Property as an economic concept: reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (J Law Econ 3:1–44, 1960), most economic analyses of property rights disregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide to rightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers in terms of information asymmetry about legal title. Consequently, these analyses tend to overstate the role of “private ordering” and disregard the two key elements of property law: first, the essential conflict between property (that is, in rem) enforcement and transaction costs; and, second, the institutional solutions created to overcome it, mainly contractual registries capable of making truly impersonal (that is, asset-based) trade viable when previous relevant transactions on the same assets are not verifiable by judges. This paper fills this gap by reinterpreting both elements within the Coasean framework and thus redrawing the institutional foundations of both property and corporate contracting.     

The influence of cooperative relations of small businesses on environmental protection intensity

This study examines the relationship between cooperative business relations in small businesses (fewer than 50 employees) and environmental protection, one of the most important policies of social responsibility in manufacturing. We reviewed the literature and carried out an empirical study of 930 small manufacturing firms in Spain. Results indicate that small businesses that maintain and improve their cooperative relations through business networking with universities, competitors, suppliers and customers spend more on environmental protection. The managerial, practical, research and policy implications of the obtained research findings are discussed.     

Audit quality: attributes,private safeguards and the role of regulation

This article examines the private mechanisms used to safeguard quality in auditing, with a view to defining rules capable of facilitating the performance of market forces. An outline is given of a general theory of private quality assurance in auditing, based on the use of quasi-rents to self-enforce quality dimensions. Particular attention is paid to the role of fee income diversification as the key ingredient of private incentives for audit quality. The role of public regulation is then situated in the context defined by the presence of these safeguard mechanisms. This helps in defining the content of rules and the function of regulatory bodies in facilitating and strengthening the protective operation of the market. By making sense of the interaction between regulation, quality attributes and private safeguards, the analysis helps to evaluate the relative merits of different regulatory options.     

PROMOTING EFFORTS FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF THE IMPACT OF IMPORT PROMOTION OFFICES

Increasing exports from developing countries is widely regarded as an important part of a development and growth strategy. A major problem confronting exporters from developing countries is the many market barriers they typically face when attempting to enter markets in developed countries. Different institutions have been established to alleviate this problem, including export promotion offices (EPOs) in various developing countries and import promotion offices (IPOs) in several developed countries. The present study explores the impact of IPOs on exports from developing to developed countries by examin ing the actual pattern of imports into OECD countries over the period 1988 to 1993. Four specific product groups are selected and a model pertaining to explain the pattern of imports is presented. The results show that, even after controlling for a number of economic and policy variables, the share of imports originating in developing coun tries is indeed positively influenced by the presence of an IPO in the importing country. Thus, the results suggest that the establishment of an IPO may have a positive impact on the share of imports originat ing in developing countries.     

Causality and Causal Models: A Conceptual Perspective*

This paper aims at displaying a synthetic view of the historical development and the current research concerning causal relationships, starting from the Aristotelian doctrine of causes, following with the main philosophical streams until the middle of the twentieth century, and commenting on the present intensive research work in the statistical domain. The philosophical survey dwells upon various concepts of cause, and some attempts towards picking out spurious causes. Concerning statistical modelling, factorial models and directed acyclic graphs are examined and compared. Special attention is devoted to randomization and pseudo‐randomization (for observational studies) in view of avoiding the effect of possible confounders. An outline of the most common problems and pitfalls, encountered in modelling empirical data, closes the paper, with a warning to be very cautious in modelling and inferring conditional independence between variables.     

A review of determinant factors of environmental proactivity

This paper reviews the literature in order to identify the determinant factors of a company's environmental proactivity. It starts by arguing that environmental proactivity can be manifested through diverse practices and strategies and goes on to comment upon several variables that seem to influence the decision to implement such strategies. Some of these variables depict internal company features and others describe the general environment in which operations are carried out. Stakeholders' pressure is distinguished as a central determinant factor and it is argued that all the other variables affect either the intensity of this pressure or the company's capacity to perceive it. All the factors identified herein should be taken into account, at least as control variables, in those studies aiming at explaining and contextualizing environmental strategies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Organizing foreign market activities: From entry mode choice to configuration decisions

This article takes a critical look at the extant foreign entry mode research and argues that a richer and more and dynamic view is needed in order to provide a realistic presentation of how firms organize their foreign activities. While researchers have typically assumed a very limited range of foreign operation modes, we propose a systemic rather than a myopic view of foreign operation modes by modeling the entry mode decisions of the firm as a corporate-level process. We substantially broaden the scope of mode choice, thereby moving toward a configuration decision approach. We model and provide numerical examples of how international interdependencies impact mode configuration, and then extend the analysis by incorporating dynamic aspects.     

Persistence in Equity Fund Performance in Brazil

We examine performance persistence in the large and growing Brazilian equity fund market from 2000 to 2012. We find a significant risk-adjusted spread between a portfolio of top- and bottom-performing funds, which supports the idea that performance persists. This spread remains after controlling for market, size, distress, and momentum risk factors and tends to be larger and more significant for a set of small and retail funds. The spread is mostly driven by the underperformance of the bottom decile of funds, which is consistent with the existence of some fund managers with insufficient skills to recover investment costs.     

A re-examination of financial development,stock markets development and economic growth

This study provides new evidence on the role of financial development and stock market development in accounting for economic growth across geographic regions and income groups. To derive feasible policy implications, we estimate not only unbalanced panel regressions with period fixed effects, but also variance decompositions of annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates to examine what proxy measures are most important in economic growth over time and how much they contribute to economic growth. We find distinct direction, timing and strength of the causal links between financial development, stock market development and economic growth based on the results of Granger causality tests. Therefore, it may be necessary to make different efforts to achieve steady economic growth across geographic regions and income groups.     

A framework for the combination of forecasts

A framework for the systematic study of the combination of sales and market forecasts is proposed based on the types of forecasts to be combined and the methods used to combine them. A detailed survey of the literature is given in terms of the developed framework and general conclusions about the combination of forecasts area are developed. Some future needs for research are also discussed.