Institutional Investors,Political Connections,and the Incidence of Regulatory Enforcement Against Corporate Fraud

We investigate two under-explored factors in mitigating the risk of corporate fraud and regulatory enforcement against fraud, namely institutional investors and political connections. The role of institutional investors in the effective monitoring of a firm’s management is well established in the literature. We further observe that firms that have a large proportion of their shares held by institutional investors have a lower incidence of enforcement actions against corporate fraud. The importance of political connections for enterprises, whether in a developed market such as the United States or an emerging market such as China, has been established by previous studies. However, we find evidence of another positive effect of political connections: they may reduce the incidence of enforcement action against corporate fraud. We also find that political connections play a more significant role in reducing regulatory enforcement incidents against non-state-owned enterprises and firms in weaker legal environments, whereas institutional ownership plays a more important role in reducing regulatory enforcement incidents against state-owned enterprises.     

Beyond product innovation: deciphering process-oriented innovators,complementarities and performance effects

Relatively little attention has been paid to the understanding of process innovation, compared to the well-researched product innovation. This paper contributes to improve our understanding of process innovation and its specific process capabilities and performance by exploring, across many industries, 4,608 process-oriented innovators. Process innovation is defined as adoption of technologically new or significantly improved production methods, including changes in equipment, organisation or methods of product delivery. Process-oriented innovators or process seekers are those firms which usually only introduce process innovation, and no product innovation. These have received less attention by scholars. Results show that process innovation without also organisational innovation complements constrains innovative performance. Complex process-based innovation complementarities result from the simultaneous development and integration of new machinery and organisational innovations.     

Do democracies have higher current account deficits?

In this paper we argue that democracies tend to run (larger) current account deficits than autocracies. Our argument is based on the different incentives faced by democratic and autocratic leaders. The main theoretical hypothesis is tested on a dataset of 121 countries over the period 1980–2012, using 5 year averages and a fixed effects panel data model. Special focus is given on the issue of endogeneity by estimating an IV Fixed Effects model. Relying on the idea of the regional waves of democratization and the special role of the Christian Church on the third wave of democratization, we use as instruments of Democracy the level of democracy in neighboring countries and also the share of Christian adherents in each country. Both instruments turn out to be valid determinants of democracy. The empirical findings suggest that autocracies run lower current account deficits than democracies. These results are found to be robust across alternative empirical specifications.     

Geographic versus industry diversification: Constraints matter

This research addresses whether geographic diversification provides benefits over industry diversification in the Eurozone. Our contribution is to show that in the absence of constraints, no empirical evidence is found to support the argument that geographic diversification dominates industry diversification, except in the euro subperiod. With short-selling constraints, however, the tangency portfolio of geographic diversification is not attainable by industry diversification. In out-of-sample geographic minimum variance portfolios outperform industry portfolios in economic terms, although we cannot establish statistical significance.     

Working with concepts in the fuzzy front end: exploring the context for innovation for different types of concepts at Volvo Cars

Automotive firms are balancing the increasing needs for cost and time efficiency with the necessity of developing more innovative products to stand out on in a competitive market. The strive for efficiency has led to an increasingly structured development process with limited allowances for deviations. Previous academic work has pointed out the importance and embedded potential of the fuzzy front end, where new concepts still have the possibility to impact the new product development (NPD) process. However, most research has focused on the transfer of new technologies, while concepts based on e.g. customer or market knowledge have been more or less neglected. This paper discusses the need for alternative and contingent approaches in the front end of NPD to also consider the transfer of other types of concepts. More specifically, it addresses the need to distinguish between different types of concepts and to explore their different prerequisites in NPD. It is argued that customer- and market-based concepts experience certain difficulties due to the history and power of technology in research and development (R&D) domains in the automotive context as well as a lack of support from the existing, formal processes. In this paper, we argue that all new concepts need to be conceptualized before being introduced to the NPD process, but that does not always suffice. Concepts other than technology concepts also need a contingent package to enable an evaluation in the context of the R&D process – they need to be contextualized. This paper draws on an in-depth case study of Volvo Cars within a long-lasting collaborative research setup. It is based on an interview study with key persons in the areas of concept work and NPD, and uses an insider/outsider approach.     

Tourism and transformation: negotiating metaphors,experiencing change

The article introduces this special issue on tourism and transformation. After offering a brief review of the place and significance of ‘transformation’ in social sciences studies of tourism – from ‘impact studies’ to ethnographies of tourists and, more recently, ‘tourist media studies’ – we propose to take one step further and focus our attention on the performativity and reflexivity of ‘transformation’. Our main argument is that much may be gained analytically by considering how notions and experiences of transformation are addressed, negotiated and purposefully deployed in tourism contexts. We conclude with an outline of each of the contributions to this special issue, stressing that the collection re-opens the issue of transformation in tourism and provides new insights into how experiences-turned-metaphors and metaphors-turned-experiences influence both the travel experience and the development of theory.     

The aftermath of the subprime crisis: a clustering analysis of world banking sector

The banking sector has been on the spotlight in both academic and policy circles since the outburst of the subprime bubble. The crisis has its roots in the US, but there were spillover effects around the world. We study the behavior of the banking sector of 40 countries during the period 2007–2010, using a new clustering methodology. Our methodology combines regime switching models in the modeling of longitudinal variations with cluster analysis that identifies groups of countries with similar profiles. Our results show that although there were periods of intense contagion, the impact was uneven among sample countries. The crisis had episodic effects on some countries, while others had severe devaluations after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Finally, a small group of banking systems has plunged into a long severe crisis.     

Customer satisfaction with socially responsible investing initiatives: The influence of perceived financial and non-financial quality

During the last decade, socially responsible investment (SRI) initiatives have grown to become a mainstream financial service in many countries. However, to date, only a few studies focus on understanding the final investor of such initiatives. This article focuses on one particularly overlooked aspect of SRI behavior; that of customer post-purchase satisfaction. A theoretical model of satisfaction with SRI-profiled mutual funds is developed and tested. The results indicate that perceived financial performance of the SRI-profiled mutual fund is the most important predictor of customer satisfaction. However, perceived environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance also had a positive impact on satisfaction for the SRI mutual fund. On the basis of these results, it is argued that although ESG quality is important to customers, marketers of SRI initiatives should primarily focus on the conventional quality attributes such as financial performance, as a good ESG record alone is unlikely to generate customer satisfaction.     

Heterogeneous trade agreements,WTO membership and international trade: an analysis using matching econometrics

This article explores the heterogeneous effects of trade agreements (TAs) and World Trade Organization (WTO) membership on the volume of international trade. We extend Baier and Bergstrand’s (2009a) application of matching econometrics by distinguishing between different types of TAs and WTO participation and account for the endogenous nature of trade policy. For a panel data set covering 1960–2005 and 187 countries, we find that the treatment effect on international trade systematically varies with the type of TA and WTO membership.     

Multiplicative noise,fast convolution and pricing

In this work we detail the application of a fast convolution algorithm to compute high-dimensional integrals in the context of multiplicative noise stochastic processes. The algorithm provides a numerical solution to the problem of characterizing conditional probability density functions at arbitrary times, and we apply it successfully to quadratic and piecewise linear diffusion processes. The ability to reproduce statistical features of financial return time series, such as thickness of the tails and scaling properties, makes these processes appealing for option pricing. Since exact analytical results are lacking, we exploit the fast convolution as a numerical method alternative to Monte Carlo simulation both in the objective and risk-neutral settings. In numerical sections we document how fast convolution outperforms Monte Carlo both in speed and efficiency terms.