Disclosures of Social Value Creation and Managing Legitimacy: A Case Study of Three Global Social Enterprises

This study seeks to fill the gap in the existing literature by examining how and whether disclosure of social value creation becomes a part of the legitimation strategies of social enterprises. In particular, using Suchman's (1995) moral dimension of legitimacy theory, this study sets out whether and how disclosures by three global social organisations – Grameen Bank, Charity Water and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – conform to the expectations of the broader community. The study finds that there is an apparent disconnection between disclosure and action by social enterprises. With reference to a few incidents, social enterprises use disclosure as a part of their managerial efforts, rather than to create moral legitimacy. The notion of apparent disconnection between disclosure and real action by social enterprises is evident. The notion is consistent with extant disclosure literature capturing the motivations for the disclosure practices of corporations. The findings of this paper suggest that when an organisation (whether it is a corporation or a social enterprise) faces a legitimacy crisis, it appears to disclose good news rather than bad news, which calls into question organisational moral legitimacy.     

Property tax and inter-municipal migration in canada: a multivariate test of the Tiebout hypothesis

This paper tests the causal ordering between property taxes and inter-municipal migration, using both bivariate and multivariate methods. Empirical results, based on annual data for post-war Canada (1940–84), support the Tiebout–Tullock hypothesis, which implies that differential local tax system and public services induce inter-comunity migration, inter alia. Local spending and taxation are not therefore fully capitalized in property values. The bivariate tests, based on the Granger–Sims test and Hsiao's procedure, indicate an instantaneous bidirectional causality between property taxes and migration but the multivariate Granger test supports only a unidirectional causality from property taxes to migration.     

Health shocks and consumption smoothing in rural households: Does microcredit have a role to play?

This paper estimates, using a large panel data set from rural Bangladesh, the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households’ response to such shocks. Households appear to be fairly well insured against health shocks. Our results suggest that households sell livestock in response to health shocks and short term insurance is therefore attained at a significant long term cost. However microcredit has a significant mitigating effect. Households that have access to microcredit do not need to sell livestock in order to insure consumption. Microcredit organizations and microcredit therefore have an insurance role to play, an aspect that has not been analyzed previously.     

Financing constraints and investment efficiency: evidence from a panel of Canadian forest firms

This article examines the financial constraint of 18 listed Canadian forest firms between 2000 and 2014 following the stochastic frontier approach. Empirical results support the observation that Canadian forest firms have a strong dependence of using both equity financing and debt financing as the coefficients of both equity and debt financing mean functions are significant at 1% level. The distribution of investment efficiency index (IEI) of all 18 firms demonstrates a loss of around 40% of the rate of investment due to financing constraints. Regional analysis demonstrates that the time-varying patters of IEI of three provinces are significantly different.     

Does paternity leave matter for female employment in developing economies? Evidence from firm-level data

Analysis using firm-level data for a sample of 33,302 firms in 53 developing countries shows that women’s employment among private firms is significantly higher in countries that mandate paternity leave versus those that do not. A conservative estimate suggests an increase of 6.8 percentage points in the proportion of women workers associated with mandating paternity leave. The empirical specification is immune to spurious correlations that affect the level of women and men employment equally and also robust to a large number of controls for country and firm characteristics.     

Tests of Weak‐Form Efficiency of the Dhaka Stock Exchange

Abstract:   Conflicting evidence on weak form efficiency of the Dhaka Stock Market appears to stem from the use of monthly versus daily data, structural changes after the 1996 market crash, and the use of tests with or without heteroscedasticity adjustment. Heteroscedasticity‐robust tests indicate short‐term predictability of share prices prior to the crash, but not afterwards. Although a heteroscedasticity‐robust Box‐Pierce test was used by Lo and MacKinlay (1989) in their simulations, our study appears to be the first to apply this test to stock prices. Typical rejection of weak‐form market efficiency by the usual autocorrelation tests may be reversed by a heteroscedasticity‐robust test.     

REGIONAL AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION SYSTEMS: ESTIMATES FOR WESTERN AUSTRALIA

A regional model, be it computable general equilibrium or partial equilibrium in construct, which is based on the national parameters would certainly provide misleading results if the regional economy or sector is significantly different from its national counterpart. For a credible and useful quantitative analysis of the regional impacts of changes in, say, government policies or international events, one thus needs an empirically based economic model that reflects the key features of the regional economy or sector concerned. This is the motivation for this paper, which estimates a disaggregated agricultural production system for Western Australia (WA): a key farming State of Australia. The paper uses a profit function approach that explicitly recognizes jointness in agricultural production and various climatic zones in WA, and an estimation procedure that involves the Diewert–Wales decomposition technique. It presents estimates of elasticities of supply responses and input demands in WA agriculture, and compares these with the national estimates.     

Ethically Questionable Negotiating: The Interactive Effects of Trust, Competitiveness, and Situation Favorability on Ethical Decision Making

This study explores the direct and interactive effects of individual differences in interpersonal trust and negotiation style on ethical decision-making processes across commonly faced negotiation situations. Individual differences influence basic ideas about legitimate negotiating behaviors, affect behavioral intentions directly, and interact with the favorability of negotiating situations, resulting in direct, indirect, and interactive effects on ethical decision-making processes. Using a sample of 298 participants in executive education workshops, the study analyzes the relationship between interpersonal trust, competitiveness, moral judgment, and behavioral intentions in different negotiating conditions through a series of structural equation models and regression analyses. Our results suggest that individual difference variables exert a significant influence not only on how managers assess the morality of ethically ambiguous negotiation practices but also directly on their behavioral intentions, and that this effect changed across specific negotiation situations. We discuss these results in terms of their usefulness in explaining ethical decision-making processes in negotiations.