Does it really pay to be good,everywhere? A first step to understand the corporate social and financial performance link in Latin American controversial industries

Most research studying the corporate social performance (CSP)–corporate financial performance (CFP) link has utilized developed country samples. Also, this literature has generally focused on a wide variety of industries, ignoring the fact that certain sectors – such as controversial industries – have graver social and environmental issues. Hence, a gap exists in this tradition when it comes to emerging markets and controversial industries. This paper attempts to fill this void by providing preliminary evidence and insight on the matter. Based on an exploration in six Latin American countries and five controversial industries, we find a negative bidirectional association (or a non‐significant one at best) between CSP and CFP. These results tend to contradict the mainstream conclusion of a positive bidirectional link, suggesting that institutional and market‐level forces play a major role in shaping this relationship.     

Draining the judiciary bottleneck: A quasi-experiment in improving a government service

This study describes judicial reform as a quasi-experiment. The reform is the deployment and implementation of the GICA-Justicia (Gestión Integral de Calidad y Acreditación: Quality and Accreditation Integral Management) Quality-Management Standard (QMS) within the Second Court of Appeal of Costa Rica's Supreme Court; the reform includes process improvements following the implementation. The study of impact includes a direct comparison to its homologous in Panama's Justice System. The GICA-Justicia emerges in the QMS environment as a process-performance tracking and improvement tool for accreditation of district courts and courts of appeal. This study offers “sui generis state of the art” empirical know-how via the use of an interrupted time series quasi-experiment. This study contributes to literature by unveiling a successful new judicial service improvement design in a Latin-American context.     

MLP ensembles improve long term prediction accuracy over single networks

This work describes an award winning approach for solving the NN3 Forecasting Competition problem, focusing on the sound experimental validation of its main innovative feature. The NN3 forecasting task consisted of predicting 18 future values of 111 short monthly time series. The main feature of the approach was the use of the median for combining the forecasts of an ensemble of 15 MLPs to predict each time series. Experimental comparison to a single MLP shows that the ensemble increases the performance accuracy for multiple-step ahead forecasting. This system performed well on the withheld data, having finished as the second best solution of the competition with an SMAPE of 16.17%.     

Origin of FDI and Intra‐Industry Domestic Spillovers: The Case of Greek and European FDI in Bulgaria

This paper uses firm‐level data to assess the horizontal impact of foreign firm ownership on domestic productivity in Bulgaria. We identify a theoretical tradeoff between technological distance (of domestic versus foreign firms) and internalization capacity (of spillovers) and examine the extent to which this is reflected in the impact on the domestic economy of different types and origins of FDI. Emphasis is placed upon the effects of Greek FDI, which is known to be of a distinctively “regional” character. We find that Greek FDI produces significantly larger positive spillovers, which appear more suitable for the Bulgarian context of transition and economic restructuring. We also unveil some notable “hysteresis” and “technology bias” effects for FDI spillovers of all origins, as well as some country‐specific ownership‐structure and threshold effects.     

Regional relationships between inherent coffee quality and growing environment for denomination of origin labels in Nariño and Cauca,Colombia

International markets are increasingly signaling demand for quality-differentiated coffee, which the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) proposed to exploit to identify those regional coffees that would fulfill the requirements to be classified as denomination of origin. The objective of this study was to develop and implement a sound, robust and repeatable approach with and for the FNC to identify regional causal relationships between coffee quality and environmental characteristics as bases for labels of denomination of origin. Environmental differences between coffee-growing areas in the departments of Cauca and Nariño were statistically significant for several characteristics, including the number of dry months, annual precipitation and diurnal temperature range. The dominant varieties (Caturra and Colombia) did not show major differences in quality attributes, and were pooled for the analyses with the environmental data. There are significant differences in biochemical and sensorial product characteristics between the two departments. The spatial patterns in product characteristics exhibit a non-random, regionally-changing structure that is related to those in the environmental data. The generated results provided ample evidence to support the application for regionally-based denominations of origin. Recommendations were derived to help mainstreaming the developed approach and thereby facilitate policy decisions for its use in other geographies and with other crops. Furthermore, the importance of systematic interdisciplinary institutional collaboration for large-scale denomination of origin projects was corroborated for food policy dialogue and decision making. It seems plausible that producers of high-quality products within other commodities are likely to follow the FNC in seeking denomination of origin for their goods. The presented approach is crucial to facilitate policy.     

International evidence on bond risk premia

This paper revisits the study of time-varying excess bond returns in international bond markets. Using newly available yield curve data from 10 different countries with independent monetary policy, I test the robustness of Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). For most countries in my sample, I find more modest predictive power for forward rates than originally found by Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) for the US. Their single-factor model captures well the predictability in international data, and this factor also tends to have a tent-shape in most countries of my sample. CP factors are more idiosyncratic across countries than yields or forward rates. Finally, I show that the recent financial crisis has significantly affected the predictability of excess bond returns.     

A systemic approach to modelling and estimating demand for money(ies)

This article uses a consumer theory-based systemic approach to model the demand for monetary liquid asset holdings in Chile. We implement the suggestions and caveats of aggregation theory for the estimation of a demand system for liquid assets (monies) in static, dynamic and time-varying parameters setups. Our results are robust and theoretically consistent with consumer theory restrictions, as a system derived from a utility maximizing framework and a quasi concave utility function. In our estimations, we find stability of interest rate elasticities, in contrast to previous related literature. We also document evidence that long (short) maturity rates are associated to less (more) liquid assets.     

Strategic positioning of global manufacturing virtual networks in the aeronautical industry

The evolution of organisations that work in multinational environments has considerably altered their production strategies. One of the consequences has been the appearance of global manufacturing virtual networks (GMVNs), which include all kinds of production centres. These networks establish a new type of vertical and horizontal collaboration between independent companies or even competitors who launch occasional collaborations on projects they could not take on individually. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the main reasons that determine the formation of GMVNs as well as the strategy of the companies involved in these organizations and how GMVN will evolve in the future. For that purpose, a conceptual framework is proposed based on four network features: strategy, structure, communication systems and culture. This work will delve into the strategy network feature by applying a strategic positioning model to a practical case in the aeronautical industry to gain a better understanding of how GMVNs work, its effectiveness by clarifying and putting these organisations in perspective and how they may evolve in the future.     

Branded places and marketplace exclusion

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the development of a branded place in a Brazilian city. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad, I show how the intertwined practices of hegemonic market actors in alliance concur to produce a city space that caters to the aspirations and ways of life of local elites while actively excluding lower-class groups from it. I distinguish three main elements of branded places –architecture and urbanism, brand narrative, and spatial governance– and demonstrate how they produce physical, symbolic, and social boundaries between middle- and lower-classes in the city. These findings contribute to understanding the ways market-mediated spatial dynamics perform exclusion of most vulnerable groups in post-industrial cities and extend place brand literature by accounting for the less documented practices of invested stakeholders in the production of branded places.