Audit committee characteristics and firm performance during the global financial crisis

We address the question ‘do governance enhancing audit committee (AC) characteristics mitigate the firm performance impact of significant‐adverse‐economic events such as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC)?’ Our analysis reveals that smaller audit committees with more experience and financial expertise are more likely to be associated with positive firm performance in the market. We also find that longer serving chairs of audit committees negatively impacts accounting performance. However, accounting performance is positively impacted where ACs include blockholder representation, the chair of the board, whose members have more external directorships and whose chair has more years of managerial experience. We contribute to the growing body of research on the impact of audit committee governance attributes on performance during times of financial distress.     

Population dynamics and utilitarian criteria in the Lucas–Uzawa Model

This paper introduces population growth in the Uzawa–Lucas model, analyzing the implications of the choice of the welfare criterion on the model's outcome. Traditional growth theory assumes population growth to be exponential, but this is not a realistic assumption (see Brida and Accinelli, 2007). We model exogenous population change by a generic function of population size. We show that a unique non-trivial equilibrium exists and the economy converges towards it along a saddle path, independently of population dynamics. What is affected by the type of population dynamics is the dimension of the stable manifold, which can be one or two, and when the equilibrium is reached, which can happen in finite time or asymptotically. Moreover, we show that the choice of the utilitarian criterion will be irrelevant on the equilibrium of the model, if the steady state growth rate of population is null, as in the case of logistic population growth. Then, we show that a closed-form solution for the transitional dynamics of the economy (both in the case population dynamics is deterministic and stochastic) can be found for a certain parameter restriction.     

‘We Are Here Alone’: The Ironic Potentials and Vulnerabilities of Mixed (Up) Districts in Central Jakarta

The durability of central city districts in large metropolitan systems of the majority world has largely been attained through intricate intersections of physical, infrastructural, human and discursive materials, as these intersections are continuously remade through shifting constellations of the incremental initiatives of residents. Residents have learned to use the city as a place to continuously explore new relationships among things and extract a wide range of unanticipated capacities from them. This is a collective resourcefulness from which there might be much to draw in terms of using the carbon‐driven exigencies of infrastructural transformation as the occasion to reanimate more egalitarian political projects. Although many collective efforts are increasingly being disassembled, the reflections of a single resident of one of Jakarta's most heterogeneous residential districts points to how the revitalization of such efforts might be conceived. The efficacy of political efforts to address intensified vulnerability partly entails replenishing intense mixtures of built and physical environments as provocations and platforms for complex social maneuvers.     

Defining the Content of Sustainability Reports in Nonprofit Organizations: Do Stakeholders Really Matter?

The aim of the article is to investigate the role of stakeholder engagement and participation in nonprofit organizations’ sustainability reporting, according to the literature on third sector and stakeholder theory. To verify the levels of involvement, the authors conducted an empirical survey, using content analysis, on a sample of 54 sustainability reports of nonprofit organizations included in the Global Reporting Initiative database as of September 1, 2012. In order to strengthen the results obtained from the content analysis, the authors shared their findings with the organizations of the sample. The survey showed that there were some criticisms regarding stakeholder participation in the targeted research field. These are considered in the conclusions. Questions for the future included whether stakeholder engagement is moving from being simply a way to consult and influence stakeholders to being an effective instrument for involving them in nonprofit organizations’ reporting and decision-making processes, through mutual commitment.     

