Confirmatory factor analysis to validate a new measure of food insecurity: perceived and actual constructs

Quality & Quantity - Food crises in 2008 raised the need for more timely and effective policy instruments to monitor and fight food insecurity. FAO developed the Food Insecurity Experience...     

Mergers and acquisitions & trade: A global value chain analysis

The present paper deals with how the insertion in international trade and global value chains (GVCs) of countries affects their capacity of attracting foreign mergers and acquisitions (M&As). To this end, we combine data for bilateral M&As and trade in value added for the period 2001–15 and estimate an augmented gravity equation. Results indicate that trade openness per se does not favour M&As. Nevertheless, bilateral free trade agreements, heterogeneity of destinations (sources) for exports (imports) of intermediate and final goods, and position and participation in global value chains are relevant for explaining bilateral M&As. Moreover, their role is significantly different depending on the level of development of the home and host countries.     

The dark side of buyer-supplier relationships: A social capital perspective

The literature on supply chain management (SCM) has consistently promoted the “bright side” of collaborative buyer-supplier relationships (BSRs). Based on the social capital argument, SCM scholars have investigated how a buyer can gain access to and leverage resources through its collaborative BSRs. Our study extends this research stream by considering the “dark side” of social capital in BSRs. It evaluates how social capital in its cognitive, relational, and structural forms contributes to or impedes value creation within BSRs. Both primary survey measures and secondary objective measures have been used in data analysis. The results show the presence of both the bright side, confirming the existing literature, and the dark side, extending the literature. There is an inverted curvilinear relationship between social capital and performance: Either too little or too much social capital can hurt performance. This study confirms that building social capital in a collaborative BSR positively affects buyer performance, but that if taken to an extreme it can reduce the buyer's ability to be objective and make effective decisions as well as increase the supplier's opportunistic behavior. Our study also examines how a buyer can delay the emergence of the dark side. It opens up new research avenues in the collaborative BSR context and suggests directions for future research and practice.     

How do female entrepreneurs perform? Evidence from three developing regions

Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey data, we analyze performance gaps between male- and female-owned companies in three regions—Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA), Latin America (LA), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Among our findings are significant gender gaps between male- and female-owned companies in terms of firm size, but much smaller gaps in terms of firm efficiency and growth (except in LA). Part of the reason women run smaller firms is that they tend to concentrate in sectors in which firms are smaller and less efficient (in ECA and SSA). By contrast, we find no evidence of gender discrimination in access to formal finance in any of the three regions, although in ECA women are less likely than men to seek formal finance. Finally, while female entrepreneurs receive smaller loans than their male counterparts, the returns from each dollar they receive is no lower in terms of overall sales revenue.     

A COMPARISON OF LIVING STANDARDS ACROSS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

We use an expected utility model to examine how living standards, or welfare, vary across the United States and how each state's welfare has evolved over time, accounting for cross-state variations in mortality, consumption, education, leisure, and inequality. We find considerable cross-state heterogeneity in welfare levels. This is robust to allowing for endogenous interstate migration and to computing welfare conditional on education, gender, and race. Although states experienced heterogeneous welfare growth rates between 1999 and 2015 (1.68–3.73% per year), there is no evidence of convergence in welfare levels, including during the subperiods preceding and following the Great Recession.     

Antecedents and outcomes of personal mastery: cross-country evidence in Higher Education

This paper contributes to our understanding of personal mastery by providing fresh insights from a cross-national study in Higher Education (HE). It presents findings from a rich sample of informants in two well-established universities in the UK and Vietnam, and develops a framework that illustrates the antecedents and outcomes of personal mastery in the two cultures. The multi-level analysis performed provides valuable insights that extend our current understanding of personal mastery beyond the individual level as it is traditionally theorized. Instead, we are able to show that a number of contextual conditions at the organizational, industry and the national culture that may also have a bearing on the way personal mastery is cultivated. By contributing a richer account of the multifaceted nature of personal mastery, the paper draws attention to a range of implications for both future research and practice. In particular, it invites practitioners in HE to apply the theories they develop in practice.     

Gender and Poverty Risk in Europe

This study advances research on the structural dimension in the predominantly individual-oriented field of poverty studies by evaluating to what extent cross-national differences in population and structural characteristics can explain the differences in poverty outcomes by gender. To facilitate an approach that integrates individual and structural context dimensions, the paper takes advantage of multilevel techniques to test gender differences in the risk of being poor, entering into poverty, and exiting from poverty among seventeen European countries. The analysis covers single-adult households, drawing on data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for the years 2007–8. The study concludes that structural effects, such as welfare state policies, labor market characteristics, level of inequality, and the level of women's empowerment in the country, seem to be more relevant than individual effects in explaining differences in the gender poverty gap among countries.     

Family influence on young adult's brand evaluation. An empirical analysis focused on parent–children influence in three consumer packaged goods

Throughout the years, there has been debate in the consumer research literature on how families influence their children's attitudes to brands. This paper analyses parent–young adult children influence on the creation of brand associations, perceived quality and willingness to pay a price premium. In order to fulfil these goals, an empirical analysis using a sample of 349 young adults has been conducted. Relationships have been analysed by means of structural equations models in three consumer packaged goods, and results obtained allow us to conclude that the information provided by parents may foster the creation of brand associations, it may favour young adults' positive perception of the brand's quality, and finally, it may lead young adults to be willing to pay a price premium for the brand.     

Bayesian Value-at-Risk with product partition models

In this paper we propose a novel Bayesian methodology for Value-at-Risk computation based on parametric Product Partition Models. Value-at-Risk is a standard tool for measuring and controlling the market risk of an asset or portfolio, and is also required for regulatory purposes. Its popularity is partly due to the fact that it is an easily understood measure of risk. The use of Product Partition Models allows us to remain in a Normal setting even in the presence of outlying points, and to obtain a closed-form expression for Value-at-Risk computation. We present and compare two different scenarios: a product partition structure on the vector of means and a product partition structure on the vector of variances. We apply our methodology to an Italian stock market data set from Mib30. The numerical results clearly show that Product Partition Models can be successfully exploited in order to quantify market risk exposure. The obtained Value-at-Risk estimates are in full agreement with Maximum Likelihood approaches, but our methodology provides richer information about the clustering structure of the data and the presence of outlying points.