ON THE EMERGENCE OF TOYBOYS: THE TIMING OF MARRIAGE WITH AGING AND UNCERTAIN CAREERS*

We explore how gender bias in career opportunities affects matching in a marriage market with search frictions and where an individual’s fitness decays with age. We document a “being left on the shelf” effect where young singles, who find the marriage market rapidly thins with age, rush into early partnership. Singles with stronger career opportunities, however, have a greater option value to defer marriage. More equal career opportunities for women (captured by greater schooling and better occupations) potentially explain the recent emergence of toyboy unions, in which the woman is at least 5 years older than her partner.     

Impact of Market Orientation and ICT on the Performance of Rural Smaller Service Enterprises*

Market orientation (MO) is considered as a competitive strategy for the smaller service enterprises based in rural locations. A model is proposed and validated for the rural tourism sector that encompasses the effects of MO and of the use of information and communications technology (ICT) on business activity, taking into account the business's financial results, improvements to the rural location, and the more personal, intangible impact on the local entrepreneur. ICT is found to have a positive impact on MO and outcomes, whereas, similarly, the adoption of MO is found to have a positive effect on outcomes.     

Beyond Contracts: Love in Firms

The traditional theories of the firm leave no room for love in business organizations, perhaps because it is thought that love is only an emotion or feeling, not a virtue, or because economic efficiency and profit making are considered to be incompatible with the practice of charity or love. In this article, we show based on an approach to the human action within the organization, that love can and must be lived in firms for firms to operate efficiently, be attractive to those who take part in them, and act consistently in the long run.     

Supervisor Role Modeling,Ethics-Related Organizational Policies,and Employee Ethical Intention: The Moderating Impact of Moral Ideology

The moral ideology of banking and insurance employees in Spain was examined along with supervisor role modeling and ethics-related policies and procedures for their association with ethical behavioral intent. In addition to main effects, we found evidence supporting that the person–situation interactionist perspective in supervisor role modeling had a stronger positive relationship with ethical intention among employees with relativist moral ideology. Also as hypothesized, formal ethical polices and procedures were positively related to ethical intention among those with universal beliefs, but the relationship was much weaker among relativists. Thus, firms wishing to optimally promote ethical attitudes and behavior must tailor their organization-based initiatives to the individual characteristics of their employees.     

Economic Openness and Fiscal Multipliers*

Recent empirical findings attribute a central role to the degree of economic openness to determine the size of the fiscal multiplier. See, for instance, Ilzetzki et al. (2013) [How big (small?) are fiscal multipliers? Journal of Monetary Economics, 60(2), 239–254]. However, traditional macroeconomic models have difficulties to account for this evidence. By introducing ‘deep-habit’ formation into a New Keynesian small open economy model, this paper provides a theoretical framework which is able to attest for the new empirical evidence. Deep habits give rise to counter-cyclical firm markups, which are crucial to generate effects of openness on the fiscal multiplier as found in the data. We study three dimensions of economic openness: exchange rate flexibility, trade openness, and capital mobility. In line with the empirical findings, we report a negative relationship between measures of economic openness and the fiscal multiplier.     

Measuring Corporate Environmental Performance: A Methodology for Sustainable Development

Assessing corporate environmental performance (CEP) that is both comprehensive and consistent with sustainable development both for society and companies, while at the same time taking heed of the facts and interests of each stakeholder, is not a simple feat. Due to the multidimensional character of the sustainability concept, several questions must be considered in the evaluation process: (i) the qualitative nature of indicators and the complexity of developing a synthetic index; (ii) the difficulty of choosing properly statistical techniques for aggregation and (iii) the difficulty of introducing stakeholders’ preferences in the assessment models. This paper is an attempt to address this challenge by developing a framework for the assessment of CEP, based on the application of a fuzzy multi‐criterion decision‐making (MCDM) method. To achieve positive scores in a CEP assessment, an organization should be strategically committed and engage in environmental management and governance structures that are translated into good results in terms of both engagement and operational performance. Unless such premises are explicitly incorporated into the assessment criteria, the results would reveal that the CEP measurement could not be brought into a line with an earnest ambition of achieving true sustainable development. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Influence of Social Media over the Stock Market

This research analyzes investors’ activity through social media and these media's influence over the Chicago Board Options Exchange Market Volatility Index (VIX) using a logit model and a fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The logit results show that social media sentiment influences stock markets. Meanwhile, the fsQCA results show that the investors’ profile is important for explaining how social media influence the stock market. Particularly, holding period combined with experience in technical investors contributes to avoiding a raise in market risk, whereas for nontechnical investors message sentiment and experience form the combination that contributes to avoid a raise in market risk.     

Long waves in prices: new evidence from wavelet analysis

In this paper we apply wavelet analysis to study the dynamics of long-term movements in wholesale prices for the USA, the UK and France over the period 1791–2012. The application of wavelet analysis to long-term historical price series allows us to detect long waves in prices whose periodization is remarkably similar to those provided in the literature for the pre-World War II period. Moreover, we find evidence on the existence of long waves in prices also after World War II, a period in which long waves are generally difficult to detect because of the positive trend displayed by prices. The comparison between the long wave components extracted through wavelets and the Christiano–Fitzgerald band-pass filter suggests that wavelets provide a reliable and straightforward technique for analyzing long waves dynamics in time series exhibiting quite complex patterns such as historical data.     

Assessing ethical behaviours in the Spanish banking and insurance industries: evidence and challenges

This study aims to improve understanding of the ethical nature of the relations in two labour-intensive industries to facilitate the creation of an ethical culture. For this purpose, the authors first review literature related to the main influences on ethical behaviour, then perform an empirical analysis of those factors using a hierarchical stepwise regression of a database of 525 banking and insurance employees. Contrary to expectations, leadership has a less important effect on ethical behaviour than other organizational factors. The results reveal several implications for improving the management of ethical behaviour in these industries.