Broadband achievement index: Moving beyond availability

High-speed access to the Internet enhances economic prosperity, social development and global competitiveness. Significant progress has been made in broadband deployment in the last decade. Nevertheless, there are increasing gaps in broadband adoption, use and speed between, as well as within, the states. Federal and state legislators and regulators currently use a number of indicators such as adoption, availability and speed to track states’ progress in broadband diffusion in order to design appropriate policy responses. Single indicators, however, when analyzed individually, fall short of capturing multi-dimensional aspects of broadband diffusion and, thus, do not provide an integrated and easily comprehensible picture of states’ advancement. To monitor states’ overall progress it is useful to aggregate various indicators into a composite index that could measure the overall extent of broadband diffusion. A composite index can also provide with an important benchmark for designing policies to improve states’ overall performance. This paper offers a flexible framework for benchmarking states’ achievement in broadband diffusion by proposing a composite Broadband Achievement Index (BAI). The index combines several key performance indicators: broadband availability, adoption, competition, speed and the dispersion of broadband adoption within the states utilizing FCC's Form 477 data and the recently collected census block level broadband availability data from NTIA. The purpose is to provide a more comprehensive picture of where the states stand in their evolution toward high-performance America by measuring each state's current broadband achievement relative to other states and providing an important benchmark for assessing state-specific needs. The indicators are combined using the Benefit of the Doubt (BOD) methodology (Cherchye, Moesen, & Van Puyenbroeck, 2004). The methodology is founded on the premise that, absent a consensus on social policy priorities, that are, on which indicators are more important and should be given higher weights in the index, each state is granted leeway for deciding how to weigh its own indicators and the most favorable weights for indicators are determined for each state. A good relative performance in a particular dimension is seen as revealed evidence of setting high state policy priority to that indicator, when each state's specific policy priorities are unknown. Additionally, the Second Order Stochastic Dominance (SOSD) methodology is used to compare the dispersion of adoption in the states. Using SOSD the states are ranked under the assumption that proportionally higher and more equally distributed adoption rates are better.     

On the distributional properties of size, profit and growth of Icelandic firms

In this paper, we analyze the distributional properties of the balance sheets of Icelandic firms by performing an empirical analysis of total assets, profit rates and growth rates using a data set of 2,818 Icelandic firms during the period 2000–2009. We find that the firms size measure, i.e. total assets, have the same heavy tail characteristics as various studies have shown, e.g. for US and Italian firms. The heavy tail nature of the total assets distribution seems to be robust w.r.t. a boom-bust cycle of the economy as well as special characteristics of Icelandic firms, e.g. their relatively small size and private ownership. Another important finding is that the profit rates, or return on assets, of Icelandic firms follow a Laplace like distribution similar to US firms. Additionally, we identified deviations from the distributional regularities, namely the power law behavior of firms’ size and Laplacian distributions of growth and profit rates, during the booming period of the economy 2005–2007.     

Knowledge dynamics in setting sustainable standards in tourism – the case of ‘Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa’

The development of standards and certification programmes in global tourism has gained importance in the production-consumption-nexus. This paper deals with the ‘Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa’ standard, one of the first innovative service standards with a focus on the social dimension of sustainability. Until now, there has been little detailed exploration in the evolutionary trajectories of sustainable tourism standards from a knowledge-based perspective. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of standard creation in global–local interaction processes over time and its impacts on the micro level of firms. Conceptually, it builds on two scientific debates: the neo-institutional approaches in organisational theory focusing on institution building and the research on innovation and knowledge dynamics. Empirically, it is based on 32 interviews conducted with different actor groups.     

On the aubin-like characterization of competitive equilibria in infinite dimensional economies

For an exchange economy with finitely many agents and a commodity space which is infinite dimensional, it is proved that competitive equilibria are the same as allocations belonging to the fuzzy core of the economy. The latter is further characterized as a subset of the ordinary core of a suitably associated continuum economy.

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Riassunto Per un'economia di puro scambio con un numero finito di agenti e uno spazio dei beni di dimensione non necessariamente finita, si prova che gli equilibri Walrasiani possono essere caratterizzati come allocazioni che appartengono al nucleo fuzzy dell'economia. Inoltre, queste ultime allocazioni sono in corrispondenza biunivoca con allocazioni di tipo semplice che si trovano nel nucleo ordinario di un'opportuna economia che ha [0,1] come spazio rappresentativo dello spazio degli agenti.