Effective Elements to Establish an Ethical Infrastructure: An Exploratory Study of SMEs in the Madrid Region

The purpose of this study is to identify the elements that can be implemented to achieve an ethical infrastructure, in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The ethical infrastructure is considered as a set of formal and informal systems, leadership, climate and culture, related to ethical issues. The research was carried out through interviews and focus groups with managers from 28 companies in Madrid, all signatories to the Global Compact. The identified key elements in SMEs are leadership, informal managerial and formal communication. This study also explores different factors that influence the effectiveness, implementation, and sustainability of the ethical infrastructure in SMEs, discovering some factors that can act as both accelerators and barriers such as pressure from customers. Additional findings regarding the concepts of ethics and corporate social responsibility in SMEs, dilemmas and characteristics of the culture and climate are also presented.     

The impact of traffic congestion when optimising delivery routes in real time. A case study in Spain

This paper studies the importance of considering congestion costs when optimising delivery routes. Through the analysis of two study areas (the region of Catalonia and the city of Barcelona, in Spain), four different scenarios have been implemented and compared in which different objective functions are minimised: Euclidean distance, real distance, real time with static congestion, and real time with dynamic congestion. The data have been collected from Google Maps, which allows us to obtain information on traffic conditions in real time. The results indicate that minimising real time considering congestion as a dynamic attribute which varies throughout the day is the most efficient method to optimise delivery routes, especially within urban areas. For the two study areas, and using this dynamic approach in which real-time congestion costs are reflected into the vehicle routing problem, savings in time up to 11% have been obtained.     

The public sector and convergence with spatial interdependence: empirical evidence from Spain

We propose a framework to analyse convergence between regions, incorporating the public sector and technological knowledge spillovers in the context of a Neoclassical Growth Model. Second, we apply novel estimation methods pertaining to the spatial econometrics literature introducing a spatial Durbin panel data model based on instrumental variables and maximum-likelihood estimation. Our model makes it possible to analyse, in terms of convergence, the results obtained in Spanish regions with the policies implemented during the period 1980–2011. The results support the idea that education and fiscal policies have a positive effect on regional development and cohesion. Therefore, we can conclude that it is possible to obtain better results for regional convergence with higher rates of public investment in education and tax revenues. We also obtain interesting results that confirm the existence of spillover effects in economic growth and public policies, identifying their magnitude and significance.     

Business dynamics statistics of High Tech industries

Modern market economies are characterized by the reallocation of resources from less productive, less valuable activities to more productive, more valuable ones. Businesses in the High Tech sector play a particularly important role in this reallocation by introducing new products and services that impact the entire economy. In this paper we describe an extension to the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics that tracks job creation, job destruction, startups, and exits by firm and establishment characteristics, including sector, firm age, and firm size in the High Tech sector. We preview the resulting statistics, showing the structural shifts in the High Tech sector over the past 30 years, including the surge of entry and young firm activity in the 1990s that reversed abruptly in the early‐2000s.     

The Three‐Factor Model: A Practitioner's Guide

The three‐factor model (3FM) has slowly but steadily become a popular alternative to the CAPM for measuring risk from the perspective of both corporate finance and portfolio management. The evidence clearly shows a negative relationship between market capitalization and returns, and a positive relationship between the book‐to‐market ratio and returns. Under the assumption that size and value are risk factors, the 3FM incorporates a market risk premium, a size premium, and a value premium into a model that aims to assess risk in a more comprehensive way, and ultimately to provide a more reliable estimation of required return. The required return produced by the 3FM has corporate finance applications (such as cost of capital estimation, project evaluation, and firm valuation) as well as portfolio management applications (such as performance evaluation). This article discusses the foundations and intuition behind the 3FM, as well as its application to the estimation of the cost of equity and excess returns.     

ACCOUNTING FOR THE TIMING OF FIRST MARRIAGE*

Among first marriages in the United States, grooms are on average 1.7 years older than their brides. Traditionally, this fact is explained by sex differences in income. We use a general equilibrium, overlapping generations search model economy to show instead that sex differences in fecundity are essential to account for the age gap at first marriage, whereas sex differences in income play a secondary role. Our model economy also accounts for other facts on the timing of first marriages that the literature has overlooked.     

Implications of market orientation on the environmental transformation of industrial firms

This article examines the role of industrial firms' market orientation as a moderator of the economic-ecologic conflict. Specifically, the authors consider the effect of industrial firms’ market orientation on perceptions of the environmental pressure exerted by stakeholders and the environmental practices implemented in response to that pressure. Because market orientation is related to the collection and assessment of and response to opportunities and threats, market orientation should act as a driver of perceptions of and responses to environmental pressures exerted by stakeholders. An empirical analysis of a sample of Spanish industrial firms shows that market orientation is linked to more intense perceptions of pressure from nongovernmental stakeholders. However, the results are not conclusive with respect to the relationship between market orientation and the intensity of the response to environmental pressures characterized by the implementation of environmental practices.     

Distributive implications of member level income aggregation within the household: An approximation through mobility indices

This paper adapts the ethical index of income mobility first suggested by Chakravarty, Dutta and Weymark (1985) to assess the contribution of wives, husbands, and other adults' member level income to husband-wife households' income mobility according to two of the criteria discussed in the literature. For any partition of the population, a source's contribution is seen to be decomposable into within-group and between-group income mobility indices plus a term capturing sub-group differences in income shares. The approach is applied to a sample of husband-wife households where both spouses are present, extracted from the 1990–91 Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares , the Spanish household budget survey. While the husbands' income contribution is large and positive, the contribution of wives and other adults is practically equal to zero. When mean income differences are eliminated, all member contributions to husband-wife households' income mobility are substantially reduced.
JEL classification: D31, D33.     

An algorithm to reduce the occupational space in gender segregation studies

This paper presents an algorithm based on the bootstrap to select an admissible aggregation level, that is, the minimum number of occupational categories that yield a gender segregation value not significantly smaller than that obtained from the large number of occupational categories usually available in any data set. The approach is illustrated using labour force survey data for Spain for the comparison of gender segregation in 1977 and 1992, as well as 1994 and 2000. To measure gender segregation, an additively decomposable segregation index based on the entropy concept is used. Despite a substantial simplification in the size of the occupation space, the decrease in the segregation index is very small and not significant, regardless of the year. Consequently, intertemporal changes in gender segregation can be studied using a greatly reduced classification of occupations that permits an easier interpretation of results. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.