Cooperative Management of Groundwater Resources in the Presence of Environmental Externalities

This paper investigates how cooperation among users can achieve a better management of groundwater in the presence of environmental externalities. Cooperation allows users to internalize the damages caused by their activities and reduce extractions. The paper develops a game theoretical framework to assess the value of cooperation in an aquifer that is divided into three sub-aquifers that are being overly exploited. Two types of externalities are modeled: first, water extractions in each sub-aquifer impact water levels in neighboring sub-aquifers (extraction externality). Second, the three sub-aquifers are also connected to an ecosystem and thus decisions in each sub-aquifer affect the health of the ecosystem (environmental externality). A cooperative game theory model is applied. The model empirically shows how the uncontrolled extractions in each sub-aquifer affects neighboring groundwater users but also cause severe impacts to the linked ecosystem. The model is tested empirically in one of the most important aquifers in Spain, the Eastern la Mancha aquifer. The results illustrate how both extraction and environmental externalities interact in affecting the likelihood of cooperation among the users. The paper estimates the value of cooperation and its stability with and without the environmental externality.     

The client as co-manufacturer and environmental entrepreneur: a research agenda

The purpose of this article is to detect issues of greatest interest and to establish a proposal that can be used as a basis to study the client's environmental entrepreneurship in service sector companies. The study is based on the existing literature on service innovation and the bibliography dedicated to environmental management specific to these innovations. This study poses a few questions that, together with many others, must be addressed in the future. These studies will inevitably contribute to improve the environmental performance of service companies.     

Management and employee involvement in achieving an environmental action-based competitive advantage: an empirical study

The objective of this work is to conduct an empirical study that shows whether certain management and human resource factors influence the achievement of an environmental action-based competitive advantage in a company. To this end, we have taken a sample of 110 factories. Management's deep involvement and its strategic integration, as well as employee motivation and participation, have a positive impact on the achievement of an environmental action-based competitive advantage in a company.     

Latin America: Environmental and firm-level challenges

During the last decades Latin America, as the rest of the world, has gone through a process of increased commercial openness and due to the commodities price boom of the last years the region has grown significantly. However competitiveness hasn't improved much, mostly due to lack of concern from governments. Companies, though, cope with the increase in competition resulting from the greater openness by refining their management practices in the different management areas: marketing, finance, information technology and strategy. Academics study these effects in the papers that comprise the special issue of the Journal of Business Research with the best papers from the conferences of the Business Association for Latin American Studies (BALAS).     

Types of entrepreneurs and firms: The case of new Spanish firms

The main purpose of this paper is to present an empirical analysis of the sequence relating the performance of the firm to its behavior, which in turn depends upon the origin and personal characteristics of the entrepreneurs. The data are drawn from new Spanish firms. A typology of new entrepreneurs is constructed, based on their basic work aspirations. Each type of entrepreneur is then examined, in terms of the origin and personal characteristics of the members of the class. The results of the study show that significant differences exist among the entrepreneurs and firms of each type, especially in terms of the size of the firm (number of employees) and its evolution over time. The implications of these results, for the theory of entrepreneurship and for the design of policies towards the creation of new firms, are then derived.     

High-involvement practices in human resource management: concept and factors that motivate their adoption

Using data on 250 Spanish firms, we examine the incidence of high-involvement practices and investigate what variables are associated with the adoption of these practices. Particularly, we analyse the influence of size, age, competitive advantage, activity sector, the existence of a recent crisis, culture, leadership style and the competitiveness of the environment on the adoption of high-involvement work practices. With all this, we try to offer an exploratory view of nature of the contexts that condition the adoption of such practices, with the aim of motivating future research more thoroughly.     

Organizational culture and human resources in the environmental issue: a review of the literature

From the resourced-based view, the weakness of organizations' business culture and their shortcomings in human resources may be important obstacles in the process of environmental action. However, as the number of works on these questions is still limited, our aim is to integrate the classical literature concerning business culture and human resources and the small number of works concerning these aspects of environmental management. Several issues, such as managerial duties, the role of organizational culture in the formation of environmental internal stakeholders' awareness, organizational involvement in environmental issues, environmental training and concern, environmental motivation and incentives and implementation and organizational innovations, may be very important for thesuccess of companies' environmental strategy. However, it seems necessary to carry out studies in which qualitative and quantitative methodologies are applied.     

Adverse Selection and Entrepreneurship in a Model of Development

This paper presents a theory in which talented entrepreneurs are identified as the key agents driving the process of development and modernisation. Entrepreneurial skills are private information, which prevents full risk sharing. Development into a modern industrial economy might fail to take place, since potentially talented entrepreneurs may refrain from taking on the entrepreneurial risks as a way to avoid income shocks. An interesting feature of the model is the fact that the informational asymmetries are endogenous to the process of development, as they are related to the heterogeneity in entrepreneurial skills required in the manufacturing activities.     

SPINOFFS AND THE MARKET FOR IDEAS*

We present a theory of entry through spinoffs where workers generate ideas and possess private information concerning their quality. Because quality is privately observed, adverse selection implies that the market can only offer a price that reflects the average quality of ideas sold. Only workers with good ideas decide to spin off, whereas workers with mediocre ideas sell them. Existing firms pay a price for ideas sold in the market that implies zero expected profits. Hence, firms’ project selection is independent of firm size, which can lead to scale‐independent growth. This mechanism results in invariant firm‐size distributions that resemble the data.     

Specialization and concentration: a note on theory and evidence

We study the prediction of the theory in Rossi-Hansberg [Rossi-Hansberg E (2005) Am Econ Rev 95(5):1464–1491] that, under quite general circumstances, lower transport costs increase specialization of regions or countries and decrease (regional) concentration of industries. This prediction contradicts the contention of other models and many empirical papers that specialization and concentration should move in parallel. We use two data sets on manufacturing industries across US States and EU member countries to show specialization and concentration do not develop in parallel. The empirical data replicates some of the features of the divergence predicted in the model.