Sustainability adrift: An evaluation of the credibility of sustainability information disclosed by public organizations

This article aims to evaluate the credibility of information disclosed by public organizations in terms of sustainable development. It focuses on an under-studied aspect in the sustainability reporting literature—namely, the factors that may affect the credibility of disclosure practices. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of the sustainable development content of annual management reports disclosed by 113 ministries and public bodies in the province of Quebec, Canada. The findings shed more light on the main factors that affect the credibility of the information disclosed therein, particularly in terms of lack of transparency and flawed monitoring mechanisms.     

Some Further Results on the Tempered Multistable Approach

This article provides new results on the tempered multistable approach. After a preliminary section recalling the main definitions, we show the correspondence between a series representation and a characteristic function representation for asymmetrical field-based tempered multistable processes and for asymmetrical independent increments tempered multistable processes. We also show that both processes are semimartingales, which is a convenient property in finance. Next, we study the structure of autocorrelations that is conveyed by this approach. Finally, we provide an illustration showing the term structures of Value-at-Risk that can be obtained with this model.     

EXPLAINING THE SPREAD OF TEMPORARY JOBS AND ITS IMPACT ON LABOR TURNOVER

This article provides a simple model that explains the choice between permanent and temporary jobs. This model, which incorporates important features of actual employment protection legislations neglected by the economic literature so far, reproduces the main stylized facts about entries into permanent and temporary jobs observed in Continental European countries. We find that job protection has very small effects on total employment but induces large substitution of temporary jobs for permanent jobs, which significantly reduces aggregate production.     

Optimal Insurance Against Climatic Experience

An optimal insurance contract against a climatic risk is derived in the presence of an uninsurable and dependent aggregate production risk. The optimal design depends on the stochastic dependency between both sources of uncertainty and on the producer's attitude towards risk, especially on his prudent behavior. Rational weather insurance purchasing decisions are also derived. The prudent producer responds to actuarially fair weather insurance by increasing his exposure towards risk.     

Management and Business Research on Commercial Diplomacy: Examining Trends and Themes

This article reviews the literature of commercial diplomacy during the period 1960–2014 from a management angle and is organized around four major themes: (1) government’s export/trade promotion function; (2) institutional/organizational arrangements; (3) managerial roles and activities; and (4) interaction between commercial diplomats and businesses. A complementary quantitative analysis tracing current research trends reveals the emergence of relevant publications at the end of the 1970s and a real increase after 2000. It also confirms the relative scarcity of commercial diplomacy literature focusing on the business and management dimension. Gaps in current literature are identified, and suggestions for further research are presented.     

Estimating Value Creation from Revealed Preferences: Application to Value‐based Strategies

Research summary : We develop and apply a new set of empirical tools consistent with the tenets of value‐based business strategies, leveraging the principle that “no good deal comes undone” and the methods of revealed preferences, to empirically estimate drivers of value creation. We demonstrate how to use these tools in an analysis of value creation in buyer–supplier relationships in the UK corporate legal market. We show that our approach can uncover evidence of subtle mechanisms that traditional methods cannot easily distinguish from each other. Furthermore, we show how the estimates can be used as parameters of biform games for out‐of‐sample analyses of strategic decisions. With readily available data on relationships between firms, this approach can be applied to many other contexts of interest to strategy researchers. Managerial summary : Managers need to understand the drivers of value creation for customers in order to make competitive positioning decisions and understand when they can capture value under competition. However, estimates of the relative importance of each driver are typically difficult to obtain. In this article, we help remedy this problem by demonstrating a novel method that obtains estimates of the contribution of various drivers of value creation from commonly available data of buyer–supplier relationships. These estimates can then be used to inform the strategy‐making process. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing the martingale difference hypothesis in CO2 emission allowances

This study examines the martingale difference hypothesis (MDH) for the carbon emission allowance market within the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) during the Phase I and the Phase II, using both daily and weekly data over the 2005–2009 period. We analyze the MDH for spot prices negotiated on BlueNext, European Energy Exchange and Nord Pool along with futures prices negotiated on BlueNext and European Climate Exchange, using the new variance ratio tests developed by Kim (2009) and the generalized spectral test proposed by Escanciano and Velasco (2006). For the Phase I, the results show that the spot price changes of these three markets are predictable, suggesting the possibility of abnormal returns through speculation, except during the period April 2006 to October 2006, namely after the compliance break and before the ECs of stricter NAP II. Finally, we find that the CO₂ spot and futures price changes are unpredictable during the Phase II because we failed to reject the MDH based on both daily and weekly data. Thus, these markets are found to be weak-form efficient.