Social and Environmental Filters to Market Incentives: The Persistence of Common Land in Nineteenth‐Century Spain

The regional diversity of communal persistence in nineteenth‐century Spain has been well documented by historiographers. Although the explanation of this divergence has been attributed to the social and environmental context, together with the prevailing market incentives, that characterized the different rural societies of this period, there has been no clear assessment of the role played by each of these factors. Through a comparative study of the historical data at the provincial level, this paper analyses the relative contribution of these elements to that divergence. The results diminish the significance of market signals and show how the social and environmental conditions interacted to limit, or promote, the dismantling of the common lands. Apart from the greater need to resort to the commons when it was necessary to increase agricultural production in dry regions, this paper highlights the role of unequal levels of access to land in promoting enclosure. The Spanish case illustrates the limitations of the theories that predict the inevitable drift towards individual property rights.     

A Note on US Worker Turnover

The length of new employment relationships is of first‐order importance for a number of questions in recent macro‐labour research. We investigate it using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for the US from 1996 onwards, and document that above two‐fifths of newly employed workers fall into non‐employment within a year. We also find that the transition rate from employment to non‐employment within the first year varies significantly for different groups of the population, increases with the duration of the previous non‐employment spell, exhibits an acyclical or weakly procyclical pattern and a much higher volatility than the unemployment rate.     

The innovation trajectory of eco-cement in the Netherlands: a co-evolution analysis

In this article, we scrutinize the innovation trajectory of eco-cement in the Netherlands by examining the innovation nexus of eco-cement manufacturers, scientists/researchers, waste producers and policymakers as part of a broader analysis of markets, policy and society, with special attention to standards and regulations. The influence of policy and innovation interactions are substantiated by policy documents, media news, patterns of eco-cement use, and in-depth interviews conducted with relevant eco-cement actors. Our analysis brings forward empirical evidence of how policymakers are involved in the innovation trajectory of eco-cement in multiple ways through building regulations, sector policies, waste policies, and science and innovation policies. Political economy aspects of regulation and innovation in cement industry (e.g. the cooperative approach of waste authorities with regard to re-use of waste, absence of policies to put a price on CO₂ emissions from cement production) are being described, together with the specificities of the cement market. Bans on the disposal of fly ash and sewage sludge resulted in the use of those materials either as a supplementary cementitious material or a fuel. Demand for green cement from is presently growing but meets with several obstacles. Carbon policies are shown to constitute a weak influence. Innovation in eco-cement co-evolved with policy, through mutual dependencies, as a theoretical finding for innovation studies.     

ANTECEDENTS TO MARKET ORIENTATION IN THE WORKER COOPERATIVE ORGANIZATION: THE MONDRAGON GROUP

Given the socio‐economic importance of cooperative firms and in the light of evidence that they are an effective option for competing in complex environments, an intensive examination of their organizational model is required. It is significant that some of the most consolidated worker cooperative organizations have focused on Market Orientation. The central purpose of this research is therefore to examine the influence of a set of internal antecedents of market orientation found in cooperatives. We shall then verify the possible benefits of market orientation on their business performance. The subject of this analysis will be the worker‐owned businesses that make up the Mondragon cooperative group, a global pioneer in democratic business practice.     

The Evolution of a Socially Committed Business Group in Colombia, 1911–85

This article examines the historical path of a century-old business group – Fundación Social – in an ‘emerging society’ in Latin America (Colombia) in terms of strategy, top management structure, and governance. Conducted within the grounded theory methodology and relying on broad empirical data, the article identifies a series of issues that emerge from the Fundación Social's history. It offers opportunities for dialogue and comparison with scholars in at least two fields: corporate social responsibility and business groups.     

Mortgages Denominated in Domestic and Foreign Currencies: Simple Models

We design a family of simple models of foreign currency-denominated (FXD) loans to compare the cash flows of installments and the paths of outstanding debts denominated in domestic and foreign currencies, respectively. Using them, we draw several conclusions relevant to the recent debates about the FXD loans. We demonstrate the key role played by the uncovered interest rate parity in the comparisons. Moreover, we give a closed-form solution for the trade-off between the currency depreciation and the unilateral FX interest rate increases by the banks. We determine the optimal size of domestic and FXD loans, respectively.     

Technical efficiency with state-contingent production frontiers using maximum entropy estimators

Although the theory of state-contingent production is well-established, the empirical implementation of this approach is still in an infancy stage. The possibility of finding a large number of states of nature, few observations per state and models affected by collinearity have led some researchers to claim the urgent need to develop robust estimation techniques. In this paper, we investigate the performance of some maximum entropy estimators to assess technical efficiency with state-contingent production frontiers. The methodological discussion and the simulation study provided in the paper reveal some of the potential of these estimators. Small mean squared error loss and small differences between the true and the estimated mean of technical efficiency show that the maximum entropy can be a powerful tool in the estimation of state-contingent production frontiers.     

The influence of countries' climate change-related institutional profile on voluntary environmental disclosures

This paper analyzes how the regulative, normative, and cultural dimensions of institutions exert pressure both on companies' decisions to voluntarily disclose environmental information and on the quality of the information disclosed. Prior research has focused on the influence of economic, disclosure, and generic institutional determinants, although little attention has been paid to the analysis of the influence exerted by climate change-related institutional pillars. The results show that the three institutional pillars have different effects as regards both the decision to respond and the quality of disclosure. The regulative pillar positively influences the response decision but does not influence disclosure quality. The normative pillar positively affects both the propensity of companies to disclose and the quality of the information reported. Meanwhile, the cultural pillar positively influences disclosure quality, but it has no effect on firms' decisions to disclose environmental information. This paper is the first to analyze whether the institutional profile of climate change in different countries influences voluntary environmental disclosures.