Conditional Cash Transfers, Schooling, and Child Labor: Micro-Simulating Brazil's Bolsa Escola Program

A growing number of developing economies are providing cashtransfers to poor people that require certain behaviors on theirpart, such as attending school or regularly visiting healthcare facilities. A simple ex ante methodology is proposed forevaluating such programs and used to assess the Bolsa Escolaprogram in Brazil. The results suggest that about 60 percentof poor 10- to 15-year-olds not in school enroll in responseto the program. The program reduces the incidence of povertyby only a little more than one percentage point, however, andthe Gini coefficient falls just half a point. Results are betterfor measures more sensitive to the bottom of the distribution,but the effect is never large.     

Job and worker flows in high adjustment cost settings

This paper analyses the relationship between the size of adjustment costs and the intensity of labor market flows. I argue that high adjustment costs inhibit adjustment to temporary shocks, leaving adjustment to long-lived shocks unchanged. Worker turnover is also reduced because of the negative impact that adjustment costs have on churning.Received: January 2002, Accepted: November 2002, JEL Classification: J23, J63I am grateful to the FCT for funding this research (research grant Praxis/PCSH/C/CEG/13/96), and to Pedro Portugal, Daniel Hamermesh and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I thank the Department of Statistics at the Ministry of Labor for providing the data. CETE is supported by the FCT.     

Exploiting short-run predictability

This paper measures the utility gains from exploiting short-run predictability in the volatility of stock returns in a dynamic model in the the presence of transaction costs, short-selling constraints and estimation risk. We find that utility gains are quite significant, both ex ante and out-of-sample.     

Does integrity matter for CSR practice in organizations? The mediating role of transformational leadership

Scholars have long debated whether leader's integrity affects managerial decision making with respect to social responsibility. In this paper, we propose a model in which transformational leadership mediates integrity and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and examine the relationship between these concepts. A survey of 170 senior managers from 50 organizations was conducted. Results indicate that integrity is a predictor of transformational leadership behavior and that transformational leaders’ behaviors are linked to CSR practices. It was also found that leaders rated with higher integrity are engaged in CSR because they exhibit more transformational leadership behaviors. These findings add to the extant literature by demonstrating that integrity is important as transformational leaders engage more actively on ‘responsible’ behaviors. Practical implications call for an understanding among corporate leaders of the benefits of integrity and how it relates to transformational leadership. Organizations can improve their selection and leadership development processes by focusing on these two dimensions.     

Fiscal harmonization in the European Union with public inputs

Fiscal harmonization among the European Union member states is a goal involving major difficulties for its implementation. Each country faces a particular trade-off between fiscal revenues generated by taxation and the productive efficiency loss induced by their respective tax code. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of these trade-offs for a number of the European Union (EU-15) member states using a dynamic general equilibrium model with public inputs. Calibration of the model for the EU-15 member states provides the following results: i) the maximum tax revenue level is relatively far from the current tax levels for most countries; ii) the cases of Sweden, Denmark and Finland are anomalous, as productive efficiency can be gained by lowering tax rates without affecting fiscal revenues; iii) in general, countries would obtain efficiency gains without changing fiscal revenues by reducing the capital tax and increasing the labor tax; and iv) capital tax harmonization to the average capital tax rate can be done with quite small changes in both fiscal revenues and output for most countries.     

Toward Consumption Reduction: An Environmentally Motivated Perspective

Faced with the threat of climate change, there is a challenge to promote more environmentally friendly consumption patterns. This work seeks to unearth psychographic and socio‐demographic factors that could trigger environmentally motivated reductions in consumption. The context of empirical investigation is the European Union (i.e., a large‐scale sample of European citizens), with a focus on two key types of environmentally motivated consumption reduction: domestic and “out‐of‐home” (purchasing) activities. The findings show the interrelated effects of environmental knowledge and ecological motivations (in both aggregated and disaggregated forms) on positive and negative environmental attitudes, which in turn influence consumption reduction. There is also evidence of significant moderating influences of perceived environmental threat, gender, age, education, and country value orientation—particularly on “environmental knowledge” links. The findings reported here contribute to theory and practice toward environmental sustainability.     

Work,Virtues, and Flourishing: A Special Issue from the EBEN 25th Annual Conference

Journal of Business Ethics - The paper is the introduction to a selection of papers submitted to the EBEN 25th Annual Conference which took place at IESE Business School in Barcelona from September...     

The Creation of Value Through Corporate Reputation

The relationship between social and financial performance (CSP – FP) has been a main objective in the literature on business management, as it would provide an economic justification for the social investment insofar as it contributes to the creation of value. This relationship has been empirically tested by several authors though without using a theoretical model that sustains this relationship. The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical model of the process of the creation of value from the reputation generated by companies, integrating the factors that have been shown to be more relevant in this process from previous research, in such a way that hypotheses are put forward regarding the existence of this relationship and the factors that determine it. Finally, an empirical test is performed using the 100 most prestigious companies operating in Spain during 2004.