The influence of entrepreneurial talent and website type on business performance by rural tourism establishments in Spain

Entrepreneurs provide the engine of development, especially in economically unstable times. In Spain, rural tourism is undergoing a boom, and the Internet plays a vital role for tourism. This study therefore considers: (i) the importance of entrepreneurial talent for implementing a website; (ii) the relations among entrepreneurial talent, website characteristics and business performance; and (iii) the moderating effect of entrepreneurial experience. Using a sample of 150 rural tourism establishments in Spain, this study reveals how website content affects performance and how experience moderates the relationships between entrepreneurial talent and performance, and between entrepreneurial talent and website design. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic panel data models in tourism

The analysis of relations of dependency is widespread in tourism research. However, there are a series of questions related to endogeneity, such as dependence on the past and reverse causality, closely linked to the specific characteristics of the sector, which cast doubt on the conventional methods that are currently in use, especially Ordinary Least Squares. In this paper, the consideration of those questions and their analysis is proposed with the current methodology of dynamic panel data with the System GMM method. In addition, an practical application is advanced with 187 airlines to demonstrate the use of the tool. The results of dynamic panel data analysis can contribute new nuances in the field of tourism that have hardly been reflected upon until now. Here it is used to examine the complex interrelations and the dynamic components of the sector in greater depth.     

An analysis of business ethics in the cultural contexts of different religions

The aim of our research is to analyze how different religions influence business ethics. We develop an index of practices in the field of business ethics, made up of 19 items containing practices related to workers, consumers, products, human rights, management of ethical conflicts, and crime prevention. Also, we consider a wide range of religion affiliations. To undertake this research, we use a panel data sample composed of 11,956 firm‐year observations from 18 countries. Drawing on stakeholder theory, we posit some hypotheses based on the religions considered. The results obtained show that a higher percentage of religious adherents in the country where a company does business usually involve the implementation of more ethical practices in the corporate field. These findings are obtained for Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu religions. In contrast, this does not stand for Buddhist and folk religions. Also, countries where there is no predominant religion do not show a confluence between religion and ethical corporate practices.     

Thick and Thin Borders in the European Union: How Deep Internal Integration is Within Countries,and How Shallow Between Them

The existence of large border effects is one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics. The seminal paper by McCallum found that trade between any two Canadian provinces was (on average) 22 times greater than trade between any Canadian province and any US state. Although various authors have estimated internal and external border effects for the whole European Union and some specific European countries, none has done so in the manner that McCallum's seminal paper, stymied by lack of data on region‐to‐region international trade flows. This study uses a novel data set that captures intra and international truck shipments between Spanish regions and regions in seven European countries during the period 2004–11. It computes internal and external border effects, offering novel results for aggregate flows and the importing countries, and estimates several specifications of the gravity equation, so as to tackle such issues as the multilateral resistance term, heteroscedasticity, and zero flows and non‐linear relation between trade and distance. The paper also adds a detailed analysis on the external border effect for each Spanish exporting region and each of the seven European countries considered. By means of this analysis, we shed new light on the relative integration between regions of these seven countries and Spanish exporting regions. Finally, we conduct an extrapolation exercise, computing the ‘trade potentials’ that would be expected in a fully integrated Europe and estimating how long full integration would take to achieve between each Spanish exporting region and each European importing country. To this regard, two alternative scenarios are considered: one using the growth rates of the Spanish exports before the crisis (2001–08) and other considering the post‐crisis growth rates (2011–13).     

Differentiated effects of formal and informal institutional distance between countries on the environmental performance of multinational enterprises

This research examines the influence of environmental institutional distance between home and host countries on the standardization of environmental performance among multinational enterprises using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression techniques and a sample of 128 multinationals from high-polluting industries. The paper examines the environmental institutional distance of countries using the concepts of formal and informal institutional distances. The results show that whereas a high formal environmental distance between home and host countries leads multinational enterprises to achieve a different level of environmental performance according to each country's legal requirements, a high informal environmental distance encourages these firms to unify their environmental performance independently of the countries in which their units are based. The study also discusses the implications for academia, managers, and policy makers.     

