CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A MICROECONOMIC REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This paper provides a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Depending on whether an individual can be considered as selfish, or whether she has also social preferences, motives for CSR, can be explained in different ways. Furthermore, we explicitly highlight the influence of different Corporate Governance System on CSR as well as the relationship between firms' size and social commitment. Because it is difficult to distinguish between different theories in empirical studies, we argue that an experimental approach might be suitable to test theories of CSR.     

Organising migrant workers: the living wage campaign at the University of East London

This critical case study looks at the campaign led by Citizens UK and Unison to get the University of East London (UEL) to sign up to the London living wage (LLW). UEL agreed to pay the LLW after a brief campaign in November 2010 and it was subsequently implemented in August 2011. The study charts the course of the campaign and draws on mobilisation theory and new primary research to account for its success. What our findings suggest is that community organisers and union activists were able to organise and mobilise a largely apolitical group of migrant workers. This, we suggest, can be explained by the successful mobilisation of the community and augurs well for future broad‐based campaigns.     

Concept‐Based Bayesian Model Averaging and Growth Empirics

In specifying a regression equation, we need to specify which regressors to include, but also how these regressors are measured. This gives rise to two levels of uncertainty: concepts (level 1) and measurements within each concept (level 2). In this paper we propose a hierarchical weighted least squares (HWALS) method to address these uncertainties. We examine the effects of different growth determinants taking explicit account of the measurement problem in the growth regressions. We find that estimates produced by HWALS provide intuitive and robust explanations. We also consider approximation techniques which are useful when the number of variables is large or when computing time is limited.     

The Case Against a U.S.-Arms Monopoly

The U.S. government is the dominant player in the global arms market. Existing literature emphasizes the many benefits of an international U.S. government arms monopoly including: regional and global balance, stability and security, the advancement of U.S. national interests, and domestic economic benefits from international sales. The purpose of this paper is to balance this largely one-sided treatment of the U.S. government’s dominant position in the international arms market. We discuss several negative consequences and costs associated with U.S. arms sales which call into question the net benefit of the U.S. government’s control over global arms.     

Corporate Responsibility and the Collegial Field

This article is based on 21 interviews of informants actively engaged with corporate responsibility in Sweden. The article introduces a new concept—the “collegial field”—which is helpful in understanding the course of events. With systems that are more open to other organizations, horizontal groupings with common interests become more influential. Collegial fields can also be relevant for understanding other activities in organizations than corporate responsibility.     

Prospect Theory in the Heterogeneous Agent Model

Using the Heterogeneous Agent Model framework, we incorporate an extension based on Prospect Theory into a popular agent-based asset pricing model. This extension covers the phenomenon of loss aversion manifested in risk aversion and asymmetric treatment of gains and losses. Using Monte Carlo methods, we investigate behavior and statistical properties of the extended model and assess how our extension is manifested in different strategies. We show that, on the one hand, the Prospect Theory extension keeps the essential underlying mechanics of the model intact, but on the other hand it considerably changes the model dynamics. Stability of the model is increased and fundamentalists may be able to survive in the market more easily. When only the fundamentalists are loss-averse, other strategies profit more.

     

Measuring the Diffusion of Technologies Through International Trade

International Advances in Economic Research - Technological advancements affect economic growth, income distribution and levels of unemployment. However, quantifying the pace of technological...     

Disentangling types of liquidity and testing limits-to-arbitrage theories in the CDS–bond basis

We disentangle asset-specific, market, and funding liquidity in the CDS–bond basis outside and during the 2007–9 global financial crisis. Our findings stress the importance of separating different types of liquidity, since all three measures have independently negative impacts on the basis. Funding liquidity emerges as the economically most important liquidity metric. While asset-specific liquidity is cross-correlated in both the cash and derivative markets, funding and market liquidity only matter for the cash market. We exploit the decomposition of the basis to test predictions of limits-to-arbitrage theories. We find strong evidence in favor of margin-based asset pricing and flight-to-quality effects.