The refugee entrepreneurship process from/in emerging economies

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - The paper examines several refugee experiences in Mexico and presents their reasons for leaving their home countries. A gap in research is...     

Encouraging organizational performance through the influence of technological distinctive competencies on components of corporate entrepreneurship

Firms’ technological distinctive competencies (TDCs) help CEOs to confront their reality based on technological knowledge to achieve and exploit competitive advantage by encouraging the different dimensions of corporate entrepreneurship (innovation, new business venturing, proactiveness and self-renewal). The main purpose of this paper is thus to highlight how companies that strive to improve technological competencies within the firm achieve higher organizational performance through different components of corporate entrepreneurship and their interrelationships. This study seeks to fill this research gap by analyzing theoretically and empirically how TDCs enhance innovation, new business venturing and proactiveness and their interrelationships to achieve self-renewal and thus improve firms’ organizational performance. The methodology used is LISREL analysis. We test the model with data from 201 Spanish organizations. Our research contributes theoretical and empirical arguments on the value of TDCs to the organization, arguments that are especially important because organizations sometimes fail to achieve sustainable competitive advantage due to their limited understanding of the relationships between these strategic variables.     

Risk aversion, moral hazard, and the principal's loss

Summary. In their seminal paper on the principal-agent model with moral hazard, Grossman and Hart (1983) show that if the agent's utility function is , then the loss to the principal from being unable to observe the agent's action is increasing in the agent's degree of absolute risk aversion. Their proof is restricted to the case where the number of observable outcomes is equal to two, and it uses an argument that is specific to that case. In this note, we provide an alternative proof that generalizes their result to any (finite) number of outcomes. Received: March 21, 2001; revised version: June 21, 2001     

Consensus Problem-Solving Increases Perceived Communication Openness in Organizations

Members of three established teams in different organizations participated in problem-solving sessions using a structured consensus model. Participants perceived a significant increase in communication openness during these sessions as compared to their previous problem-solving sessions. The increase in communication openness suggests an improved openness to the flow of information among team members. The results of this study provide early indicators of successful applications for this consensus model, including improving the participation of team members during strategic planning and enhancing the upward flow of information to senior decision-makers for purposes of organizational change and development.     

Performance of international joint ventures from developing and developed countries: An empirical study in a developing country context

In response to the need for research on International Joint Ventures (IJVs) from developing countries, this paper examines the multivariate determinants of performance of 59 IJVs from both developing and developed countries in a developing country context. Resource complementarity, cooperation, joint venture experience, technology and export-orientation were found to be significant determinants of performance of joint ventures. While the determinants varied for IIVs from developing and developed countries, there were no significant differences in their performance levels. The empirical findings and their implications, including limitations and areas for further research are discussed.     

Spain is different: Falling trends of inequality

In this article we characterize the evolution of inequality in hourly wages, hours of work, labor earnings, household disposable income and household consumption for Spain between 1985 and 2000. We look at both the Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares and the European Household Community Panel. Our analysis shows that inequality in individual net labor earnings and household net disposable income has decreased substantially. The decreases in the tertiary education premium and in the unemployment rate have been key ingredients to understand this falling trend. Public transfers have played a crucial role in smoothing out the inequality arising in the labor market, but instead the Spanish family does not seem to have been an important insurance mechanism. Regarding household consumption, inequality has fallen much less than inequality in household net disposable income, with the decrease mostly concentrated in the second half of the eighties. This suggests that the reduction in income inequality has affected the sources of permanent differences between households only during the second half of the eighties. Our estimates of the earnings process for the period are consistent with this view.     

Police Violence and the Underreporting of Crime

This paper examines the relationship between police violence and the reporting of crime. Utilizing original data from a large‐scale household survey conducted in Costa Rica from October 2013 to April 2014 (n = 4,200), we find that the observation of police violence significantly reduces citizens’ willingness to report crime. The implications of this finding are explored using a game‐theoretic model of crime, crime reporting, and police misconduct. The model reveals that although the prospect of police violence against criminals may generate a degree of deterrence for criminal behavior, permissiveness toward police violence also raises expectations about the likelihood of police abuse against law‐abiding citizens. Consistent with our empirics, this reduces citizens’ propensity to report crime, thereby fostering a climate of impunity for criminal activity.     

Pricing Dynamic Insurance Risks Using the Principle of Equivalent Utility

We introduce an expected utility approach to price insurance risks in a dynamic financial market setting. The valuation method is based on comparing the maximal expected utility functions with and without incorporating the insurance product, as in the classical principle of equivalent utility. The pricing mechanism relies heavily on risk preferences and yields two reservation prices - one each for the underwriter and buyer of the contract. The framework is rather general and applies to a number of applications that we extensively analyze.     

Target-Bequest Investment and Insurance Fund

We propose a new type of investment fund, a Target-Bequest Fund (TBF), for which the manager of the fund invests to maximize the probability of reaching a bequest goal, specified by the investor. We assume the fund pays dividends at a rate proportional to the value of the fund, with the proportion also specified by the investor. In addition to considering this basic fund, we propose two extensions. The first extension is to impose a no-borrowing constraint. Indeed, unless the investment fund is a hedge fund, it will likely not allow the manager to invest more in the risky asset than is available in the fund, so this constraint is a realistic one. The second extension is to allow the fund manager to buy life insurance to help reach the bequest goal. We consider both extensions in the special case for which the proportional dividend rate is less than or equal to the riskless rate of return. Our focus is to obtain explicit solutions in a simplified market and insurance setting to give actuaries implementing this fund design some rules-of-thumb for investing in a financial market and buying life insurance in more realistic settings. We fully expect these rules-of-thumb to be generally valid in those more realistic settings.