Third-Party Certification,Sponsorship, and Consumers’ Ecolabel Use

While prior ecolabel research suggests that consumers’ trust of ecolabel sponsors is associated with their purchase of ecolabeled products, we know little about how third-party certification might relate to consumer purchases when trust varies. Drawing on cognitive theory and a stratified random sample of more than 1200 consumers, we assess how third-party certification relates to consumers’ use of ecolabels across different program sponsors. We find that consumers’ trust of government and environmental NGOs to provide credible environmental information encourages consumers’ use of ecolabels sponsored by these entities, and consumers do not differentiate between certified versus uncertified ecolabels in the presence of trust. By contrast, consumers’ distrust of private business to provide credible environmental information discourages their use of business association-sponsored ecolabels. However, these ecolabels may be able to overcome consumer distrust if their sponsors certify the ecolabels using third-party auditors. These findings are important to sponsors who wish develop ecolabels that are more credible to consumers, and thus encourage more widespread ecolabel use.     

Rhetorical History as Institutional Work

Rhetorical history has emerged as a useful theoretical construct that bridges the long recognized gap between historical and organizational scholarship. Despite its growing popularity, the precise nature of rhetorical history as a construct, its scope conditions, and its utility in resolving critical issues in historical organizational analysis remains unclear. This paper addresses these issues. We define rhetorical history and contextualize the construct by elaborating its relationship to associated concepts like collective memory, rhetoric, and narrative. We ground the construct by reviewing literature that has applied rhetorical history in both theory and empirical research. Our inductive review identifies four recurring themes in which rhetorical history is used to construct perceptions of; (a) continuity and discontinuity, (b) similarity and difference, (c) winners and losers, and (d) morality and immorality. We conclude with a discussion of how rhetorical history is an essential mechanism of institutional work.     

Socioeconomic Index for Income and Poverty Prediction: A Sufficient Dimension Reduction Approach

The present paper introduces a novel method for the construction of Socioeconomic Status (SES) indices that are specific to a target variable of interest. It is based on the Sufficient Dimension Reduction (SDR) paradigm and uses a factorized model-based approach to simultaneously deal with predictor variables of mixed nature (i.e. quantitative, binary, and ordinal), which are usual in microeconomic data. These SES indices also identify relevant predictor variables using a two-step regularized matrix factorization approach. Using data from household surveys for Argentina (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares-EPH), the proposed method is compared with other existing dimension reduction algorithms such as standard Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its version for mixed variables, regression on the full set of variables and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression (LASSO).     

The productivity growth of euro area banks

Journal of Productivity Analysis - We study the performance of the banking system in the Eurozone over the period 2006–2017 as measured by total factor productivity growth (TFPG) and its...     

Stakeholder theory and actor-network theory: The stakeholder engagement in energy transitions

The idea of sustainable development highlights the need to address economic, social, and environmental aspects to preserve the rights and needs of future generations. This paper proposes an association between stakeholder theory (ST) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that can better explain the dynamics of actors in the energy sector, in the context of sociotechnical transitions to sustainability. By selectively examining the way in which different researchers perceive this subject, we intend to address how the engagement of the stakeholders can promote sociotechnical transitions in the energy sector trough the connection between ST and ANT. We aim to characterize the dynamics of stakeholder's engagement in sociotechnical transitions in the context of sustainability in the energy sector, trough the connection of the two theories. A narrative literature review was performed on scientific databases. The results showed that sociotechnical transitions in the energy sector require the involvement of multiple actors with different interests and that ST associated with ANT provides a good basis for research on this theme. The association of both theories highlights the importance of ST to enhance cooperation in the areas of clean energy research and technology, providing a theoretical tool for understanding the dynamics of transitions and its different pathways. For future studies, it is recommended to deepen the relationship between human and non-human actors and their role as stakeholders.     

Test power properties of within-firm estimators of ownership and board-related explanatory variables with low time variation

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - After decades of fast growth, the Chinese housing market has become twice as large as the US housing market. In this paper, we examine the effect of...     

Empirical analysis of the relationship between labour cost stickiness and labour reforms in Spain

This study performs an empirical analysis on the relationship between labour cost stickiness and the decrease in employment protection in the Spanish labour reforms in 2010 and 2012. Following these reforms, the sticky behaviour of labour costs substantially decreased with respect to the pre-reform period. All constituents of total labour costs followed a similar pattern: wages, social security contributions and number of employees. Results are robust to different models, estimation methods, periods of time, and industries, as well as with respect to endogeneity concerns.