The effects of beach characteristics and location with respect to hotel prices

This paper measures the effects of beach characteristics and hotel location with respect to the beach on sun-and-beach hotel prices by using a well-established hedonic perspective. The paper’s main results are that, after controlling for the relevant variables, location in front of a beach increases the price of a room in costal hotels of Catalonia by a figure between 13 and 17%, and that a Blue Flag increases the price by around 11.5%. The effects on hotels’ prices of other beach characteristics (such as beach length, width, sand type or beach services) are also estimated. With these estimates, the paper ranks beaches according to their characteristics and provides a setting to assess different policies regarding beaches from the point of view of hotels, such as regeneration, maintenance or achieving a Blue Flag award.     

A Model of Elitist Qualification

This paper deals with the collective qualification of members of society as belonging to a certain category or group based on a fixed attribute. Our model contains three main features: the existence of individual gradual opinions, the notion of elitism (only the opinions of certain individuals are taken into account to delineate the reference group), and the idea of sequentiality (elites are successively created by using the previous elites’ opinions on a social decision scheme). The main results of the paper characterize when this sequential procedure converges for some intuitive ways of aggregating individual opinions. Finally, we analyze the role of convergence for two extra basic properties (symmetry and contractiveness) that elitist rules should possess.     

Transfers in Spanish State Retirement Pensions

A central issue in the recent reforms of state pensions in Spain has been to increase the proportionality between contributions and benefits along actuarially fair lines. The aim of this paper is to quantify the transfer component of social security retirement pensions, with transfer being understood as the difference between the pension effectively received and that which would be received under a system of actuarial fairness. The analysis is placed within a life-cycle framework, with particular reference to the distributive effects by income level. The results show that, in the past, there was a marked bias in favour of the objective of intergenerational and intragenerational redistribution, to the detriment of the objective of income insurance. This paper examines the factors that determine the final value of the transfer component within the entire Spanish pensions system.     

Five decades of corporate entrepreneurship research: measuring and mapping the field

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Research on corporate entrepreneurship—venturing activities by established corporations—has received increasing scholarly...     

Examining the behavior of renewable‐energy fund investors

Mutual fund investors could contribute to sustainable development by encouraging fund managers to channel their savings into the funding of sustainable energy projects adopted by firms. This study examines whether renewable‐energy investors take into account financial and/or nonfinancial factors when making the decision to invest in a specific fund, comparing their investment behavior with that of black‐energy and conventional investors. To this end, we have gathered information about 4,368 mutual funds (76 renewable‐energy funds, 109 black‐energy funds, and 4,183 conventional mutual funds) from January 2007 to December 2017. For this sample, we adopt a panel‐data approach with Petersen's standard errors clustered by fund and year. Our results indicate that renewable‐energy fund investors are less sensitive to past financial performance than are black‐energy and conventional fund investors, indicating that the former derive their utility from nonfinancial attributes whereas black‐energy investors derive their utility from a conditional multiattribute and conventional fund investors derive their utility from financial attributes.     

The impact of scale effects on the prevailing internet-based banking model in the US

Internet-based banks use a technology-intensive production process that may benefit from scale effects as they grow larger. This article analyzes whether the predominant Internet-primary bank in the USA generates technology-based economies of scale in the period 2002–2010. There is evidence of both favorable and adverse technology-based scale effects. As the leading Internet-primary bank gets larger, the financial performance gap with traditional banks shrinks while some of its critical competitive advantages wear down. The results suggest that unless the prevailing Internet-primary bank preserves the distinctive advantages of the Internet-based business model as it improves financial performance, it might end up converging with its branching competitors.