Does organisational capital influence environmental strategies? Evidence from environmental innovation

As a result of increasing consumer awareness and stakeholder demands about environmental management, firms face stricter challenges surrounding the impact of business operations on the environment. In this regards, environmental innovation is one of the important ways of acting in harmony with the environment. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of organisational capital on environmental innovation measured as the process innovation and product innovation. Using environmental innovation data from ASSET4 for the US listed firms between 2002 and 2018, our empirical results reveal a significant positive association between organisational capital and both the process innovation and product innovation. Furthermore, the relationship is stronger in high-profitability and sensitive industries subsamples. These results are robust to additional control variables and endogeneity tests. This study, while endorsing the resource-based view (RBV), provides important implications for the top management teams that organisational capital could be an important channel through which managers can boost environmental innovation.     

Microcredit on a Large Scale: Appraising the Thailand Village Fund

The Thailand village fund (VF) is the second‐largest microcredit scheme in the world. Nearly 80 000 elected local VF committees administer loans that reach 30 percent of all households. The value of VF loans has remained steady since 2006, even without new infusions of government funds, and loans go disproportionately to the poor. Based mainly on a custom‐built survey of over 3000 local VFs conducted in 2010, we evaluate the performance of the VF. As expected, profit rates are hard to model, but our regression analysis shows that loan recovery rates, total lending and the proportion of loans going to the poor are all higher when a VF borrows additional funds from a formal bank and on‐lends to households, as done by one in five VFs. An economic analysis suggests, tentatively, that VF benefits exceed the costs. A financial analysis shows that VFs more than break even, with receipts covering their cash costs. Most VFs are social rather than financial intermediaries; they have little incentive to take risks or to innovate, which explains why VF lending has not kept pace with the growth of the Thai economy.     

The role of institutional investors in the inventory and cash management practices of firms in Asia

This paper examines the role of a particular class of institutional investors, domestic and foreign banks, in corporate decisions that have liquidity implications such as inventory and cash management. Using a sample of 256 non-financial listed firms in six Asian countries over the period of 2002–2005, this paper shows that foreign banks improve inventory and cash management practices, due to their superior monitoring of the managers. The disproportionate numbers of the institutional investors across industrial sectors in these Asian countries seem to suggest that some industrial sectors have stable demand of their products, such as in consumer goods sector, which is an attraction, for these institutional investors. Furthermore, the paper finds that forward-looking government policies are crucial to entry of these institutional investors in the developing countries. The research findings have implications for board structure and corporate governance standards.     

Price Elasticity of Demand and an Optimal Cash Discount Rate in Credit Policy

While the provision of a cash discount is equivalent to a reduction in price, the role of price elasticity of demand in determining credit terms has been neglected in the extant literature. In this paper, this role is investigated and it is shown that the optimal cash discount rate is affected by the price elasticity of demand for the firm's product. The comparative effects on the optimal cash discount rate with respect to exogenous changes in the fraction of credit sales paid after taking cash discount, the cost of short-term funds and the bad debt loss ratio are investigated. A trade-off between the time value gain and the price elasticity of demand is established. We find that firms which sell in locations having different price elasticities for their products, and/or which face various costs of short-term funds in different locations, should vary their cash discount terms accordingly.     

Assessing the potential impact of Microfinance with agent-based modeling

Recent empirical results have cast doubt on the value of Microfinance as a tool for reducing poverty. But, the difficulty lies in evaluating the impact of Microfinance in a world where the Microfinance institutions, their borrowers, and government policies are constantly changing. There is a need for a comprehensive and transparent framework to develop the theoretical grounds for believing in (or against) the efficacy of Microfinance, which can at the same time be used as a testing ground for policymakers. This paper presents a first attempt to develop an agent-based modeling (ABM) framework for pre-policy-implementation testing of the effects of Microfinance. Under the ABM paradigm, a set of behaviors for individual agents in the economy is used to construct a simulation whereby random interaction allows agents to change their state over time. Simulation of the model in different scenarios supported all our intuitions about Microfinance; in particular, there was positive impact of Microfinance on the wealth level of the poor. It was found that increase of available funds, easy access for producers and lower interest rates increase the effectiveness of Microfinance.     

Credit programs for the poor and the health status of children in rural bangladesh*

The impact of participation in group‐based credit programs, by gender of participant, on the health status of children by gender in rural Bangladesh is investigated. These credit programs are well suited to studies of how gender‐specific resources alter intra‐household allocations because they induce differential participation by gender. Women's credit is found to have a large and statistically significant impact on two of three measures of the healthiness of both boy and girl children. Credit provided to men has no statistically significant impact and the null hypothesis of equal credit effects by gender of participant is rejected.     

Financial soundness of single versus dual banking system: explaining the role of Islamic banks

Portuguese Economic Journal - This paper empirically investigates the financial stability of the countries having both Islamic and conventional banks versus the countries having only conventional...     

Differing Visions of Agriculture: Industrial-Chemical vs. Small Farm and Urban Organic Production

Seed diversity and soil preservation are the foundations of healthy agriculture. Over many generations, farmers have developed varieties of wheat, rice, corn, and other crops that are adapted to local growing conditions. Industrial-chemical agriculture has abandoned that local knowledge, replacing seed diversity with genetically uniform crops that require large doses of fertilizers and chemical poisons to survive. One way the United States exerted control over Iraq, starting in 2003, was to enable agribusiness to disrupt thousands of years of tradition by imposing industrial methods on the country where evidence of the earliest mass production of food was discovered. Thus, it seems that conquest of people goes hand in hand with conquest of soil. There is resistance to agribusiness around the world. In the United States, small farms and urban agriculture are not only providing healthy food but also reconnecting people who grow up in cities with the life of the soil.