Toward sustainable corporate behavior: The effect of the critical mass of female directors on environmental,social, and governance disclosure

Boards of directors have recently become more attentive to their stakeholders' concerns, providing more transparent information and adopting more sustainable business strategies. This study investigates the influence of a critical mass of women on boards on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure score and its three components separately. Using a sample of the FTSE-MIB listed companies in the 2005–2017 period, we show that reaching a critical mass of female board members—going from one or two women to at least three—enhances the level of ESG disclosure. The results also show that the critical mass of female board members has a positive influence on every component of the ESG score, with the highest contribution of women reaching the governance score. These findings provide insights to shareholders and policymakers and suggest that a critical mass of female board members is particularly effective in improving transparency, and it can be seen as a mechanism to transit to stakeholder governance, fostering more sustainable behavior in firms.     

TERRITORIAL PLANNING AND TOURISM DEVELOPMENT TAX

An economic model of land taxation involving a local government and a private developer constitutes the theoretical framework in this research. The model hinges around a two-tier approach including both a conservation and an efficiency criterion. The analysis indicates that sustainable tourism calls for the use of land taxation and planning legislation simultaneously geared to the achievement of efficiency and the signaling of the government’s commitment to conservation policies. To provide support for the theoretical conclusions, an Italian case study is discussed, showing how the local government chose not to yield to a developer’s requests by not changing a norm prohibiting construction near of the coastline.     

Online banking services: a meta-analytic review and assessment of the impact of antecedents and consequents on satisfaction

This paper provides a meta-analysis of the generalizations in the relationships between the antecedents and consequents of satisfaction with online banking services. In total, 118 observations were analysed, with a sample of 49,607 respondents in 39 published articles from studies indexed in ten databases (Jstor, Emerald, PsycINFO, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier Science Direct, Scopus, ProQuest, SciELO, Google Scholar and EBSCO). Specifically, for the data analysis, we used the correlation coefficient r (plus χ², f test, t test, z test and β values). The results showed that constructs related to uncertainty, as evoked by online devices, system performance, quality of device content and online banking device structures, are significant and positive antecedents of consumer satisfaction. We also found that satisfaction with online banking services promotes trust and loyalty. Finally, we also detected that the relationship between reliability, satisfaction and service quality is stronger among Western banking consumers.     

The Anticipated Capitalisation Effect of a New Metro Line on Housing Prices*

Housing units with closer access to public transportation enjoy a higher market value than those with similar characteristics but poorer access. This difference can be explained by the lower cost of transport to the main workplaces and shopping areas in town. For this reason, investments in public transport infrastructure, such as building a new metro line, are capitalised totally or partially into land and housing prices. This work empirically analyses the degree of capitalisation into housing prices of the benefits of the new Line 4 of the Santiago metro system, which began operating in December 2005. We focus on anticipated capitalisation into housing prices at the moment construction of Line 4 was announced and at the moment information on the basic engineering project was unveiled, identifying the location of the future stations. We use a unique database containing all home buying and selling transactions in the Greater Santiago area between December 2000 and March 2004. The results show that the average apartment price rose by between 4.2 per cent and 7.9 per cent after construction was announced and by between 3.1 per cent and 5.5 per cent after the location of the stations was identified. These increases were not distributed evenly, but depended on the distance from the apartment to the nearest station. An indirect effect of this kind of capitalization is that property tax collections will increase if property is reappraised following the price rise. This effect is not negligible in magnitude and could represent 11 to 17 per cent of investment in the new metro line. This raises and interesting discussion on how the metro network extension is financed.     

Factor vector autoregressive estimation: a new approach

In this paper a new approach to factor vector autoregressive estimation, based on Stock and Watson (Implications of dynamic factor models for VAR analysis, NBER Working Paper, no. 11467, 2005), is introduced. In addition to sharing all the relevant features of the Stock–Watson approach, in its static formulation, the proposed method has the advantage of allowing for a more clear-cut interpretation of the global factors, as well as for the identification of all idiosyncratic shocks. An application to large-scale macroeconometric modelling is also provided. The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for constructive comments and to MIUR (PRIN project 2005) for financial support.     

Liquidity Constraints,Competition, and Markup Cyclicality

This article provides evidence on the relation among financial constraints, competition, and the cyclicality of markups. Based on a long series of industry data from a large number of countries, we find that markups increase in conjunction with the business cycle in environments with higher short‐term financial constraints (liquidity constraints) and more competition. The evidence also suggests that these two elements complement each other: the procyclicality of markups in firms facing both high competition and high liquidity constraints is higher than that explained by each determinant independently.     

