Economies of scale and scope in the European banking sector

In this article, using the data of 2008, we try to describe the impact of scale and product differentiation in 282 European banks. While evidence of the economies of scale is less clear, the results obtained using a translogarithmic function system show that significant economies of scope do exist even for new banking products like derivatives.

The Power of Stakeholders' Voice: The Effects of Social Media Activism on Stock Markets

Building on social movement theory, this study assesses the influence of social media activism on the stock market performance of targeted firms. We focus on information published on Twitter by two critical stakeholders: consumer associations and trade unions. To the extent that social media represent a valid medium to mobilize stakeholders' activism, protests on Twitter may damage firm reputation, leading to capital market reactions. Using a corpus of over 1.5 million tweets referring to Spanish listed banks, we study the impact of activism by looking at targeted firms' abnormal variations in price and trading volume. Our findings suggest that the Twitter activism of key stakeholders has a significant impact on investors' decisions. Further, our empirical analyses indicate that the mechanisms affecting investors' behavior differ depending on the characteristics of the stakeholder group. Hence, this study contributes to understanding how social movements influence corporate behavior via social media. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Proposal of a composite indicator of job quality based on a measure of weighted distances

Quality & Quantity - In this paper, we propose a formulation of a composite indicator (CI) computed for individuals and based on elementary indicators that are measured using quantitative,...     

Labor Courts and Firing Costs: The Labor-Market Effects of Trial Delays

Employment protection is the result of labor laws as well as of institutional factors not encompassed in official legislation. Courts' delays in settling labor disputes are among those factors. Using individual data from the Italian Labour Force Survey (2008–2010) and exploiting the territorial heterogeneity in the duration of labor trials across Italian regions we investigate the effect of courts’ delays on the composition of employment. We find that labor courts' delays reduce the employment rate and increase inactivity of specific categories of workers, i.e., women, young, and low-skilled individuals; they also reduce the likelihood of accessing a permanent occupation and increase the incidence of long-term unemployment for the same groups of workers.     

Competition and coordination in experimental minority games

This work presents experimental results on a coordination game in which agents must repeatedly choose between two sides, and a positive fixed payoff is assigned only to agents who pick the minoritarian side. We conduct laboratory experiments in which stationary groups of five players play the game for 100 periods, and manipulate two treatment variables: the amount of information about other players’ past choices and the salience of information regarding the game history (i.e., the length of the string of past outcomes that players can see on the screen while choosing). Our main findings can be summarized as follows: aggregate efficiency in the game is in most cases significantly higher than the level corresponding to the symmetric mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. In addition, providing players with information about individual choices in the group does not improve aggregate efficiency with respect to when such information is absent. Displaying information about more rounds than just the previous one, on the other hand, seems to have a positive effect on aggregate efficiency. At the individual level, we find a stronger statistical relation between players’ current choices and their own past choices than between players’ choices and previous aggregate outcomes. In addition, the depth of the relation between present and past choices seems to be affected by the prompt availability of information about the game history. Finally, we detect evidence of a mutual co-adaptation between players’ choices over time that is partly responsible for the high level of efficiency observed.      

An Open Innovation Decision Support System to Select a Biopharmaceutical R&D Portfolio

Drugs available in the market today, selected several years ago under very uncertain future scenario, have experienced a long and expensive process of research and development carried out following both a closed and an open innovation path. To support this critical selection process, we propose a Decision Support System, able to choose among different candidates the most promising drugs along their best development path. The Decision Support System, based on a real options portfolio optimization model, mapping tools, and what‐if rules as well, has been applied to a numerical example available in literature, and the research findings show interesting managerial and academic implications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Monitoring Intensity and Stakeholders’ Orientation: How Does Governance Affect Social and Environmental Disclosure?

The aim of the paper is to investigate the effects of the corporate governance model on social and environmental disclosure (SED). We analyze the disclosures of the 100 U.S. Best Corporate Citizens in the period 2005–2007, and we posit a series of simultaneous relationships between different attributes of the governance system and a multidimensional construct of corporate social performance (CSP). We consider both the extent and the quality of SED, with the purpose of identifying increasing levels of corporate commitment to stakeholders and shedding some light on whether SED is used as a signal or rather as a legitimacy tool. Our empirical evidence shows that the stakeholders’ orientation of corporate governance is positively associated with CSP and SED. On the other hand, we do not find support for the monitoring intensity of corporate governance being negatively associated with social performance. We also find that CSP in the “product” dimension is positively associated with the extent and quality of SED whilst CSP in the “people” dimension is negatively associated with the extent and quality of SED. At a time when shareholders and stakeholders share more common aspects in their relationships with firms, this is a significant area to explore and this research fills an important lacuna in this respect.     

Matching bias in labor demand estimation

Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we show both theoretically and empirically that positive assortative matching between firms and workers leads to an underestimation of the absolute value of wage elasticity of labor demand.     

Pacioli's Example Entries—a Conundrum Resolved?

This paper discusses the nature of the 10 example paragraph entries at the end of Pacioli's bookkeeping treatise. It concludes that these are entries from fledgling banking operations involving one account holder and one borrower who, along with two others, has financial transactions with the account holder. The widely held assumption that they are examples of entries in the Ledger is set aside and it is concluded that, on the basis of the available evidence, they are examples of entries in a Ricordanze, a record book Pacioli described as being used to record items of this type.     

Private benefits, block transaction premiums and ownership structure

A simple model shows that both price premiums and standardized block premiums (SBPs) are biased measures of private benefits because they do not account for the transfer of control effectively taking place with the block. This depends not only on the fractional size of the block, but on the whole distribution of shareholdings. We propose an alternative methodology to measure private benefits which makes it possible to weight the size of traded blocks on the basis of their strategic power. We apply our method to a sample of Italian block transactions and show that the traditional method underestimates control rents. The sensitivity of private benefits to net worth, leverage, and nonvoting shares is also examined. Finally, we show how to forecast the price of out-of-sample blocks of shares on the basis of information on company capital and ownership structure.