Toward sustainable corporate behavior: The effect of the critical mass of female directors on environmental,social, and governance disclosure

Boards of directors have recently become more attentive to their stakeholders' concerns, providing more transparent information and adopting more sustainable business strategies. This study investigates the influence of a critical mass of women on boards on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure score and its three components separately. Using a sample of the FTSE-MIB listed companies in the 2005–2017 period, we show that reaching a critical mass of female board members—going from one or two women to at least three—enhances the level of ESG disclosure. The results also show that the critical mass of female board members has a positive influence on every component of the ESG score, with the highest contribution of women reaching the governance score. These findings provide insights to shareholders and policymakers and suggest that a critical mass of female board members is particularly effective in improving transparency, and it can be seen as a mechanism to transit to stakeholder governance, fostering more sustainable behavior in firms.     

Mobile gaming: Industry challenges and policy implications

Mobile games are a prime example of a successful mobile application and demonstrate the increasing range of platforms for the media and entertainment industries. Against this convergent background, this paper introduces the basic features of the mobile gaming market and its industrial ecosystem together with its main actors and activities. The focus of the paper lies in the challenges ahead for the evolution of mobile applications into a potentially dominant game platform and the possible disruptions along this road. The deep personal relationships between users and their mobile devices are considered to further explore the link between mobile games, players’ strategies and pending techno-economic developments. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some policy options to assist with the development of this domain.     

Localized Competition,Heterogeneous Firms and Vertical Relations

This paper investigates the link between firms' geographic configuration and market power in imperfect markets. We consider two related setups. The first illustrates the relevant characteristics of the pricing equilibrium. A main implication is that the equilibrium price vector changes in accordance with the firms' spatial configuration. The second, where firms operate as downstream retailers affiliated to rival upstream wholesalers, shows that upstream market power is strongly affected by an index of geographic concentration which reflects the spatial configuration of retailers. Finally, our analysis provides several insights for market delineation as well as merger evaluation and remedies.     

Inter industry and occupational wage differentials in Italy

The vast literture on wage determination in the post-war era extensively documents the existence of large and persistent wage differentials among industries and workers of comparable skills. This paper addresses the issue of wage dispersion in the context of the Italian economy. The stability over time of industry relative wages confirme previous results obtained for the other countries. A wide class of earings equations is estimated using microdata for the Italian manufacturing industry. The results provide little evidence in support of the view that wage dispersion can be explained by either unmeasured workers' charcteristics or by compensating wage differentials. Conversely, the estimated pattern of industry-occupation wage differentials is consistent with the existence of rent sharing mechanisms and fairness considerations.     

Development and validation of the Remote Working Benefits & Disadvantages scale

The changes that are constantly occurring in the labour sector have led organisations and companies to move towards digital transformation. This process was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and  conducted to a massive recourse to the practice of remote working, which in this study is understood as the term for the way of performing work outside the usual workplace and with the support of ICT. Currently, there are no flexible scales in the literature that allow measuring the benefits and disadvantages of remote working with a single instrument. Thus, the distinction between the positive and negative consequences of working remotely, substantiated by a solid literature, provides a framework for a systematical understanding of the issue. The aim of the present study is to develop and validate a scale on remote working benefits and disadvantages (RW-B&D scale). For this end, a preliminary Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with 304 participants, a tailored EFA with a sample of 301 workers and a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) with 677 workers were conducted. Participants were all Italian employees who worked remotely during the period of the COVID-19 health emergency. Data were collected between October 2020 and April 2021. The psychometric robustness of the model was assessed through bootstrap validation (5000 resamples), fit indices testing and measurement of factorial invariance. The statistical analyses demonstrated the bifactorial nature of the scale, supporting the research hypothesis. The model showed good fit indices, bootstrap validation reported statistically significant saturations, good reliability indices, and convergent and discriminant validity. Measurement invariance was tested for gender and organisational sector. The results suggested that the novel scale facilitates the quantitative measurement of the benefits and disadvantages associated with remote working in empirical terms. For this reason, it could be a streamlined and psychometrically valid instrument to identify the potential difficulties arising from remote working and, at the same time, the positive aspects that can be implemented to improve organisational well-being.

     

How financial intermediation impacts on financial stability?

The great financial crisis widened the role of financial intermediation in financial stability. This study develops a new financial intermediation variable, credit cash flow (CCF), which enables measurement of the net financial flow resulting from loan activity. An analysis provides evidence that CCF affects the capital buffer via credit gap behaviour, thus indicating the existence of a channel between the CCF and the capital buffer. Such a link offers the policy-maker the possibility to monitor the behaviour of financial intermediation carried out by banks, in order to avoid the outbreak of financial instability events.     

Stochastic dominance relations for integer variables

The objective of this paper is to derive some integer-majorization results for variable-sum comparisons. We use an axiomatic framework to establish equivalence between several intuitively reasonable conditions.     

Better-reply dynamics and global convergence to Nash equilibrium in aggregative games

We consider n-person games with quasi-concave payoffs that depend on a player's own action and the sum of all players' actions. We show that a discrete-time, stochastic process in which players move towards better replies—the better-reply dynamics—converges globally to a Nash equilibrium if actions are either strategic substitutes or strategic complements for all players around each Nash equilibrium that is asymptotically stable under a deterministic, adjusted best-reply dynamics. We present an example of a 2-person game with a unique equilibrium where the derivatives of the best-reply functions have different signs and the better-reply dynamics does not converge.     

STUDYING INEQUALITY IN INCOME DISTRIBUTION OF SINGLE-PERSON HOUSEHOLDS IN FOUR DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

The increasing frequency of single-person households has become a major economic phenomenon, and is likely to become an important political force. This paper focuses on differences related to inequality of income distribution among single-person households in Europe's four largest economies, i.e. France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. Income distribution was modeled in terms of individual characteristics using a parametric model with heterogeneous model parameters. Poverty differences were also broken down using the results of Biewen and Jenkins (2005 ) in order to understand the relationship between poverty and individual characteristics among countries.     

Identifying factors affecting the status of superhost: evidence from Sardinia and Sicily

Quality & Quantity - Airbnb is currently one of the most developed new forms of hospitality. It is essentially an online platform that connects the owners of apartments or rooms with potential...