A resource orchestration view of supply chain traceability and transparency bundles for competitive advantage

The literature has mostly examined supply chain (SC) traceability and SC transparency separately, ignoring the mutually constitutive relationship of these two related constructs. We draw on the resource orchestration theory and the causal complexity perspective to conceptualize and validate SC traceability and SC transparency as interrelated organizational capabilities that may mutually enhance or compensate each other for competitive advantage. We constructed an original sample from two sources to empirically test this conceptualization using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Our empirical results reveal that the ability of firms to leverage SC traceability for a high financial performance is contingent upon creating a transparency perception of SC with a wide range of stakeholders. Our results also identified the firm size and its international presence, as having a significant bearing on the ability of firms to leverage SC traceability and SC transparency capabilities for a competitive advantage.     

The role of risk aversion in public goods dilemmas with environmental uncertainty: an experimental analysis

The purpose of this study is to extend earlier research on environmental uncertainty in public goods dilemmas. The present paper reports the results of an experiment designed to examine the effect of risk aversion on public goods provision. A von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function with constant coefficient of relative risk aversion is used to investigate the impact of risk attitudes within a threshold public goods environment. The outcome of the threshold public goods experiment shows that subjects are indifferent to the changes in environmental conditions. Additionally, the analysis indicates that risk aversion is a significant determinant of voluntary public goods contribution level.     

The effect of fiscal system reform on fiscal policy outcomes

We investigate how reform in governmental accounting affects fiscal policy outcomes including debt, balance, and fiscal transparency. Since a change from cash to accrual accounting can be regarded as a natural experiment among governments, a fixed-effects model is exploited. We discover that the change diminishes debt in developed countries, but expands it in less-developed ones, with strong effects in highly indebted countries. The change improves balance in developed countries and worsens it in less-developed countries, which is significant for developed countries with large deficits. Transparency is improved only in less transparent developed countries.     

An incubation perspective on social innovation: the London Hub – a social incubator

In the context of incubators, particularly those that are driven to achieving social objectives, this paper investigates core processes that support the development of social innovation. Social innovation, as this paper argues, is underpinned by a new form of social collaboration and engagement built upon strong forms of sharing knowledge and learning. Coupled with this is the element of social capital reinforced by entrepreneurship and leadership that promotes sustainability in the community. These factors drive innovative thinking and ways of engaging among stakeholders in order to create new forms of socio-economic impact. Such value-creating activity occurs in firms that operate within incubators involving a wide range of stakeholders who work through networks to co-create and meet social challenges. Through a case study of a social incubator and an incubatee, we demonstrate the core processes that irradiate the argument on social innovation. The contribution of this paper is threefold: First, social innovation is an emerging area of research, of which there is a dearth in terms of examining the processes empirically. We address the gap in this field by demonstrating the value of social collaboration and engagement using different innovation models. Second, we establish links between social innovation and incubation using the concept of social capital. This allows us to achieve our third contribution: exemplification of a dyadic value-based partnership and collaboration processes between an incubator and an incubatee, through activities driven by social innovation that aim to have social impact. The paper concludes with practice implications and suggests directions for future research.     

The impacts of investor sentiment on returns and conditional volatility of international stock markets

One of the main arguments of behavioral finance is that some properties of asset prices are most probably regarded as deviations from fundamental value and they are generated by the participation of traders who are not fully rational, thus called noise traders. Noise trader theory postulates that sentiment traders have greater impact during high-sentiment periods than during low-sentiment periods, and sentiment traders miscalculate the variance of returns undermining the mean-variance relation. The main objective of this research is to construct a model to evaluate the returns and conditional volatility of various stock market indexes considering the changes in the investor sentiment by measuring the effects of noise trader demand shocks on returns and volatility. EGARCH model is used to determine whether earning shocks have more influence on the conditional volatility in high sentiment periods weakening the mean–variance relation. This paper takes an international approach using weekly market index returns of U.S., Japan, Hong Kong, U.K., France, Germany, and Turkey. Weekly trading volumes of these indexes are regressed against a group of macroeconomic variables and the residuals are used as proxies for investor sentiment and significant evidence is found that there is asymmetric volatility in these market indexes and earning shocks have more influence on conditional volatility when the sentiment is high.     

Overcoming the double hurdles to investing in technology

Technological activities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have received considerable attention from researchers and policy makers since the mid-1980s. Small firms could nurture entrepreneurship and facilitate the creation and application of new ideas. In spite of their potential in generating innovations, it is also observed that SMEs shy away from formal R&D activities, and the firm size itself seems to be a barrier for R&D activities. SMEs operating in developing countries face extra hurdles to investing in R&D. Given the massive share of SMEs, it becomes crucial to realize their developmental potential in developing countries. In this paper, we study the drivers of R&D activities in SMEs in Turkish manufacturing industries by using panel data at the establishment level for the 1993–2001 period. Our findings suggest that SMEs are less likely to conduct R&D, but if they overcome the first obstacle of conducting R&D, they spend proportionally more on R&D than the LSEs do. R&D intensity is higher in small than in large firms. Moreover, public R&D encourages firms to intensify their R&D efforts. The impact of R&D support is stronger for small firms.     

Asymmetric Behaviour of Inflation around the Target in Inflation‐Targeting Countries

We explore the asymmetric behaviour of inflation around the target level for inflation‐targeting countries. The first rationale behind this asymmetry is the asymmetric policy response of the central bank around the target. Central banks could have a stronger bias towards overshooting rather than undershooting the inflation target. Consequently, the policy response would be stronger once the inflation jumps above the target, compared to a negative deviation. Second rationale is the asymmetric inflation persistence. We suggest that recently developed Asymmetric Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive (AESTAR) model provides a convenient framework to capture the asymmetric behaviour of inflation driven by these two effects. We further conduct an out‐of‐sample forecasting exercise and show that the predictive power of AESTAR model for inflation is high for some countries in our sample, especially at long‐horizons.