The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis and the Role of External and Internal Factors in Emerging Economies

This article assesses the impact of trade, capital openness and institutions on emerging economies’ output loss during the “Great Recession.” The fixed-effect estimates of an unbalanced panel of 122 emerging countries observed from 2008 to 2010 yield three main results. First, trade openness has exacerbated output loss. Second, capital openness can help mitigate the negative impact of an external shock, but this is conditional on the level of financial development. Finally, the results also point out that the interrelations between financial and institutional development affect the crisis’s severity.     

Leaders emergence in artificial populations: the role of networks

Social networks can be viewed as graphs in their basic form, but many networks of interest include positive and negative affect relations among nodes. The structural balance theory originally developed by Heider suggests how nodes may locally modify their relationships to maintain a sort of balance within sets of nodes. We analyze a model of leadership emergence in a social network and extend it by introducing structural balance among members when modeling the attitude toward the leader. This approach takes into account some of the mutual relationships among co-workers, including the adaptation process to achieve the balance. This component helps to explore differently the bounded rationality of agents when interacting, and prove the difficulty of finding a rapid and smooth covergent path to a social stable equilibrium.     

Duration dependence in the exit rate out of unemployment in Belgium. Is it true or spurious?

On the basis of aggregate data for the early 1990s, we analyse the determinants of unemployment duration for laid‐off male workers in Wallonia (Belgium). Our results indicate that if ranking in recruitment occurs, the standard mixed proportional hazard specification can be too restrictive, leading to an overstatement of the extent of true negative duration dependence. We conclude that negative duration dependence is largely spurious. We also decompose the time variation of the hazard in (unobserved) compositional and direct cyclical and seasonal effects. We find counter‐cyclical variation in the quality of young workers, but none for the prime aged. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social norms,cooperation and inequality

This paper analyzes the outcomes that can be supported by social norms in a society of infinitely lived and patient agents that are randomly matched in pairs every period to play a given game. I find that any mutually beneficial outcome can be supported by a self-enforcing social norm under both perfect information and a simple local information system. These Folk Theorem results explain not only how social norms can provide incentives that support cooperation in a community, providing support to the concepts of social capital and corporate culture, but also how they can support inequality and discrimination.I am grateful to David Levine for invaluable guidance and ideas. I also thank Anna Aizer, Hongbin Cai, Walter Cont, Ernesto Dal Bó, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Federico Weinschelbaun, William Zame, anonymous referees and seminar participants at Universidad de Buenos Aires, UCLA, Universidad T. Di Tella, Harvard Business School and Stockholm School of Economics for very useful comments and discussions     

Family ownership and environmental performance: The mediation effect of human resource practices

Previous literature has found that listed family firms underperform their nonfamily counterparts in terms of environmental performance, but has not explained why this occurs. We address this research gap by hypothesizing that training and development practices (i.e., managerial practices devoted to providing training and development for the workforce) mediate the relationship between family blockholders and environmental performance. Using a sample of 33,901 firm‐year observations from 2002 to 2016 distributed across 56 countries and employing the structural equation model technique, we find that investment in training and development practices explains almost half of the negative relationship between family blockholders and environmental performance. Our study contributes to the agency theory debate on principal–principal problems by explaining why family blockholders could damage other blockholders and minority shareholders.     

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Geographic Entrepreneurial Choices in Brazilian Franchising

In the broad empirical literature on franchising, performance outcomes of location decisions appear to be a largely forgotten issue. Yet franchising represents a rich context to study the impact of geographic entrepreneurial choices. Addressing this “blank spot” in the literature, we deal with the following question: Is it better for a chain to stay in the same geographic area, or to expand via distant franchised units? Our econometric estimations on new and unique Brazilian panel data show that spatial agglomeration of chain outlets leads to higher performance, suggesting that agglomeration gains outweigh cannibalization and spatial monopoly effects.