Corporate environmental sustainability reporting in the context of national cultures: A quantile regression approach

This work, based on previous evidence within international business management research, aims to test the influence of communities’ culture features on corporate environmental sustainability reporting (CESR) practices. To overcome some limitations of conventional statistical approaches applied by previous research, a quantile regression (QR) model is implemented which allows setting a framework to test the working hypotheses in different scenarios that cover divergent firms’ commitment levels to stakeholder engagement and CESR practices development. Our central results addresses that different national culture dimensions present a non-monotonic influence on CESR practices. This result, which is analyzed through the Stakeholder Theory proposals, can be explained because corporate sustainability behaviors are highly sensitive to stakeholders’ pressures and demands which are ultimately conditioned by the cultural environment. Some interesting recommendations for companies’ strategic management and governmental policy-making processes are reported.     

Volatility persistence,long memory and time-varying unconditional mean: Evidence from 10 equity indices

This paper re-examines evidence of volatility persistence and long memory in the light of potential time-variation in the unconditional mean of the volatility series. Daily equity volatility is generally regarded as exhibiting long memory, however, recent evidence has suggested that long memory may be a spurious finding arising from neglected breaks or time-variation in unconditional variance. The results presented here suggested that long memory is apparent when analysed on the assumption that unconditional variance is constant. However, both breakpoint tests and a moving average application suggest that unconditional variance exhibits substantial, although slow moving, time-variation. The apparent long-memory property largely disappears when this time-variation is taken into account. A modification of the GARCH model to allow for mean variation generates improved volatility forecasting performance, but only over long horizon. At the daily level the assumption of a constant unconditional variance does not seem to affect forecasts.     

Digital Financial Inclusion and Consumption Smoothing in China

In this paper, we investigate the effect of digital financial inclusion (DFI) on household consumption smoothing in China. We use four waves of the biennial China Family Panel Studies from 2010 to 2016, during which time DFI has significantly developed alongside financial technology across China. We split household income shocks into permanent and transitory components, and evaluate if DFI may help households to buffer against these shocks. We find that households are not able to insure against permanent shocks to income, but they can smooth approximately 70 percent of transitory shocks to income. We also find that DFI has diminished households’ ability to insure against transitory income shocks. This is partly because online purchase may lead to the oversensitivity of consumption to income. In addition, we find that contrary to DFI, traditional financial sector development contributes to better household consumption smoothing against transitory income shocks.     

Corporate environmentalism strategy in the Spanish consumer product sector: a typology of firms

In recent years, the protection of the environment has gained a growing importance. Accordingly, small and large firms have become aware of their responsibility and begun to develop environmental strategies as an enterprising challenge. In such a situation, this study describes firms' environmental orientation and its impact on the design of corporate and marketing strategies in the Spanish consumer product sector. The purpose of this paper is to identify different groups of firms according to their environmental behaviour. The information was obtained through 81 personal interviews with firms in the final consumer product sector. With the data obtained we have conducted several exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and a cluster analysis. Findings have proved that there is a specific firm type characterized by certain variables: influence of external forces; environmental orientation; corporative and marketing strategies; size; macro‐sector and, if existing, the environment department. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Evaluating capital mobility in the EU: a new approach using swaps data

The level of capital mobility prevailing within a group of core European Union (EU) countries is evaluated by means of cointegration-based tests of the covered interest parity (CIP). Unlike previous studies, this one concentrates on long maturities, investigating three to ten-year assets, and employing swap rates as a means of covering foreign exchange risk. Although CIP has not been previously assessed for EU long-term interest rates, such evaluation has practical interest. In fact, given EU member states' scarcity of mechanisms to react to asymmetric shocks, financial markets may become one major source of adjustment and stabilization. To this end, it is the mobility of long-term capital that is of critical importance. The analysis in this paper suggests that long-term financial flows appear to be completely unrestrained only between domestic Dutch and German markets.     

A pricing scheme for QoS in overlay networks based on first-price auctions and reimbursement

Providing Assured-Quality Services over data networks has been a key objective for the past few decades. Research and commercial activities have been focused on several aspects related to this main objective, such as implementing services over heterogeneous networks, providing scalable solutions and verifying network performance. However, less attention has been devoted to the interaction of these technical aspects with the business plane. Although several quality-based pricing schemes have been proposed, reimbursement proposals, while quite common in other scenarios as health, hotel reservation or airlines, are still rare in the field of Internet Economics. In this work, we propose a simple pricing scheme and study it in detail, in order to use Quality of Service monitoring information as feedback to the business plane, with the ultimate objective of improving the seller’s revenue. In our framework, Assured-Quality Services are sold through first-price auctions, and in case of failure, a percentage of the price paid for the service is given back to the buyers. We derive the expression for the willingness to pay and we model the reimbursement problem through a zero-sum Stackelberg game. We show that the Nash equilibrium of such game implies reimbursing 100 % in case of failures.     

Industry dynamics, technological regimes and the role of demand

In this paper, we propose an industrial dynamics model to analyze the interactions between the price-performance sensitivity of demand, the sources of innovation in a sector, and certain features of the corresponding pattern of industrial transformation. More precisely, we study market concentration in different technological regimes and demand conditions. The computational analysis of our model shows that market demand plays a key role in industrial dynamics. Thus, although for intermediate values of the price-performance sensitivity, our results show the well-known relationships in the literature between technological regimes and industry transformation, we find surprising outcomes when demand is strongly biased either towards price or performance. Hence, for different technological regimes, a high performance sensitivity of demand tends to concentrate the market. On the other hand, under conditions of high price sensitivity, the industry generally tends to atomize. That is to say, for extreme values of the price-performance sensitivity of demand, we find concentrated or atomized market structures no matter the technological regime we are in. These results highlight the importance of considering the role of demand in the analysis of industrial dynamics.