The legacy of Max Weber and the early Austrians

The Review of Austrian Economics - This paper explores Max Weber’s intellectual relationship to the first generations of the Austrian School. Challenging his portrayal as a one-sided...     

Employee stock options with performance conditions: do commonly used valuation heuristics work?

Valuation heuristics are widely used to value traditional time vesting option plans. This study analyses if these heuristics also qualify for valuing performance vesting plans. We examine performance conditions tied to the underlying stock, the stock's performance relative to a stock index, and an earnings measure. The differences between the approximated option values and the values assuming optimal exercise are overall smaller with the performance conditions than without them. In particular, this result holds when the heuristic exercise assumptions are based on the case without performance conditions, which is a considerable simplification in practice.     

Joining forces: collaboration patterns and performance of renewable energy innovators

Small Business Economics - This article explores the pattern and breadth of collaboration activities of innovating firms active in renewable energy (RE), and the impact of collaboration on...     

ESG Disclosure and Idiosyncratic Risk in Initial Public Offerings

Journal of Business Ethics - Although legitimacy theory provides strong arguments that environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure and performance can help mitigate firm-specific...     

Children’s Snacks,their Ads and Consumer Sovereignty

Abstract

The concept of sovereign consumer preferences is challenged from three sides: child consumers, unhealthy food and advertising. The two theoretical concepts of merit goods and libertarian paternalism are implemented in order to classify situations in which full consumer sovereignty does not apply. An empirical analysis of ads for children’s snacks reveals the libertarian paternalist perspective as helpful for understanding the demand for and justification of ‘soft’ governmental intervention in the case of the advertised snacks, whilst the ads for these snacks may well be demerit goods. The banning or heavy taxation of these ads is therefore advocated.     

Aktuelle Reformvorschläge zum Einkommensteuertarif

Wirtschaftsdienst - Der aktuelle Einkommensteuertarif belastet Mittelschichten und Besserverdienende relativ stark durch den schnellen Anstieg der Progression. Entlastungen durch eine Anhebung des...     

Keeping it real or keeping it simple? Ownership concentration measures compared

We analyze the distributional properties of ownership concentration measures and find that measures come from different underlying statistical distributions. Consistent with theory, some measures that are classified to represent a monitoring dimension have a positive influence on firm performance; other measures that are interpreted to represent a shareholder conflict dimension are negatively related to firm performance. However, other measures deviate from this pattern, and therefore, we cannot conclude that simple measures can replace complicated measures. Some measures are more suitable for analyzing the relationship between management and owners, whereas other measures are more suitable for analyzing the relationships among owners.     

Corporate Carbon and Financial Performance: The Role of Emission Reductions

This article uses econometric techniques to examine the effect of corporate carbon performance on corporate financial performance. I extend the existing literature in this research field by differentiating between two measurement perspectives: carbon performance expressed as annually reported carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission equivalents and improvements in carbon performance over time. Thereby, the article re‐addresses the research question ‘when and how does it pay to be green?’ in the context of carbon emissions and climate change mitigation. Using a nonlinear modeling technique, the findings indicate that it pays to be green for companies with superior carbon performance but not for companies with inferior carbon performance. The results also show that carbon emission mitigation is linearly and significantly positive related to return on sales (ROS) but negatively related to Tobin's q . These contradictory findings help us to understand why – in spite of growing regulatory pressure – companies have been slow to respond with effective action to tackle climate change beyond marginal efficiency improvements that correspond to ‘low‐hanging fruits’. The empirical analysis is based on an unbalanced sample of 7625 firm‐year observations covering carbon emission data (Scope 1 and Scope 2) for 1640 international firms from 2003 to 2015. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Investors' carbon risk exposure and their potential for shareholder engagement

This article examines the exposure to and management of carbon risks of different investor types. Considering the dual role as portfolio manager and partial owner, we analyze carbon risk for investors both in terms of exposure to portfolio values and in terms of responsibility as shareholder of carbon-intensive firms. We show that among various investor types, the preference for holding carbon-intensive stocks differs substantially, even when considering traditional investment decision parameters. In particular, it is governments whose portfolio values are most threatened by a carbon risk exposure of 49%, but at the same time, they prefer larger ownership shares in polluting firms. In contrast, individual investors, investment advisors, and mutual funds avoid holding stakes in these firms, while revealing only a moderate exposure of their assets to carbon risk. In view of the Paris Agreement, which includes the consistent steering of financial flows towards a low carbon transformation of the economy, our study provides policymakers with important implications regarding the coverage and effects of respective regulations. By identifying the ownership structures of carbon-intensive firms and respective owners' portfolio compositions, we also offer implications for further research on portfolio decarbonization and shareholders' influence of corporate carbon management.     

Counter-arguing as barriers to environmentally motivated consumption reduction: A multi-country study

This research extends previous literature on environmentally motivated consumption reduction (EMCR) with a cross-cultural investigation across 28 European countries. The paper elucidates how European consumers' knowledge and perceived seriousness of climate change inhibit the activation of counter-arguments, with implications for EMCR. More specifically, counter-arguing is a critical barrier to reduce EMCR. The developed model is based on the novel premise that the contingency variables, which qualify the impeding role of this barrier, are anchored at different levels. To account for individual and societal aspects simultaneously, multi-level analysis combines large-scale data from a Eurobarometer (n = 16,095) with secondary data at the societal level (n = 28). The results confirm that counter-arguments as barriers for EMCR and their attenuation through knowledge and perceived seriousness substantially varies across societies. Our results reveal that the collectivism/individualism dimension is most relevant in qualifying the impact of counter-arguments on EMCR. Building on our findings, impact-level-maps of counter-arguments and country clusters aid international marketers of environmentally friendly products to flexibly tailor their marketing campaigns. For policy-makers, our results further highlight that rather than raising knowledge with educative campaigns, perceptions of seriousness should be targeted to foster EMCR and inhibit counter-arguing.