A fuzzy model to assess the resilience of Protection and Civil Defense Organizations

Resilience is the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under expected and unexpected conditions. Protection and Civil Defense Organizations (PCDOs), communities and cities deal with disaster management involving routine, non-routine and even unpredictable/unforeseen situations with varying degrees of complexity. It is important that such organizations continually assess their resilience, enable them to learn on their weaknesses and real capacities to cope with emergency situations. This research aimed the development of an Organization Resilience Indicator System (ORIS) based on a fuzzy model to enable PCDOs self-assesses their resilience. Based on a literature review on organizational and community’s resilience, a system of resilience indicators was defined. This system was validated by experts using fuzzy set theory to aggregate opinions in the development of a resilience ideal pattern. Then, the resilience of four PCDO organizations was self-evaluated. The results were accordingly to maturity level of the organizations evaluated, indicating that the ORIS is valuable to measure PCDOs resilience.     

Savings that hurt: Production rationalization and its effect on prices

Postmerger scenarios often lead to a reallocation of resources and production across the merged entity. Production rationalization, the process of reallocating production across facilities so as to reduce total costs, results in firms equating marginal costs across markets. This results in marginal costs, and hence prices, being higher in some markets and lower in others than otherwise would be without production rationalization. This paper proposes a model of competition that elicits these effects and the resulting consequences on consumer and producer surplus. The paper also presents empirical evidence to show that production rationalization, in the form of fleet reoptimization, affected prices following the US Airways/American Airlines merger. Prices of the merged firm increased 10% on routes typically served by US Airways relative to routes typically served by American Airlines, and by 12% relative to US Airways’ rivals’ prices. Price‐cost regressions confirm such price hikes were likely due to fleet reoptimization.     

Is this workplace bullying? How ideas about conflict shape conflict management strategies

The adoption of specific conflict management strategies has usually been linked to various factors, such as litigation avoidance, union substitution and the pursuit of strategic benefits. This study advances the hypothesis that actors’ different frames of reference impact how workplace conflicts are interpreted and managed by unions and employers. Drawing on original data from the Brazilian banking sector, this article shows that companies and unions have different interpretations of workplace bullying. Unions understand workplace bullying as an organizational or sectoral problem inherent to labour relations in the banking sector. In contrast, employers see workplace bullying as a problem caused by individual managers. These different understandings of the same type of conflict are shaped by each actor's frame of reference and influence their responses to workplace bullying. With a pluralist or critical frame of reference, unions favour conflict management tools that try to promote structural changes in the sector. With a unitarist frame of reference, employers try to transform individual behaviour or simply remove individual managers from the workplace. Therefore, organizations with a unitarist frame interpret and respond to conflicts in notably different ways from organizations holding a pluralist or critical frame of reference.     

Directed technical change and environmental quality

Portuguese Economic Journal - We propose a directed technical change model with two sectors, clean and dirty, to analyze the impact of the degree of substitutability between sectors and the degree...     

INFINITE HORIZON INCOMPLETE MARKETS WITH A CONTINUUM OF STATES

In this paper we address existence of equilibria in an incomplete markets economy with countably many periods and a continuum of states at each node of the infinite tree. We consider two models: one where agents have to honor their commitments and another where default is allowed. In both models, marginal utility of income, at each node, is shown to be bounded, and we prove existence by taking finite-dimensional approximations and applying Fatou's lemma sequentially.     

Group Affiliation and Ownership Concentration as Determinants of Capital Structure Decisions: Contextualizing the Facts for an Emerging Economy

This study considers the firm’s affiliation with business groups and the ownership structure as determinants of leverage decisions in Chilean firms. The major findings show that group-affiliated firms take advantage of internal capital markets and transactions with related parties (e.g., low transference price or loans at competitive interest rates) that reduces the demand for external debt. Majority shareholders in affiliated firms behave as controllers of managers, on the one hand, and avoid the supervisory role of debt, on the other hand. In stand-alone firms, supervision led by majority shareholders is complemented by the monitoring role of debt through higher levels of leverage. We conclude that further developments in capital structure theories adjusted to the particularities of the different institutional contexts are needed.     

Beating market expectations and the pricing of firms’ probability of default

This study explores the impact of beating analysts' forecasts on investors' perceptions about firms' default probability. The information contained in analysts’ forecasts, both earnings and revenues, provides additional information to investors in pricing CDSs. While previous research has focused on the impact of beating analysts’ earnings forecasts, this study shows that firms that beat analysts' revenue forecasts also experience, on average, a decrease in the CDS premium around the earnings announcement date. This study also documents that the effect is stronger when firms beat/miss both earnings and revenue forecasts. When firms beat (miss) earnings and miss (beat) revenues, the effect of earnings is the dominant signal. These effects are stronger for firms with high levels of default risk.     

Interest rate changes and the timing of debt issues

There is much recent interest in the role of market timing in firm financial decisions. Using a large detailed sample of corporate public debt issues, private placements, Rule 144A issues and bank loans over the period 1970–2006, we investigate the relationship between interest rate changes and issues of floating and fixed-rate debt. Our results indicate that both past and future rates are associated with issuance decisions. We examine whether firms are able to lower their cost of capital by anticipating future rate changes, controlling for firm characteristics and market conditions. Our findings suggest that evidence of timing success is dependent on the time interval and type of debt examined. Over the longest time intervals available in our data, we do not find evidence of timing ability for fixed-rate or floating-rate debt issues.