Recent evidence on the impact of government budget deficits on the ex ante real interest rate yield on Moody’s Baa-rated corporate bonds

This study provides recent empirical evidence on the impact of the federal budget deficit on the ex ante real interest rate yield on Moody’s Baa-rated corporate bonds. The study is couched within an open loanable funds model that includes the ex ante real short term real interest rate, the M1 money supply, net international capital inflows, and the unemployment rate. Using quarterly data for the period 1973.1–2007.4, two-stage least squares estimation reveals that the federal budget deficit, expressed as a percent of GDP, exercised a positive and statistically significant impact on the ex ante real interest rate yield on these corporate issues.     

The Power of Stakeholders' Voice: The Effects of Social Media Activism on Stock Markets

Building on social movement theory, this study assesses the influence of social media activism on the stock market performance of targeted firms. We focus on information published on Twitter by two critical stakeholders: consumer associations and trade unions. To the extent that social media represent a valid medium to mobilize stakeholders' activism, protests on Twitter may damage firm reputation, leading to capital market reactions. Using a corpus of over 1.5 million tweets referring to Spanish listed banks, we study the impact of activism by looking at targeted firms' abnormal variations in price and trading volume. Our findings suggest that the Twitter activism of key stakeholders has a significant impact on investors' decisions. Further, our empirical analyses indicate that the mechanisms affecting investors' behavior differ depending on the characteristics of the stakeholder group. Hence, this study contributes to understanding how social movements influence corporate behavior via social media. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Assessing ethical behaviours in the Spanish banking and insurance industries: evidence and challenges

This study aims to improve understanding of the ethical nature of the relations in two labour-intensive industries to facilitate the creation of an ethical culture. For this purpose, the authors first review literature related to the main influences on ethical behaviour, then perform an empirical analysis of those factors using a hierarchical stepwise regression of a database of 525 banking and insurance employees. Contrary to expectations, leadership has a less important effect on ethical behaviour than other organizational factors. The results reveal several implications for improving the management of ethical behaviour in these industries.     

Mean reversion in long-horizon real exchange rates: Evidence from Latin America

This paper examines mean reversion in real effective exchange rates in six leading Latin American economies during the XXth century using a new data set. A unit-root approach is complemented by an error-correction model including key fundamentals such as terms of trade, trade openness and relative productivities. Unit-root testing shows a very slow process of reversion – if any – to a constant mean in the original series, rejecting the strict PPP hypothesis; however, mean reversion is found after allowing for trends and structural breaks with a half-life average of 1½ years for the six countries. We also found reversion to a conditional mean defined by the co-integrating relationship with an average half-life of 2½ years. Our estimates, although lower than the 3–5 year range that motivated the Rogoff’s puzzle, still indicate the presence of important obstacles to the adjustment process that need further investigation.     

Different Paths to Collaboration Between Businesses and Civil Society and the Role of Third Parties

In this article, we suggest that one of the unexplored paths toward collaboration between firms and civil society organizations starts with confrontation or potential conflict, and that the transition toward collaboration can be further understood if one focuses on triadic relationships rather than dyadic ones. We analyze the presence of third parties and their different roles to explain how collaboration is facilitated. The article aims at bringing together the bodies of research on business–civil society confrontation and on business–civil society collaboration. It offers a comparative analysis of four case studies, and proposes a typology of third parties composed of facilitating allies, participating allies, mediators, and solution seekers. We conclude with some implications for further research as well as for practice.     

A century of economic growth in Latin America

This paper makes a contribution to the study of economic growth in developing countries by analyzing the six largest Latin American economies over 105 years within a two-equation framework. Confirming previous findings, physical and human capital prove to be key determinants of GDP per head growth. However, a more controversial result is an overall negative conditional correlation between trade openness and GDP per head growth — though openness has a positive link via investment. The evidence also shows that macroeconomic instability has been a drag on long-term growth in the region.     

Modelling Electricity Prices: International Evidence*

This article analyses the evolution of electricity prices in deregulated markets. We present a general class of models that simultaneously takes into account several factors: seasonality, mean reversion, GARCH behaviour and time‐dependent jumps. The models are applied to daily equilibrium spot prices of eight electricity markets. Eight different nested models were estimated to compare the relative importance of each factor in each of the eight markets. We find strong evidence that electricity equilibrium prices are mean‐reverting, with volatility clustering (GARCH) and with jumps of time‐dependent intensity, even after adjusting for seasonality.     

Employment Effects of Offshoring across Sectors and Occupations in Japan

In the case of Japan, the studies conducted so far focus alone on firm‐level data and delve into the productivity effects and the skill upgrading between skilled and unskilled workers. Here, we carry out an empirical analysis of the employment effects of offshoring for Japanese industries on a broader classification of skills or occupations, while considering the three major sectors of the economy and taking account of both services and materials offshoring. The results suggest that various types of offshoring affect occupations differently. In particular, services offshoring tends to benefit highly skilled occupations more, while materials offshoring tends to benefit production workers instead.     

Semiparametric Estimation of a Duration Model

Within the framework of the proportional hazard model proposed in Cox (1972), Han and Hausman (1990) consider the logarithm of the integrated baseline hazard function as constant in each time period. We, however, proposed an alternative semiparametric estimator of the parameters of the covariate part. The estimator is considered as semiparametric since no prespecified functional form for the error terms (or certain convolution) is needed. This estimator, proposed in Lewbel (2000) in another context, shows at least four advantages. The distribution of the latent variable error is unknown and may be related to the regressors. It takes into account censored observations, it allows for heterogeneity of unknown form and it is quite easy to implement since the estimator does not require numerical searches. Using the Spanish Labour Force Survey, we compare empirically the results of estimating several alternative models, basically on the estimator proposed in Han and Hausman (1990) and our semiparametric estimator.