How does R&D internationalization in multinational firms affect their innovative performance? The moderating role of international collaboration in the energy industry

This paper examines the effects of the degree and geographic diversification of a firm’s R&D internationalization on its innovative performance. We use an unbalanced panel dataset of 401 observations from 110 multinational firms operating in the energy industry over a period of six years to support the argument that both the degree and the geographic diversification of a firm’s R&D internationalization have an inverted U-shaped relationship with a firm’s innovative performance. Our results also show that collaboration among R&D units located in different countries moderates this relationship by reducing both the positive effects and the challenges of the degree of R&D internationalization. This paper extends the emerging innovation focus in the headquarters–subsidiary literature by contributing to our understanding of the implications of the international R&D activities of firms and supports the utilization of social exchange theory in order to identify the moderating influence of the collaboration among a firm’s R&D units located in different countries.     

The Effects of Institutional Distance and Headquarters’ Financial Performance on the Generation of Environmental Standards in Multinational Companies

This article combines institutional and resources’ arguments to show that the institutional distance between the home and the host country, and the headquarters’ financial performance have a relevant impact on the environmental standardization decision in multinational companies. Using a sample of 135 multinational companies in three different industries with headquarters and subsidiaries based in the USA, Canada, Mexico, France, and Spain, we find that a high environmental institutional distance between headquarters’ and subsidiaries’ countries deters the standardization of environmental practices. On the other hand, high-profit headquarters are willing to standardize their environmental practices, rather than taking advantage of countries with lax environmental protection to undertake more pollution-intensive activities. Finally, we show that headquarters’ financial performance also imposes a moderating effect on the relationship between environmental institutional distance between countries and environmental standardization within the multinational company.     

AN ULTIMATUM WAGE BARGAINING EXPERIMENT ON TRADE UNION EFFICIENCY

We present an ultimatum wage bargaining experiment showing that a trade union facilitating non‐binding communication among workers, raises wages by simultaneously increasing employers’ posted offers and toughening the bargaining position of employees, without reducing overall market efficiency.     

Stimulating creative entrepreneurial initiatives: a flow diagram for strategic planning

This paper contributes to the organisational study of the creativity applied to business innovation through the analysis of three propositions: (1) there are substantial differences between Creative Entrepreneurial Initiatives (CEIs) and non-CEIs, with regard to human capital factors, structural capital factors, intellectual property, and creative value chain; (2) there are institutional, financial, and educational barriers that limit the creation of CEIs in South Europe (Portugal, France, and Spain); and (3) the adaptation of organisational measures of stimulus to the specificity of CEIs through a flow diagram can reduce the limiting effect of the barriers detected by CEIs. From this approach, researchers and policy-makers can obtain a better understanding of the specificities of the CIEs from a sectoral, strategic, and organisational focus.     

Impact of CO2 Emission Variation on Firm Performance

The quantifying and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is one of the most important tools for monitoring and auditing proposed to mitigate climate change, and it also directly affects business. It is thus vital that at this time we learn in detail whether firms actually report on greenhouse gas emissions and make the account entries that must be included within it. This research is twofold: first to analyse the reports on greenhouse gas emissions of international firms in the 2007 and 2008 period and to see what kind of variation occurs in CO₂ emissions between 2006–2007 and 2007–2008, and second to determine the impact that this variation (2006–2007) can have on firm performance in four time periods (t, t + 1, t + 2 and t + 3) that correspond to 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, taking two variables as a measure of firm performance, ROE and ROA, and considering a time period affected by a financial crisis. The results obtained show that there was a reduction in CO₂ emissions in the 2006–2007 period, and also in the 2007–2008 period. As regards the impact that the variation in CO₂ emissions has on ROE and ROA, CO₂ emission variation is a significant but negative variable only for ROA_2007 and for the rest of the years it is not statistically significant either for ROE or ROA. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.