Bank presence in firm equity: A diversification based approach

This study analyses the possible reasons for banks deciding to invest in firm equity, based on the fundamentals of the strategic diversification literature. Those fundamentals suggest that it may be in response to the negative evolution of other aspects of banking business, namely, credit business, fixed interest business and services, as well as the bank's level of efficiency. The results confirm the hypotheses that the decision to hold equity in other firms is related to the evolution of the bank's other businesses. However, the results for savings banks differed from those for banks.     

Sustainable Development and the Financial System: Society's Perceptions About Socially Responsible Investing

The debate surrounding the financial needs of investors and the impact on society of investment is considered to be an important research topic due to the growth of socially responsible financial markets. The main objective of this research is to study society's perception about socially responsible investing (SRI) and to identify investor's preferences regarding environmental, social and governance criteria, their real‐life investment needs and the most relevant sustainable financial products. To examine society's perception of SRI, we conducted a field survey among Spanish investors. The results show that SRI is at an early stage and Spanish investors need more exact information regarding social, environmental, and governance criteria in order to invest in socially responsible companies and products. This paper offers some guidelines that could be used by Spanish institutions, managers and investors and by foreign managers when approaching the Spanish market, in order to promote the growth of socially responsible financial products. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

NYSE Euronext-Deutsche Börse merger: Let the dance go on!

While it has often been said that trading is like dancing, exchanges have certainly been dancing with one another for some time, following the need to diversify and cope with the results of a challenging liberalisation process. The proposed merger between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse would create the world’s biggest exchange by revenues and total value. This needs the approval of 47 regulators across the globe, including the US Department of Justice and the European Commission. These institutions would be well advised not to try to stop the dance.     

Customer satisfaction's key factors in Spanish grocery stores: Evidence from hypermarkets and supermarkets

The marketing literature has shown how certain attributes of the store are key for grocery retailers to differentiate themselves in the final markets. From this preliminary consideration the present work proposes a step forward by ascertaining the main factors that underlie the attributes of the store which have already been identified in the literature. All of this is taken into account with the object to examine which of these factors presents a greater influence on customer satisfaction. To test the proposed analysis, a sample of 358 Spanish customers that had carried out their purchase in different types of grocery stores (in particular, hypermarkets and supermarkets) has been analyzed considering a key variable of retail patronage behavior: the store format in which the purchase had been carried out. This study has enabled us to obtain interesting conclusions about the variables that have the most influence on customer satisfaction, providing useful managerial recommendations for decision-making in grocery retailing.     

An analysis of health expenditure on a microdata population basis

The objective of this paper is to analyse the hospitalisation and the pharmaceutical expenditures of a population. To do so, we will use cross-sectional information for the year 2004, referring to the whole population of one of the seventeen autonomous communities that make up the Spanish public health system, namely, Aragón. Given the important proportion of null expenditures, a model that takes into account the censored nature of the data must be specified. In our case, the model we choose is Heckman's (1979) selection model. The results are conclusive. i) Age, being a pensioner and being of Spanish nationality positively influence the generation of both types of expenditure; ii) on the contrary, the distance from the health centre to the hospital affects them negatively; iii) sex notably influences the generation of both types of expenditure, women generating higher level of expenditures; iv), in both cases, significant differences appear associated with the zone to which the user belongs; and v) we have also found that pharmaceutical expenditure depends significantly on the doctor who is prescribing.     

The Dynamics of Labour Flexibility: Relationships between Employment Type and Innovativeness

This paper investigates the relationship between flexible human resource (HR) practices and innovativeness. Testing the research model in a sample of first‐tier automotive suppliers indicates that internal flexibility practices are positively related to innovativeness. Regarding external flexibility, the association depends on the type of contingent employee: negative association for ‘short‐term hires’ and positive association for ‘consulting/contracting firms’. The relationships to innovativeness for practices associated with knowledge transfer are moderated by environmental dynamism, but the non‐knowledge related practices are not. Firms in highly dynamic environments can benefit more from flexible HR practices than firms in less dynamic environments.     

FINANCIAL EDUCATION AND BEHAVIORAL FINANCE: NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE ROLE OF INFORMATION IN FINANCIAL DECISIONS

Recent empirical evidence based on surveys and experimental activities within the fields of behavioral finance and financial education has offered economists new empirically based insights into how individuals use information in making financial decisions. Specifically, the importance of information in financial decisions may be reduced or eliminated by psychological aspects of the individual, such as a state of overconfidence that is individual or shared with a group, or by the individual's limited ability to process complex and abundant information. This paper aims to complement this emerging body of literature by studying how individuals perceive and process information when making financial decisions. We review these contributions and suggest a number of broad guidelines that can provide a framework for future discussion of this topic within financial decision theory.     

Relationship marketing in museums: influence of managers and mode of governance

ABSTRACT

On the bases of relationship marketing and social capital, this paper aims to explore whether museums’ external relationships depend on managers and internal relationships as well as on mode of governance. The empirical findings of a hierarchical regression analysis for a sample of 556 museums indicate that close relationships with the external environment require managerial social capital and a supportive culture that favours internal cohesion. Finally, public museums directly run by government entities remain too bureaucratic and lack incentives to promote internal cohesion as well as relationships with customers and other stakeholders. Implications for managers are discussed.     

Symmetric Coalitional Binomial Semivalues

We introduce here a family of mixed coalitional values. They extend the binomial semivalues to games endowed with a coalition structure, satisfy the property of symmetry in the quotient game and the quotient game property, generalize the symmetric coalitional Banzhaf value introduced by Alonso and Fiestras and link and merge the Shapley value and the binomial semivalues. A computational procedure in terms of the multilinear extension of the original game is also provided and an application to political science is sketched.