Technology sourcing decisions in exploratory projects

Drawing on research on innovation as knowledge combination and firm’s organizational boundaries the paper contributes to open the black box of a firm’s sourcing strategy, investigating how the new knowledge a project aims to develop affects sourcing decisions. The fine-grained level of investigation adopted, namely the project level, not only enhances the understanding of the antecedents of sourcing decisions in any single project but provides primary explorative evidence on the concept of a company sourcing strategy as a portfolio of decisions across projects. Our test is implemented on a sample of 60 New Product Development projects carried out by a group of leading Italian firms, operating in the machine tool industry. We identify two knowledge dimensions that are the determinants of sourcing decisions at project level: novelty, new functions that satisfy emergent market needs, and breadth, heterogeneity of technological fields that encompass possible solutions to product problems. Our findings show that in firms choosing sourcing configurations on a project-by-project basis, exploratory projects, which search at the frontiers of either novel product features or heterogeneous technological domains, spur firms to exploit the potential advantages of external sources.     

CHARTERS,PARTNERSHIPS AND NATURAL RESOURCES: TWO CASES OF ENDOGENOUS REGULATION IN ITALY

This paper illustrates two examples of natural resources management drawn from Italian history: the rural charter system in the current province of Trento and the rural partnership system in Nonantola in the province of Modena. These institutions lasted for many centuries, and survived and evolved in the contemporary legal system. It is concluded that both the cases can be defined as ‘robust’ institutions for the successful management of common pool resources.     

Launch Decisions and the Early Market Survival of Innovations: An Empirical Analysis of the Italian Mobile Value‐Added Services (VAS) Industry

There is a surprisingly high number of new products and services that fail to produce enough return on the firm's investments in development and launch activities. Literature has shown that these failures can be due to a poorly planned and executed launch. Although a vast stream of research has studied how strategic and tactical launch decisions affect the performance of new products and services, some issues still need theoretical and empirical investigation. This paper aims to extend new product launch research in two ways. First, it studies how tactical launch decisions (i.e., investments in advertising and involvement of external organizations in the launch process) interact with an important strategic choice (i.e., the degree of radicalness of the new product or service) to affect new product performance. Second, it focuses on a particular dimension of performance, that is, early market survival, which has been overlooked in launch strategy and tactics research so far. Using a data set comprising more than 9300 new mobile value‐added services launched in Italy between 2003 and 2006, the paper finds that launch tactics interact with the radicalness of the innovation to affect early market survival. In particular, communicating the distinctive characteristics of the new product or service and partnering with external organizations during the launch process are tactics that work particularly well with radical innovations. This is possibly due to the fact that they help reduce customers’ uncertainty regarding expected benefits and transaction costs, and hence contribute to win their resistance to adopt the innovation soon after launch. Investments in corporate advertising lead instead to a tangible improvement of the probability of early market survival for both radical and incremental innovations. In other words, the positive impact on the probability of early survival of increasing investments in corporate advertising appears to be relevant for both radically and incrementally new services. One possible explanation is that this tactic helps increase the number of potential customers who come to know about the existence of the innovating firms and its offering soon after launch, but this is likely to be equally important to stimulate early diffusion of both incremental and radical innovations.     

Groupware and teamwork in R&D: limits to learning and innovation

In recent years the re-engineering of R&D functions in large multinationals has often been accompanied by the emergence of groupware applications as strategic decision-making tools, while the organization of work has shifted towards various forms of teamworking. There is however, little empirical evidence on the conditions and processes through which groupware and teamworking practices can be efficiently linked. This paper examines the experience in groupware adoption by two large multinationals, Hoffmann la Roche and Unilever, in selected areas of new product development: the final New Drug Application phase for a new anti AIDS drug in Roche and the development along an 'innovation funnel' of new oral care products in Unilever. Despite the variety of tasks, organizations, missions and technology deployed, similar themes seem to emerge regarding how large organizations are able to 'host' the new groupware applications. Learning processes seem to play a key role in the final integration of the technology in the workflow. Still, what seems to emerge is that despite its critical role, learning is not a sufficiently valued competence, at least in the organizations examined. As a consequence, the innovations tend to drift, lead to unexpected outcomes and many opportunities for learning from (mistakes and) innovations are simply missed. Factors responsible for such a state of affairs seem to be the power of the hierarchical context into which groupware and teamwork are introduced; the continuous jolts to which such context must undergo because of radical shifts in management and R&D strategy; the dialectics between local and global changes.