisions. In doing so, it uncovers general differences in the way firms perceive and treat groups of stakeholders. It also detects variations across firms, observing that some are typically proactive in their response to stakeholder pressures whilst others are less responsive. Profiling the various stakeholder networks and the corporate response strategies in this way encourages the development of stakeholder-focussed policies and corporate strategies that emphasise communications, awareness and a clear sense of direction. It concludes that CSR appears to be more effective in the protection of the environment than previously reported. Although this study focusses on EM in Argentina, the findings are more generally applicable.     

Students’ perception of CSR and its influence on business performance. A multiple mediation analysis

Firm managers play an important role in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions. Education is emerging as the key factor in developing a sense of moral responsibility amongst the business students who will eventually become company managers and decision makers. The aim of this research is, thus, twofold. First, to analyze the existence of a direct positive correlation between university students’ perception of CSR and its impact on business performance; and second, to examine the extent to which two factors (advantages brought by CSR and responsibilities toward stakeholders) act as mediation variables in the aforementioned correlation. The analysis was performed with a sample of 390 business‐related university students. Amongst the potential contributions made by this study we can highlight the possibility of knowing future managers’ way of thinking and of knowing the aspects where educational centers might improve their CSR teaching.     

Training and business performance: the Spanish case

This paper examines the relationship between training policies and business performance. Our research seeks to enlarge the empirical bibliography about the impact training has on firms and tries to challenge the criticism previous works with similar characteristics received. With this purpose in mind, we have used a theoretical model based on the hypothesis of a ‘cascade-type relationship’ between four types of organizational performance. The results obtained from a sample of Spanish firms show that training policy (based on the human capital theory and the resource-based theory) has a significant impact on firm performance.     

PROGRESSIVITY AND REDISTRIBUTION IN NON‐REVENUE NEUTRAL TAX REFORMS: THE LEVEL AND DISTANCE EFFECTS

Kakwani and Reynolds–Smolensky indices are used in the literature to measure the progressivity and redistributive capacity of taxes. These indices may, however, show some limits when used to make normative assessments about non‐revenue neutral tax reforms. Two approaches have traditionally been taken to overcome this problem. The first of these consists of comparing after‐tax income distributions through generalized Lorenz (concentration) curves. The second approach is based on the decomposition of changes in the Reynolds–Smolensky index into changes in the average tax rate and variations in progressivity. Nonetheless, this decomposition between the average tax rate and progressivity may be further exploited to obtain some information that can be relevant to assess tax reforms. The main aim of this study is to draw up some indicators that can be useful to quantify the effects of non‐revenue neutral tax reforms. These indicators are used to investigate the last personal income tax reforms that have taken place in Spain.     

Social Welfare Analysis in a Financial Economy with Risk Regulation

In the last years, regulating agencies of many countries in the world have adopted VaR‐based risk regulation to control market risk of financial institutions. This paper investigates the consequences of such kind of regulation to social welfare and soundness of financial institutions through an equilibrium model. We show that the optimum level of regulation for each financial institution (the level that maximizes its utility) depends on its appetite for risk and that some of them can perform better in a regulated economy. In addition, another important result asserts that under certain market conditions the financial fragility of an institution can be greater in a regulated economy than in an unregulated one.     

The Effects of Formal and Informal Contracting in Credit Availability

This paper investigates how the use of collateral (formal contracting), along with the market power of banks (which facilitates relational contracts), affects the availability of credit for business firms. Using loan data from the Spanish Credit Register, we show that the average credit quality of borrowers in a provincial market decreases with market concentration and the availability of collateral. Additionally, the marginal effect of each variable decreases with the higher values of the other variable. We also find that credit line interest rates increase with the availability of collateral, although the increase is lower for banks operating in more concentrated credit markets. Therefore, market power (relations) and collateral (formal contracting) act as substitutes to increase the availability of bank finance under asymmetric information.     

Credit Spreads and Monetary Policy

We consider the desirability of modifying a standard Taylor rule for interest rate policy to incorporate adjustments for measures of financial conditions. We consider the consequences of such adjustments for the way policy would respond to a variety of disturbances, using the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with credit frictions developed in Cúrdia and Woodford (2009a) . According to our model, an adjustment for variations in credit spreads can improve upon the standard Taylor rule, but the optimal size of adjustment depends on the source of the variation in credit spreads. A response to the quantity of credit is less likely to be helpful.