Retweet if you please! Do news factors explain engagement?

Stakeholders’ engagement with corporate messages is crucial for companies that want to increase their social media coverage. However, our understanding of the content-related factors that drive stakeholders’ engagement is still poor. Drawing from the literature on news selection and distribution, this paper explores whether the relevant news values that are already found in corporate messages could also explain greater engagement in social media. In particular, six news factors were examined in a sample of 2331 tweets that were posted by the Euro Stoxx 50 companies. The results show that four news factors (in particular, Prominence, Entertainment, Immediacy, and to a lesser extent Human interest) play a role in the drive of content sharing through retweets and favorites. Additionally, the inclusion of hashtags and media content helps increase retweets and favorites. Finally, we observe differences among industries. In particular, firms operating in business-to-business industries obtain less reach through sharing. The implications of these results are relevant for social media strategists as they suggest avenues to increase followers’ engagement with company-produced content.     

Calendar effects in Latin American stock markets

One of the most well-documented empirical regularities in international finance is the presence of calendar effects in historical stock returns. The literature focuses mainly on developed countries, and in general, emerging markets have not received much attention on this issue. We aim to bridge this gap by documenting the existence of significant and robust calendar effects for the main stock markets in Latin America. Upon performing an extreme bounds analysis that adjusts our estimations for model uncertainty, we find a significantly negative Monday effect, generally compensated by a significantly positive Friday effect. These effects are robust to model specification and are stable through time. Even though not as widespread, we also find evidence for a robust turn-of-the-month effect.     

Beyond win–win: A syncretic theory on corporate stakeholder engagement in sustainable development

This article explores the concept of syncretism to articulate the construct of a novel theoretical approach that may help to accelerate progress in developing substantively more sustainable business activities. One reason why the integration of environmental and social responsibility in business has been so difficult to achieve in practice is that it is not just a battle of competing business logics but a battle of faiths. The concept of syncretism, with its roots in religious synthesis, may be far more relevant and useful than conventional approaches to combining the two, which rarely seem to rise above a “win–win” appeal to logic. The connectionist logic of syncretism may show us a way beyond paradigmatic conformity in business sustainability research so that scholars with diverse theoretical backgrounds might have a common ground for discussion, find constructive connections, and engage in potentially more insightful and creative interactions to develop our understanding of corporate sustainability.     

Corporate governance,financing and gender: A study of SMEs from Argentinean Securities Markets

The objective of this work is to study corporate governance (CG) and the financing of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) from a gender perspective. Particularly, the participation of women in the holding, administration (board of directors and senior management), and external audit of the SMEs that participate in the Argentinian stock markets is analyzed. The results show that there are significant relations between the participation of women in ownership, external audits, and financing decisions. However, no relation is found between the participation of women at the different levels of the CG.     

The LeChatelier principle for changes in risk

In this paper, we analyze the comparative statics of changes in risk in the context of problems with multiple decision variables. We demonstrate, in particular, that the Samuelson–LeChatelier principle extends naturally to the comparative statics of changes in risk: in the presence of positive feedbacks between the decision variables, the unrestricted response to an increase in risk is in the same direction and stronger in magnitude than the restricted response (i.e. the choice when other decision variables are fixed). We define the concepts of Nth-degree risk complements and Nth-degree risk substitutes and we show that it is in any one of these two cases (and only in these cases) that we will observe positive feedbacks between the decision variables. We also analyze the extent to which the same principle can be applied to strategic settings under uncertainty.     

ENJOYING THE QUIET LIFE UNDER DEREGULATION? NOT QUITE

Most empirical studies in the banking literature assume that the alternative profit function is linearly homogeneous in input prices. We show that such an assumption is theoretically unwarranted and that its use may yield misleading results. We use Koetter et al. (Review of Economics and Statistics 2012; 94 (2): 462–480) as a benchmark to showcase how empirical results can be sensitive to the linear homogeneity assumption. Contrary to Koetter et al., we find a positive relation between market power and profit efficiency when this assumption is dropped. This relation is slightly weakened after the wave of intrastate and interstate deregulation but not enough to support the ‘quiet life’ hypothesis. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.