Familiness,business strategy and stakeholder engagement: The internationalisation of Spanish olive oil mills

Based on social capital theory and the family-firm context, this paper studies familiness' composition and the result of the overlap of the family and firm systems, analysing their influence on the internationalisation strategies of family firms. In this relationship, the stakeholder engagement becomes at the same time an antecedent and a result when developing family businesses' strategies, being one of the most relevant the internationalisation strategies. Prior research focused on familiness as the result of proxy variables such as the percentage of ownership and management in family hands, or business size, instead of as psychological variables resulting from shared organisational culture and social interactions. Through a qualitative study based on 12 interviews of general managers and/or export managers of Spanish family olive oil mills, this study asserts that the level of familiness influences internationalisation strategies, the reasons underlying a business becoming international and its commitment to activities abroad being the role of stakeholders crucial in those interactions. The higher the level of familiness, the more likely the family business internationalisation and the higher their levels of international commitment. Additionally, the higher the concern about their stakeholders, the higher their levels of international commitment. The family businesses' concern for their stakeholders and their international commitment share a reciprocal relationship. The results regarding the relevance of familiness as social capital resources in sustaining competitive advantages support the decision to promote, develop and nurture social capital when a family business goes international.     

Competition under revenue-cap regulation with efficiency benchmarking: tariff related incentives for gas transmission system operators in merged markets

Journal of Regulatory Economics - In Europe, gas market mergers aim at reducing restrictions on gas wholesale markets. Market mergers also allow network users to book transport capacity at...     

Monetary policy rules with PID control features: evidence from the UK,USA and EU

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the extent to which the monetary policy operations of three major central banks can be regarded as an application of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control rules. The paper outlines the general PID framework and estimates a series of dynamic models to identify how interest rate policy adjustments are affected by the rate of inflation and the level of macroeconomic activity. The paper examines data for the UK, the USA and the Eurozone. The results suggest that the PID rules can provide a useful theoretical and empirical framework for estimating central bank responses to the inflation and macroeconomic activity variables by improving the explanatory power of the Taylor rule model and determining the effect of the parameters.     

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.     

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.     

Does Public Service Motivation Mediate the Relationship between Goal Clarity and both Organizational Commitment and Extra-Role Behaviours?

Research has not considered how goal clarity can affect work attitudes through public service motivation (PSM). As a result, a model was developed to examine the relationship between goal clarity, PSM, and two employee work attitudes and behaviours (i.e., organizational commitment and extra-role behaviours). Several important findings emerged from the model. First, goal clarity was positively associated with PSM. Second, goal clarity was positively associated with both organizational commitment and extra-role behaviours. Finally, PSM was found to partially mediate the relationship between goal clarity and both organizational commitment and extra-role behaviours. The implications these findings have for theory and practice are discussed.     

The market valuation of ethical assets in Spain: an application of the hedonic pricing method

The aim of this paper is to calculate the market valuation of non‐financial characteristics, namely, the social responsibility criteria (social, ethical and environmental) included in the Spanish Socially Responsible Investment Funds. The hedonic price method is applied for this purpose. This method relates the price of Socially Responsible Investment Funds with both financial and social responsibility characteristics. Because of the large number of social responsibility characteristics included in these funds, prior to application of the hedonic price method, the principal components factor analysis technique is used. The data are taken from the prospectus for each fund and from the data provided by the National Securities Market Commission. Results indicate that the Spanish market is sensitive to the social responsibility practices of companies. In particular, the market value practices related to environmental sustainability, the enforcement of labour rights, sustainable production and consumption and non‐abusive market practices.