Cities and Climate Change Challenges: Institutions,Policy Style and Adaptation Capacity in Bogotá

While a growing awareness of climate change has marked the institutional agenda at the national level in Colombia, the capital city of Bogotá has not undertaken actions to include adaptation to climate change within its policies so far. Conceptualizing the central role of city‐level institutions in the successful realization of adaptation policies is a straightforward matter. This is not the case for actions and conditions that may foster adaptation capacity according to varying institutional and social geographies. Using secondary data and a selection of interviews with key stakeholders occupying leading planning roles in important departments of the local administration, this article explores why and how a framework based on incentives and obstacles should be complemented by recent developments in the analysis of policy implementation based on the differentiation between political and programmatic success and failure on the basis of existing local policy styles.     

Marketing at the retail shelf: an examination of moderating effects of logistics on SKU market share

Given that the impact of retail shelf facings and price on a product’s market share is of substantial interest to marketing managers in the retail supply chain, we examine whether these relationships may be interdependent with the firm’s supply chain activities. We offer predictions regarding the interdependence of the marketing and supply chain variables using monthly in-store observations from 62 different retail stores from five different chains, taken over a 24-month period. The in-store observations included price and number of facings, which is combined with data obtained from the manufacturer on case pack quantity and market share data from the ACNielsen HomeScan consumer scanner panel. Results indicate that shelf facings impact the effects of price and case pack quantity on market share. In addition, we explore the strength of relationships across retailers employing everyday low price versus HiLo pricing strategies. Generally, our findings suggest that retailers and suppliers must work to integrate marketing activities and supply chain processes both within and across firms to most effectively serve the consumer at the retail shelf and increase market share.     

Can satellite‐based weather index insurance improve the hedging of yield risk of perennial non‐irrigated olive trees in Spain?*

Olive oil yields fluctuate strongly due to their dependence on sufficient precipitation. An interesting option to hedge the yield risk in olive cultivation could be satellite‐based weather index insurance. Therefore, we implement index insurance as a hedging alternative for non‐irrigated olive groves using MODerate‐resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite data. For this purpose, we focus on the Spanish region of Andalusia, given its importance in olive production at the international level. We calculate three satellite indices: the Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), the Temperature Condition Index (TCI) and the Vegetation Health Index (VHI). Meteorological indices related to temperature and precipitation are used as benchmarks. Firstly, we estimate the periods that have the greatest influence on the critical vegetative phase of olives, which extends from March to September. Based on the indices, insurance contracts are designed using a copula approach, which is then employed to evaluate their hedging effectiveness. On average, the hedging effectiveness of VCI‐, VHI‐ and TCI‐based weather index insurance contracts amounts to 38 per cent, 38 per cent and 29 per cent, respectively. Moreover, VCI‐ and VHI‐based weather index insurance contracts outperform traditional weather index insurance contracts based on precipitation (by 29 per cent) and temperature (by 16 per cent) indices.     

Dale Carnegie's Leadership Principles: Examining the Theoretical and Empirical Support

Dale Carnegie's best‐seller How to Win Friends & Influence People offers advice on leadership, interpersonal relationships, and persuasion. Though profoundly influential, Carnegie's self‐help book—including its nine guiding leadership principles—is based on anecdotes, case studies, and personal examples rather than empirical evidence. Examining the theoretical and empirical support behind Carnegie's leadership principles is essential for leaders to better understand whether to draw upon these principles and, if so, how and when to effectively use them in the workplace.     

Adapting public–private governance to the local context

Abstract

The article analyses the reform of water and sanitation services in Italy, which was introduced in 1994 and is still not fully implemented in many important respects. The introduction of a purchaser–provider split as envisaged in the national reform has had to come to terms with local power relationships and industrial and managerial status quo. In particular, network structures, leadership, and stakeholders' trade off along the top–down process from the policy design to final impacts prove to be relevant not only in reducing, but also in radically redefining objectives and outcomes of the policy. Thus, the concepts of governance and regulation at the local level are critically assessed in view of their dependence on the interplay of actors in local arenas, where power remains a prominent factor in determining processes and outcomes.     

Competing mechanism games of moral hazard: communication and robustness

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct mechanisms in the standard framework of Myerson (J Math Econ 10:67–81, 1982). Our results complement those of Han (J Econ Theory 137(1):610–626, 2007) who analyzes a complete information setting where agents’ actions are fully contractible.     

The credit crisis around the globe: Why did some banks perform better?

Though overall bank performance from July 2007 to December 2008 was the worst since the Great Depression, there is significant variation in the cross-section of stock returns of large banks across the world during that period. We use this variation to evaluate the importance of factors that have been put forth as having contributed to the poor performance of banks during the credit crisis. The evidence is supportive of theories that emphasize the fragility of banks financed with short-term capital market funding. The better-performing banks had less leverage and lower returns immediately before the crisis. Differences in banking regulations across countries are generally uncorrelated with the performance of banks during the crisis, except that large banks from countries with more restrictions on bank activities performed better and decreased loans less. Our evidence poses a substantial challenge to those who argue that poor bank governance was a major cause of the crisis because we find that banks with more shareholder-friendly boards performed significantly worse during the crisis than other banks, were not less risky before the crisis, and reduced loans more during the crisis.     

What lures cross-border venture capital inflows?

We investigate if economic factors drive gross and net cross-border venture capital inflows differently. Using a dataset of venture capital investments in European and North American countries from 2000 to 2008, we find that higher expected economic growth goes hand in hand with higher gross as well as net inflows, while higher market capitalization and a more favorable environment for venture capital intermediation entail higher gross inflows, but lower net inflows. The latter two findings may suggest that cross-border venture capital inflows partly compensate for potential limits in domestic venture capital supply. However, the findings may also reflect that venture capitalists’ locational decisions depend on the viability of capital markets.     

Assembling resources when forming a new business

Every business builds on a specific set of resources. New businesses in particular have to assemble external resources that are mostly new to them. This resource assembly requires developing business relationships with other actors that control and can provide the needed resources. Adopting a resource interaction perspective, this paper examines a case of a new business venture in the automobile industry. The case study shows that when forming a new business the actors possess only partial knowledge of how to assemble the resources. Consequently, the actors must engage in extensive adaptation and interaction with others to enact workable resource interfaces and combinations. This necessity makes the new business formation process nonlinear and onerous. Further, the case demonstrates that new business formation is a collective process involving not only the emergence of a formal business organization but also reorganizing the applicable resource market. Since third parties involved in developing the necessary resource combinations can be considered part of the new business venture, setting the boundaries of the new venture becomes arbitrary. The arbitrary nature of such boundary setting has implications in entrepreneurship studies with regard to the unit of analysis and the concept of opportunity.