Has the CSR engagement of electrical companies had an effect on their performance? A closer look at the environment

Even though electrical companies attain a top ranking in the publication of CSR reports, they are often accused of 'green‐washing' due to their bad environmental reputation. The current economic crisis is testing their real CSR commitment more than ever, especially when this goes beyond its economic consequences. Based on a worldwide sample of electrical companies, we are going to study why companies are being socially responsible. We wish to know if it is due to the impact on the firms' performance or whether there are other motives (legitimation, improving their reputation) that lead companies to carry out these practices. We will also consider if it changes across the kind of CSR action considered. The results show that there is an economic justification beyond the socially responsible behaviour of the electrical companies. Additionally, most kinds of CSR action (community, diversity, corporate governance, product responsibility) are also carried out looking for economic rewards. However, the CSR actions oriented to the environment are mainly motivated by their need to improve their image and reverse their negative impact. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Sales forecasting in financial distribution: a comparison of quantitative forecasting methods

This paper deals with the issue of forecastability of sales activities of independent financial advisers (agents). Employing the most common quantitative methods on a diverse sample of timelines from multiple advisory companies, we have found that under most settings, these methods offer sub-par performance with high relative errors and no statistical differences between them. When a more granular approach is applied (reflecting sales unit size), ARIMA and the simple moving average emerge as significantly less accurate. This outcome is true for all sales units regardless of their size, when relative error is concerned. Thus, our analysis confirms the difficult forecastability of financial sales, speaking against the utilisation of more sophisticated forecasting methods, which mostly fail when compared to their much simpler and less costly counterparts.

     

La curva de Beveridge y los determinantes del emparejamiento en el mercado de trabajo

Se exploran los determinantes a corto plazo del emparejamiento entre oferta y demanda de trabajo identificando los desplazamientos de la curva de Beveridge en doce países de la OCDE entre el primer trimestre de 2000 y el cuarto trimestre de 2013. Mediante tres metodologías complementarias (examen visual, técnicas de cointegración y estimaciones no lineales), observamos que el crecimiento de la población activa, la legislación de protección del empleo y las políticas activas de mercado de trabajo (incentivos a la creación de empresas, programas de trabajo compartido) favorecen el emparejamiento, mientras que los niveles de instrucción intermedios, el desempleo de larga duración y las políticas pasivas (prestaciones por desempleo, fiscalidad del trabajo) lo dificultan.     

Distinctive Features of Environmental Innovators: An Econometric Analysis

This paper analyzes the main determinants influencing environmental innovators (i.e. firms developing or adopting environmental innovations) in Spain with respect to non‐environmental innovators. Similarly to other contributions in the literature, our results show that Spanish environmental innovators respond to regulatory stimulus in the form of demand‐pull and technology‐push instruments. They have a high internal technological capability and combine internal and external information sources, mostly in cooperation with knowledge institutions. Environmental innovators are more concentrated in mature, traditionally highly polluting sectors, but new firms are not more environmentally innovative than incumbents. Most importantly, in contrast to other environmental innovation studies, mostly carried out in a German context, we have not found evidence of a market pull from either the domestic or international markets. Furthermore, cost savings are not found to be a distinctive driver for environmental innovators. These differential results are possibly related to the special features of Spain regarding its national innovation system and the degree of stringency of environmental regulation and environmental consciousness of its consumers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

A Geometrical Interpretation of Collinearity: A Natural Way to Justify Ridge Regression and Its Anomalies

Justifying ridge regression from a geometrical perspective is one of the main contributions of this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this question has not been treated previously. This paper shows that ridge regression is a particular case of raising procedures that provide greater flexibility by transforming the matrix X associated with the model. Thus, raising procedures, based on a geometrical idea of the vectorial space associated with the columns of matrix X , lead naturally to ridge regression and justify the presence of the well-known constant k on the main diagonal of matrix X ^′ X . This paper also analyses and compares different alternatives to raising with respect to collinearity mitigation. The results are illustrated with an empirical application.     

Trading activities,productivity and markups: Evidence for Spanish manufacturing

This work analyses the firms' internationalisation strategies of importing intermediates and exporting output, and the potential rewards of these activities in terms of total factor productivity (TFP), as a proxy for marginal costs, and markups. It further deepens into the study of the relationship between internationalisation strategies and markups by disentangling whether it operates through affecting firms' marginal costs and/or firms' prices. The panel database employed in this paper is the Spanish Survey on Business Strategies (ESEE) for the period 2006–14. Results in the paper distinguish between SMEs and large firms and indicate that there is high persistence in the performance of these activities and in firms' TFP and markups. For SMEs, we obtain rewards from importing inputs as well as exporting output in terms of TFP and markups. For large firms, we obtain rewards in TFP from the importing activity and rewards in markups from the exporting activity. Finally, we find evidence that the effects of internationalisation strategies on markups are due to both a price channel and a marginal cost channel.     

Place attachment,host–tourist interactions,and residents’ attitudes towards tourism development: the case of Boa Vista Island in Cape Verde

A clear understanding of residents’ attitudes towards tourism development and its determinants is a crucial pillar for designing tourism development strategies to promote sustainable development. The literature on the influence of host–tourist interactions and place attachment on residents’ attitudes towards tourism development in developing countries is still scarce. To extend knowledge in this field, this study aims at developing and testing a structural model to examine direct and indirect causal effects of place attachment, host–tourist interaction, and perceived positive and negative tourism impacts on the residents’ attitudes towards tourism development in an island tourism destination – Boa Vista Island in Cape Verde. Results suggest that the residents’ attitudes are positively affected by place attachment, host–tourist interaction, and perceived positive impacts; and negatively affected by perceived negative impacts. Host–tourist interaction emerges as the strongest (direct and indirect) determinant of the residents’ attitudes towards tourism development. Moreover, although both positive and negative perceptions of tourism impacts have significant impacts on the residents’ attitudes, the influence of the former is stronger than that of the latter. The paper ends with relevant theoretical and practical implications to promote positive residents’ attitudes towards tourism development in Boa Vista.     

Police-Monitored Cameras and Crime*

We study the effects of police monitoring on crime. We exploit detailed information on the location and date of installation of police-monitored surveillance cameras, coupled with data at the street-segment level on all reported crimes in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay. We find that the introduction of police-monitored surveillance cameras reduces crime by about 20 percent in monitored areas relative to a pure control group located outside the city. We also explore potential displacement effects, and we do not find evidence of such effects.     

Reliable Estimates of Sovereign Rating

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Marketing capabilities and innovation. How do they affect the financial results of hotels?

From the point of view of firms’ managers, the knowledge of the factors which explain their firms’ financial results is considered of great usefulness to propose the most appropriate and profitable marketing strategies and actions. This research sets out from this central idea and proposes a model of relationships that considers the marketing results, the marketing capabilities, and the innovation capability as key factors for achieving good financial results. This model is verified via an empirical investigation carried out among 200 directors of hotel establishments in Andalusia, a region in the south of Spain which is one of the country's main tourist destinations. The results indicate that innovation capability is strongly conditioned by marketing capabilities and resources and that this innovation capability affects the financial results of the firms analyzed. Likewise, it is deduced that a market-oriented management philosophy contributes to the development of these marketing capabilities. The implications for management are considered very relevant as they must lead these firms to invest in the development of marketing resources and capabilities, and apply a market-oriented management philosophy if they wish to improve their financial results.