Social Responsibility and Social Security: The Foundation of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Caja de Pensiones para la Vejez y de Ahorros</Emphasis>

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is not new. Many entrepreneurs created and developed companies along the time, with a strong sense of ethical and social responsibility. This article presents an example of how CSR was conceived and put into practice when Caja de Pensiones para la Vejez y de Ahorros was created in Barcelona in 1905, following the life and ideas of its founder, Francesc Moragas, a lawyer with a deep commitment for social action and a successful conception of the technical and economic dimensions of a financial and social institution.     

Financial contagion in the laboratory: The cross-market rebalancing channel

We present the results of the first experimental study of financial markets contagion. We develop a model of financial contagion amenable to be tested in the laboratory. In the model, contagion happens because of cross-market rebalancing, a channel for transmission of shocks across markets first studied by Kodres and Pritsker (2002). Theory predicts that, because of portfolio rebalancing, a negative shock in one market transmits itself to the others, as investors adjust their portfolio allocations. The theory is supported by the experimental results. The price observed in the laboratory is close to that predicted by theory, and strong contagion effects are observed. The results are robust across different market structures. Moreover, as theory predicts, lower asymmetric information in a (“developed”) financial market increases the contagion effects in (“emerging”) markets.     

Asymmetric stock market volatility and the cyclical behavior of expected returns

Recent explanations of aggregate stock market fluctuations suggest that countercyclical stock market volatility is consistent with rational asset evaluations. In this paper, I develop a framework to study the causes of countercyclical stock market volatility. I find that countercyclical risk premia do not imply countercyclical return volatility. Instead, countercyclical stock volatility occurs if risk premia increase more in bad times than they decrease in good times, thereby inducing price–dividend ratios to fluctuate more in bad times than in good. The business cycle asymmetry in the investors’ attitude toward discounting future cash flows plays a novel and critical role in many rational explanations of asset price fluctuations.     

Complements and substitutes in sequential auctions: the case of water auctions

We use data on sequential water auctions to estimate demand when units are complements or substitutes. A sequential English auction model determines the estimating structural equations. When units are complements, one bidder wins all units by paying a high price for the first unit, thus deterring others from bidding on subsequent units. When units are substitutes, different bidders win the units with positive probability, paying prices similar in magnitude. We recover individual demand consistent with this stark pattern of outcomes and confirm it is not collusive but consistent with noncooperative behavior. Demand estimates are biased if one ignores these features.     

Real effective exchange rate and the constant elasticity of substitution assumption

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is an aggregation of several bilateral real exchange rates assuming constant elasticity of substitution (CES) between goods from different countries. We investigate the validity of the CES assumption by estimating manufacturing export equations for 56 countries over 26 years. Under the CES assumption, splitting the REER into two components should not increase the fit in an export equation and the coefficients on the two REERs should be equal. We reject both these implications and find that the export equations with two REERs—vs. OECD and vs. nonOECD countries—perform better than the traditional ones.     

How Different Is the Efficiency of Public and Private Water Companies in Asia?

Several studies have compared the efficiency of publicly andprivately owned water utilities and reached conflicting conclusionson the impact of ownership on efficiency. This article providesfurther evidence by estimating a stochastic cost frontier fora sample of Asian and Pacific regional water companies. Theresults show that efficiency is not significantly differentin private companies than in public ones.     

Digital Transformation and Innovation Management: A Synthesis of Existing Research and an Agenda for Future Studies

Management and organizational scholars have paid increasing attention to the interconnections between digital transformation and innovation management in the last decade. However, a highly fragmented understanding of this topic is what we are left with so far. In this editorial, we suggest an approach to open up the black box of the interplay between digital transformation and innovation management by providing a framework that identifies three levels of analyisis (i.e., macro, meso, and micro) along which existing and future research on the topic can be organized. This model encourages scholars to conduct theoretical and empirical studies on how digital transformation affects ecosystems’ structure and governance, how industries and firms compete and organize for innovation in a digitalized world, how the processes for developing new products and services change under the effect of digital technologies, and the implications of digital transformation on managing people and teams involved in the innovation process, among the other topics. We also provide a synthesis of the eight papers published in the Special Issue that this editorial introduces and develop an agenda for future research that will hopefully contribute to encourage and shape future scholarly efforts into this field.     

Interdependent preferences and segregating equilibria

This paper shows that models where preferences of individuals depend not only on their allocations, but also on the well being of other persons, can produce both large and testable effects. We study the allocation of workers with heterogeneous productivities to firms. We show that even small deviations from purely “selfish” preferences leads to widespread workplace skill segregation. That is, workers of different abilities tend to work in different firms, as long as they care somewhat more about the utilities of workers who are “close”. This result holds for a broad class and distribution of social preferences.     

Changes over time in the pattern of comparative advantage in manufactured goods: An empirical analysis for the period 1962–1974

This article presents a simple methodology for analysing empirically the extent, pace, and timing of changes over time in the pattern of comparative advantage in manufactured goods. This methodology is based upon the OLS estimation of time series of values of some elasticity- parameters measuring the impact of various country-attributes, and in particular of technology- endowments, upon the pattern of comparative advantage in each product. The methodology proposed here is then applied to the empirical analysis of shifts in the pattern of comparative advantage in 25 groups of products over the period 1962–1974.