Autocratic tensions,cronyism, and the opacity of business information: party newspapers and circulation figures during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975)

Autocracies draw their political power from cronyism and organized repression. The opacity of business information (economic censorship) protects these regimes and their crony firms from any opposition. However, autocracies might also desire to eliminate cronyism (and therefore opacity) because it dampens economic growth. Autocracies survive through repression that engenders tensions, as evident in the Spanish newspaper industry during the Francoist dictatorship. State control over this industry was important because the press disseminated news to the public. From 1939 to 1957, the autocracy institutionalized both cronyism and the opacity of circulation figures to sustain the political powers of Franco and the single party state. Opacity concealed the economic performance of newspapers owned by sole legal party and any distribution of resources in its favor. Franco authorized voluntary disclosure of reliable circulation figures in 1964, after eliminating cronyism in favor of a freer market. Repression guaranteed support for this industry until Franco's death.     

Does Branch Religiosity Influence Bank Risk‐Taking?

Using branch‐level data on public and private US banking institutions, we investigate the importance of branch religiosity in shaping bank risk‐taking behavior. Our results show robust evidence that branch religiosity is negatively related to bank risk‐taking. This effect persists after controlling for several bank‐level and county‐level variables that might correlate with religiosity. Moreover, this result is robust to controlling for headquarter religiosity, suggesting that the effect of branch religiosity is additive and not washed out by headquarter religiosity. Overall, our findings document that headquarter religiosity does not capture the full effect of religiosity on bank behavior, as claimed by previous research, but that the religiosity of the geographic area in which the bank operates significantly influences bank behavior.     

A decade of occupational accidents due to direct or indirect electrical contact in the primary,secondary and tertiary sectors in Spain (2003–2012)

Occupational accidents caused by electrical contact are a major concern worldwide due to their severe consequences. The study conducted is based on an analysis of the evolution of incidence rates and dependence between variables for 14,022 electrical accidents occurring in Spain between 2003 and 2012. The results show that electrical accidents as a whole are 3.6 times more likely to have severe consequences than the rest of the accidents in the country. This proportion is even nine times greater in the case of fatal accidents. They also confirm a significant relationship between the severity of this type of accidents and the economic sector in which they occur. On the other hand, there is a positive trend in the reduction of the incidence rate, especially in relation to direct contact, although unexpectedly the rate of accidents due to indirect contact is on the rise. Thus, preventing electrical occupational accidents requires efforts to guarantee adequate training adapted to the needs of workers in the various economic sectors. Furthermore, those responsible for safety should work to implement mechanisms to monitor and control compliance with efficient protective measures against electrical contact.     

Banking Soundness Indicators and Sovereign Risk in Time of Crisis: The Case of the European Union

This study examines the impact of the soundness of the banking sector on sovereign risk of EU member countries during the financial crisis using a selection of financial soundness indicators (FSIs) and the sovereign ratings of the three main rating agencies. Unlike previous literature that typically focuses on the ability of FSIs to foresee banking crises, we estimate ordered response models to assess the power of these indicators to explain sovereign risk. Our results show that evaluations made by the rating agencies are related to the lagged values of core FSIs such that an improvement in these indicators leads to improvements in upcoming sovereign ratings. Hence, reinforced banking soundness would reduce the sovereign risk. Accordingly, governments, supervisors and central banks should pay close attention to the evolution of certain FSIs related to the banking sector, in addition to other variables that have traditionally been taken into account in analysing sovereign risk.     

Nanomarketing: A New Frontier for Neuromarketing

The emergence of neuromarketing has significantly advanced conventional marketing research, illuminating how unconscious responses and emotions impact consumers’ perceptions and decision‐making processes. Neuromarketing is founded on the assumption that individual sensory and motor systems can be identified in specific networks of brain cells, the observation of which can reveal the unconscious or emotional characteristics of consumer decision making. Yet, neuromarketing technologies present several limitations that can impede the extension and validation of their application: (i) the development of high‐priced and time‐restricted neuroimaging experiments; (ii) the employment of large and immovable devices confined to artificial laboratory environments; (iii) the use of a single neuroimaging technology at a time (usually the functional magnetic resonance imaging); (iv) the use of a single nonneuroimaging device at a time; and (v) the potentially unethical manipulation of research subjects. One way to address these issues involves nanotechnologies, which present a ground‐breaking opportunity for neuromarketing research. These technologies encompass not only the traditional notion of structures, devices, and systems created by limiting shape and size at the nanometer scale, but also the new miniaturized tools based on one or more nanocomponents. The integration of neuromarketing and nanotechnologies could start a new field of research, which is termed here nanomarketing. Nanomarketing makes it possible to: (i) carry out noninvasive and nonintrusive experiments in shopping places; (ii) monitor consumers’ mental processes in real time; (iii) combine different technologies to corroborate results obtained by different neuroscientific tools; (iv) integrate neurophysiological field indicators with laboratory neuroimaging results; and (v) highlight ethical issues raised by the use of these novel, portable, and easy‐to‐use nanodevices. This study thus has a twofold aim: (i) investigating both the limitations and opportunities, for researchers and practitioners, that accompany the miniaturization process and application of nanotechnologies to neuromarketing; and (ii) providing a critical review of the aforementioned limitations, highlighting the theoretical and managerial implications, and summarizing the discussion for future research.     

