Trust and Dialogue: Theoretical Approaches to Ethics Auditing

The aim of this paper is to put forward an ethical framework for the conceptualization and development of ethics audits, here understood as a catalyst for company dialogue and in general, for management of ethics in the company. Ethics auditing is understood as the opportunity and agreement to devise a system to inform on ethical corporate behavior. This system essentially aims to increase the transparency and credibility of the companys commitment to ethics. At the same time, the process of elaborating this system allows us to introduce the moral dimension into company actions and decisions, thereby completing a key dimension of the production, maintenance and development of trust capital. To this end, the following four steps are taken. First, we analyze the relation between ethics auditing and trust as a basic moral resource in the dialogue between the company and its various stakeholders. Second, we examine the social balance sheet as a precursor to ethics auditing and focus on what prevents it from going further. Third, we attempt to reconstruct the basic moral assumptions underlying the companys social responsibility from the discourse ethics approach. Finally, we present a methodological framework from which to carry out our proposal, which embraces two basic theoretical perspectives stakeholder theory and the values derived from discourse ethics as a normative framework.     

Proposal of a model to measure competitiveness through factor analysis

This article presents a proposal for a simultaneous competitiveness measurement model for the three geographical levels: country, states, and municipalities. For this, a multivariate factor analysis method is used to help identify five factors, seven sub-factors, and thirty variables, which will be used for the measurement and to present the results of an empirical study on eleven entities: the country, the State of Sonora, and nine municipalities, which represent 80% of the population and 80% of their TGP. The results indicate that, in 2010, the municipality of Hermosillo was the most competitive.     

Ownership structure and its effect on dividend policy in the Mexican context

This work focused on analyzing whether the ownership structure has any effect on the dividend policy of companies in the Mexican market. The decision of dividend payment is one of the major elements in corporate policy, as this dividend policy influences the value of the company. Therefore, decisions such as adopting a company growth policy through the reinvestment of profits, or better yet allocating them to the payment of dividends, are going to be influenced by the type of ownership structure that dominates the company. The analysis was based on three types of ownership structures such as: families, institutions (mainly banks) and small blocks of shareholders. Our results show that the concentration of property in families negatively influences the payment of dividends, whereas the presence of institutional shareholders has an inverse effect on the payment of the same. This indicates that the presence of big shareholders foreign to the families has a different effect on the payment policy of dividends in the Mexican context. This work provides literature information about the context of emerging countries as is the case of Mexico, given that much of the existing investigations focus on European or North American contexts, where the markets are well regulated and property is broadly distributed.     

The cultural system and integrated reporting

The complexity of the business world has led to growing demands being made of companies regarding the information provided on their financial performance, management, corporate governance and sustainability record. In response, some leading companies have begun to publish integrated reporting, in the form of a document providing a coherent summary of this information, thus facilitating decision-taking by different stakeholders.The aim of this study is to examine the impact of the Hofstede national cultural system, which is representative of the values of local stakeholders, on integrated reporting, in comparison with the provision of various unrelated documents on corporate performance. The results obtained show that companies located in societies with stronger collectivist and feminist values are in the vanguard of information integration.     

On A Surplus Process Under A Periodic Environment

Abstract

The problem of modeling claims occurring in periodic random environments is discussed in this paper. In the classical approach of risk theory, the occurrence of claims is modeled by counting processes that do not account for claims following a periodic pattern. The author discusses how the use of the classical approach to model a periodic portfolio might lead to the miscalculation of important risk indices, namely the associated ruin probability.

He presents a periodic model, in terms of nonhomogeneous Poisson processes, that has potential practical applications. The discussion is based on some properties of the modeled periodic intensities. Existing simulation techniques are adapted to this periodic model, which provides a practical way to evaluate ruin probabilities.     

On The Expected Discounted Penalty function for Lévy Risk Processes

Abstract

Dufresne et al. (1991) introduced a general risk model defined as the limit of compound Poisson processes. Such a model is either a compound Poisson process itself or a process with an infinite number of small jumps. Later, in a series of now classical papers, the joint distribution of the time of ruin, the surplus before ruin, and the deficit at ruin was studied (Gerber and Shiu 1997, 1998a, 1998b; Gerber and Landry 1998). These works use the classical and the perturbed risk models and hint that the results can be extended to gamma and inverse Gaussian risk processes.

In this paper we work out this extension to a generalized risk model driven by a nondecreasing Lévy process. Unlike the classical case that models the individual claim size distribution and obtains from it the aggregate claims distribution, here the aggregate claims distribution is known in closed form. It is simply the one-dimensional distribution of a subordinator. Embedded in this wide family of risk models we find the gamma, inverse Gaussian, and generalized inverse Gaussian processes. Expressions for the Gerber-Shiu function are given in some of these special cases, and numerical illustrations are provided.     

Optimal subsidies and guarantees in public–private partnerships

In this paper, we analyse how certain subsidies and guarantees given to private firms in public–private partnerships should be optimally arranged to promote immediate investment in a real options framework. We show how an investment subsidy, a revenue subsidy, a minimum demand guarantee, and a rescue option could be optimally arranged to induce immediate investment, compensating for the value of the option to defer. These four types of incentives produce significantly different results when we compare the value of the project after the incentive structure is devised and also when we compare the timing of the resulting cash flows.     

Another look at the Tail Area Influence Function

A new way of computing the Tail Area Influence Function (TAIF) exactly is proposed and a new finite sample robustness measure, based on the TAIF, is introduced. The main properties of this robustness measure are also studied, for both finite and asymptotic sample sizes. Next, a very accurate approximation to the finite sample power function of a test is obtained; this is based on the TAIF plus an iterative procedure. The results are valid when there are no nuisance parameters.     

CUBA: The Blocked Transition

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -