Towards a sustainable fashion retail supply chain in Europe: Organisation and performance

Sustainability issues are particularly sensitive to the fashion supply chain, given current fierce competition, intensive resource use, and the exposure of penurious labour conditions in some regions.In this paper, we discuss how the sustainability movement is impacting the fashion retail supply chain organisation and its performance. We carried out a study with stakeholders of the fashion industry and we report on their views. We elaborate on the challenges and conflicts of the different dimensions of sustainability, and we discuss how to leverage both the internal and external organisations in the European supply chain.     

Internationalization strategy,financial constraints and assets (in)tangibility. A study of euro area countries after the 2008 crisis

This paper studies the determinants of companies’ performance during the crisis based on their short-term (sales changes) and medium-term (exit) reaction, using firms’ data from the European Firms in Global Economy (EFIGE) survey and combining them with balance-sheet statistics. The results, based on the four largest euro area countries show that vulnerability to the crisis depended on a company’s mode of international operation. More sophisticated forms of internationalization increased firms’ resilience in the first and second waves of the crisis. The paper also investigates the mediating role of intangible assets and financial constraints in the relationship between internationalization and companies’ response to the crisis. While intangible assets were very important for preventing a drop in sales for internationalized firms immediately after 2008, they amplified the probability of firms’ exit five years after the crisis in weaker European countries (Spain and Italy). At the same time, financial constraints increased companies’ probability of exit. Innovation prevented a drop in firms’ sales and firms’ exit.     

An Impact Analysis of Microfinance in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This paper applies the financing constraints approach to study whether microfinance institutions improved access to credit for microenterprises in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to this approach, microenterprises with improved access to credit rely less on internal funds for their investments. Thus, we compare investment sensitivity to internal funds of microenterprises in municipalities with significant presence of MFIs to that of microenterprises in municipalities with no (or limited) presence of MFIs using Living Standards Measurement Survey and MFI branch location data. Results indicate that MFIs alleviated microbusinesses’ financing constraints. This approach is applicable to evaluating microfinance impact in other countries.     

Pseudo conditional maximum likelihood estimation of the dynamic logit model for binary panel data

We show how the dynamic logit model for binary panel data may be approximated by a quadratic exponential model. Under the approximating model, simple sufficient statistics exist for the subject-specific parameters introduced to capture the unobserved heterogeneity between subjects. The latter must be distinguished from the state dependence which is accounted for by including the lagged response variable among the regressors. By conditioning on the sufficient statistics, we derive a pseudo conditional likelihood estimator of the structural parameters of the dynamic logit model, which is simple to compute. Asymptotic properties of this estimator are studied in detail. Simulation results show that the estimator is competitive in terms of efficiency with estimators recently proposed in the econometric literature.     

Collective bargaining towards mutual flexibility and security goals in large internationalised companies—why do institutions (still) matter?

This paper examines the potential of collective bargaining to generate mutually advantageous flexibility and security outcomes at firm level. By focusing attention on actors' negotiating capacity at sites in Denmark and Italy of four large chemical-pharmaceutical companies, it provides a nuanced, comparative explanation. The findings demonstrate that, across countries, differences in actors' capacity and negotiated outcomes are attributable to the stability and depth of collective bargaining institutions. Within country differences are accounted for by the organisational resources (internal democracy, external links and pro-activity) of local trade unions, which condition their capacity to induce management to negotiate outcomes which benefit both parties.