MEASUREMENT,EVOLUTION, DETERMINANTS,AND CONSEQUENCES OF STATE CAPACITY: A REVIEW OF RECENT RESEARCH

There is increasing realization that state capacity is a fundamental ingredient for effective governance, and is a crucial element of long‐run economic development. This paper offers an overview of the strengths and limitations in current empirical research on the measurement of state capacity. The paper also surveys the fast emerging literature on the determinants and effects of state capacity. We argue that existing measures on governance quality used in cross‐national research can be usefully exploited to capture different aspects of state capacity, and show that post the end of the Cold War, developing economies have experienced improvements in legal, administrative and bureaucratic capacity, but the gap with advanced economies is still wide. Future research should address the short temporal coverage of available measures of state capacity, as well as providing a systematic quantitative assessment of the determinants of capacity and of its effects on development outcomes, such as health and education, which have not received sufficient scrutiny.     

Aggregation Bias in Estimates of Conditional Conservatism: Theory and Evidence

This paper documents a study about the influence of the aggregation effect on the estimates of models based on the original Basu model – specifically the Ball, Kothari and Nikolaev model (Ball et al., 2013b). We provide an analytical study of the effect, showing that it can produce two biases: an omitted‐variable bias and a truncated‐sample bias. Using separate proxies for good and bad news for each company and year, we estimate the empirical sign and magnitude of those biases. Our results show that the estimates of conditional conservatism based on regressions of (unexpected) earnings on (unexpected) returns, as in the paper by Ball et al., are contaminated by substantial aggregation bias. More specifically, the aggregation effect causes these models to underestimate good‐news timeliness and overestimate bad‐news timeliness, thereby overestimating differential timeliness. Moreover, when we use proxies that provide better control for the aggregation effect, the differential timeliness coefficient tends to 0, showing that the influence of conditional conservatism on the returns–earnings relationship is, at best, marginal.     

The macroeconomics outcome of oil shocks in the small Eurozone economies

In this work, we provide an analysis over the period 1999–2015 of the effects of oil shocks on prices and GDP in a group of small Euro-area economies. The group includes Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. In order to characterise the macroeconomic outcomes of movements in oil prices, we adopt the structural vector autoregression (VAR) methodology. We find that under the European Monetary Union (EMU), oil price shocks have been important drivers of business cycle fluctuations in almost all these countries. Moreover, an increase in oil prices produces significant recessionary effects in all the countries included in the investigation. Thus, although there are different sizes in the responses of output in the investigated countries, our main conclusion is that despite the structural changes experienced by the European economies in the last decades, oil prices still matter for these countries. In the light of these results, we also stress some important challenges for the conduct of monetary policy in the Euro area.     

Explanatory Factors of Integrated Sustainability and Financial Reporting

The complexity of the business world has led to growing demands being made of companies regarding the information provided on their financial performance, corporate governance and contribution to developing sustainability. In response, some leading companies have begun to publish integrated reporting, in the form of a document providing a coherent summary of this information, thus facilitating stakeholder engagement. This paper examines the validity of the hypotheses of the theories of agency and of signalling, and analyses the political costs and those borne by owners in voluntarily developing this new type of business document. More specifically, in order to determine their prevalence among the suggested reasons for these paradigms, we analyse the effect of industry concentration, together with other factors, in the development of integrated reporting. The analysis of a non‐balanced sample of 1590 international companies for the years 2008–2010, in which a logistic regression methodology is applied to panel data, reveals the negative impact of industry concentration on the development of a more pluralist report, simultaneously taking into account stakeholders, sustainability and the long‐term viewpoint, as well as questions of responsible investment, business ethics and transparency. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment