CSR Practices and Corporate Strategy: Evidence from a Longitudinal Case Study

This paper aims to contribute to the present debate about business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that the Journal of Business Ethics is hosting. Numerous contributions argued theoretical frameworks and taxonomies of CSR practices. The authors want to ground in this knowledge and provide further evidence about how companies adopt CSR practices to address stakeholders’ claims and consolidate their trust. Evidence was provided by a longitudinal case study about an Italian food company that is one of the largest producers of baby food. This company reshaped its corporate strategy along three decades through the adoption of CSR practices in order to win stakeholders’ trust about food safety and supply chain behaviour. The empirical exercise was informed by a literature review of the relevant contributions in terms of CSR business practices and levels of efforts to adopt them. In light of this review, the authors adopted for the research framework the taxonomy of business practices proposed by Spiller (2000, “Ethical Business and Investment: A Model for Business and Society”, Journal of Business Ethics 27, 149-160) and the levels of commitment towards CSR proposed by Stahl and Grigsby (1997, Strategic Management; Total Quality & Global Competition (Blackwell, Oxford)). The main findings are discussed in order to argue theoretical implications and identify further areas of research and debate.     

Order book modeling and financial stability

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - This paper presents an agent-based model of the financial order book, and investigates whether the volatility of market prices can be reduced by...     

Ownership ties,conflict of interest,and the tone of news

This paper investigates the tone newspapers use in reporting information on a company that it is linked with through an ownership tie. Our empirical setting is Italy, a country characterized by dominant national industrial groups’ high ownership of newspapers. Based on a sample of about 123,000 articles, we document that newspapers’ coverage of firms in conflict of interest is greater, with significantly fewer negative and uncertain words. We also document that the slant increases with ownership stakes and decreases with the newspaper's reputation.     

Multi-agent technologies in economics

This paper summarizes some of the trends in the use of multi-agent technologies in economics. Multiple agent systems, fuzzy sets and neural networks are critical tools used to investigate the emerging economics research agenda related to data mining, dynamic markets stock selection and bank stress testing. This paper reviews the contributions of four such examples.     

Uncertainty across volatility regimes

We propose a nonrecursive identification scheme for uncertainty shocks that exploits breaks in the volatility of macroeconomic variables and is novel in the literature on uncertainty. This approach allows us to simultaneously address two major questions in the empirical literature: Is uncertainty a cause or effect of decline in economic activity? Does the relationship between uncertainty and economic activity change across macroeconomic regimes? Results based on a small‐scale vector autoregression with US monthly data suggest that (i) uncertainty is an exogenous source of decline of economic activity, and (ii) the effects of uncertainty shocks amplify in periods of economic and financial turmoil.     

Endogenous debt maturity and rollover risk

We empirically study the nature of rollover risk and show how banks manage it. Having to roll over debt does not lead to higher default risk per se. Only banks that lose significant access to new funding while having to roll over debt display higher default risk. We identify a factor that determines this buildup of risk: specifically, debt maturity shortening (forcing debt to be more frequently rolled over) and reduced access to new funding are both driven by market pessimism about banks’ future performance. We also provide evidence consistent with dynamic coordination risk.     

Climate change management: a resilience strategy for flood risk using Blockchain tools

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This work aims to offer a contribution in the analysis and management, from an economic and financial point of view, of the flood risk, and extended to the...     

The role of time value in convertible bond call policy

Since the seminal work of Ingersoll (1977b) the optimal time in which a firm should redeem its outstanding convertible bonds has received large attention by the financial literature. Several studies have put forward a number of possible costs and benefits for a firm if it interrupts the life of its convertible bonds prior to their contractual maturity. However, in this paper we argue that the managerial decision to call back a convertible bond is mainly driven by a fundamental variable almost neglected up until now: the time value extraction from bondholders’ conversion option. Accordingly, we propose a measure for the effective convenience of calling—which we define as net time value advantage—and we show, using a survival analysis, that it is more effective than previously proposed measures in explaining the firms’ observed call policy.     

Regional convergence in Italy, 1891–2001: testing human and social capital

The article aims to present and discuss estimates of levels of human and social capital in Italy??s regions over the long term, i.e., roughly from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day. The results are linked to newly available evidence for regional value added in order to begin to form an explanatory hypothesis of long-term regional inequality in Italy: convergence in value added per capita is tested in light of the neoclassical exogenous growth approach, which incorporates human capital and social capital as conditioning variables into a long-term production function. In contrast with conventional wisdom (e.g. Putnam 1993), we find that social capital was not a significant predictor of economic growth in post-Unification Italy: It grew in importance only in the last decades. Conversely, human capital was more important in the first half of the twentieth century. Results suggest that there was not one single conditioning variable over the long run, thus supporting the view that, in different periods, conditioning variables can be determined by technological regimes.