CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A MICROECONOMIC REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This paper provides a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Depending on whether an individual can be considered as selfish, or whether she has also social preferences, motives for CSR, can be explained in different ways. Furthermore, we explicitly highlight the influence of different Corporate Governance System on CSR as well as the relationship between firms' size and social commitment. Because it is difficult to distinguish between different theories in empirical studies, we argue that an experimental approach might be suitable to test theories of CSR.     

Does stable ownership create value? Evidence from the global financial crisis

We investigate the value of stable ownership for a sample of European firms using the global financial crisis as an exogenous shock and pre-and post-crisis years as benchmark periods. Consistent with the argument that stable ownership allows managers to focus on the creation of long-term value, we find that stable ownership resulted in higher stock returns and a higher market-to-book ratio during the crisis. This positive effect of stable ownership was not reversed after the crisis. Stable institutional blockholdings were more valuable in countries with weaker investor protection. However, the positive effect does not apply to firms in which a family is the largest blockholder. Finally, we also find that ownership stability was associated with a higher level of investments, illustrating that stable ownership affects real corporate decisions.

     

Concept‐Based Bayesian Model Averaging and Growth Empirics

In specifying a regression equation, we need to specify which regressors to include, but also how these regressors are measured. This gives rise to two levels of uncertainty: concepts (level 1) and measurements within each concept (level 2). In this paper we propose a hierarchical weighted least squares (HWALS) method to address these uncertainties. We examine the effects of different growth determinants taking explicit account of the measurement problem in the growth regressions. We find that estimates produced by HWALS provide intuitive and robust explanations. We also consider approximation techniques which are useful when the number of variables is large or when computing time is limited.     

Corporate Responsibility and the Collegial Field

This article is based on 21 interviews of informants actively engaged with corporate responsibility in Sweden. The article introduces a new concept—the “collegial field”—which is helpful in understanding the course of events. With systems that are more open to other organizations, horizontal groupings with common interests become more influential. Collegial fields can also be relevant for understanding other activities in organizations than corporate responsibility.     

Prospect Theory in the Heterogeneous Agent Model

Using the Heterogeneous Agent Model framework, we incorporate an extension based on Prospect Theory into a popular agent-based asset pricing model. This extension covers the phenomenon of loss aversion manifested in risk aversion and asymmetric treatment of gains and losses. Using Monte Carlo methods, we investigate behavior and statistical properties of the extended model and assess how our extension is manifested in different strategies. We show that, on the one hand, the Prospect Theory extension keeps the essential underlying mechanics of the model intact, but on the other hand it considerably changes the model dynamics. Stability of the model is increased and fundamentalists may be able to survive in the market more easily. When only the fundamentalists are loss-averse, other strategies profit more.

     

The economics of nonprofit organisations' governance

We determine theoretically when we can expect agency problems amenable to shirking agents to arise in nonprofit organisations and derive the conditions for governance measures to remedy these. Agents' private benefits of shirking need to be considered combined with the effect of their efforts on the probabilities of being successful in fundraising and production. If this effect is large, agency problems can more easily be avoided. Sufficient conditions for governance measures to reduce agency problems are derived. The empirical literature fits a number of the results derived and shows important gaps, especially w.r.t. the role of success probabilities.     

Disentangling types of liquidity and testing limits-to-arbitrage theories in the CDS–bond basis

We disentangle asset-specific, market, and funding liquidity in the CDS–bond basis outside and during the 2007–9 global financial crisis. Our findings stress the importance of separating different types of liquidity, since all three measures have independently negative impacts on the basis. Funding liquidity emerges as the economically most important liquidity metric. While asset-specific liquidity is cross-correlated in both the cash and derivative markets, funding and market liquidity only matter for the cash market. We exploit the decomposition of the basis to test predictions of limits-to-arbitrage theories. We find strong evidence in favor of margin-based asset pricing and flight-to-quality effects.     

A unified framework for robust modelling of financial markets in discrete time

Finance and Stochastics - We unify and establish equivalence between the pathwise and the quasi-sure approaches to robust modelling of financial markets in finite discrete time. In particular, we...