The relationship between legitimacy,reputation, sustainability and branding for companies and their supply chains

This paper aims at filling a gap that we perceive to exist in the scientific literature as to legitimacy, reputation and sustainability and their interrelationship to corporate and supply chain branding. A series of innovative theoretical frameworks are provided interrelating companies and their value (supply) chains with legitimacy, reputation, and branding which are essential conditions to achieve sustainability and competitive advantage based on dyadic and social context consonance to the benefit of society and all stakeholders involved. An urgently required better understanding of the concepts and their interrelations is enhanced by a synthesized explanatory basis entailing an eclectic mosaic of interdisciplinary theories (institutionalist, neo-institutionalist theories, the viable system approach, isomorphism and identity) to improve corporate and supply chain performance. To better inform managerial practice the theoretical considerations are spiced with case studies among which especially the currently debated supply chain case of the European horse meat scandal is illuminated suggesting concrete managerial cross-functional implications in the food industry. The paper culminates in the call for a newly to-be-established marketing stream we call ‘Sustainable and Curative Marketing’.     

Sectoral shifts, diversification and regional unemployment: evidence from local labour systems in Italy

Using Local Labour Systems (LLSs) data, this work aims at assessing the effects of sectoral shifts and industry specialization patterns on regional unemployment in Italy over the years 2004–2008. Italy represents an interesting case study because of the high degree of spatial heterogeneity in local labour market performance and the well-known North–South divide. Furthermore, the presence of strongly specialized LLSs (Industrial Districts, IDs) allows us to test whether IDs perform better than highly diversified urban areas thanks to the effect of agglomeration economies, or viceversa. Building on a semiparametric spatial auto-regressive framework, our empirical investigation documents that sectoral shifts and the degree of specialization exert a negative role on unemployment dynamics. By contrast, highly diversified areas turn out to be characterized by better labour market performances.     

Garret Epps. Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America

In the spring of 1866, Congress drafted what would become theFourteenth Amendment—a promise of citizenship and civilrights for all Americans regardless of race. However, the Redeemeryears following its ratification blurred its importance, illuminatedlatent racial prejudice, and then provided for the failure ofcivil rights—not normally the makings of a success story.Yet, despite the racial issues of this nation, the FourteenthAmendment has remained a part of the Constitution—readyto serve its duty to     

INCOMPLETE CONTRACTS MODELLING

Contractual incompleteness has been understood in the literature as the conditions under which contracts are insufficiently state contingent due to non‐observable and/or non‐verifiable states of the world. The term incomplete contracts has been used in different meanings: to denote both proper contractual incompleteness (in a complete contracts context) due to various types of information problems, which can be contractually solved through a suitably designed mechanism and a context (an incomplete contracting context) where ex ante states of nature that are too expensive to describe prevent a contractual mechanism being designed. We examine these significantly different interpretations in both methodological and formal terms. We argue that, as long as relationship‐specific investment conditions occur, an incomplete contracting context is an innovative paradigm to the extent that it permits analysis of issues that in a complete contract context cannot even be broached, namely the recognition of non‐contractible inefficiencies and the possibility of non‐contractual solutions to such inefficiencies.     

Interregional Migration of Human Capital and Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Italian Provinces

Since the mid‐1990s interregional migration flows in Italy have dramatically increased, especially from the South to the North. These flows are characterized by a strong component of human capital, involving a large number of workers with secondary and tertiary education. Using longitudinal data for the period 2002–2011 at NUTS‐3 territorial level, we document that long‐distance (i.e., South‐North) net migration of high‐skill workers has increased the unemployment at origin and decreased it at destination, thus deepening North–South unemployment disparities. On the other hand, long‐distance net migration of low‐skill workers has had the opposite effect, by lowering the unemployment at origin and raising it at destination. Further evidence also suggests that the diverging effect of high‐skill migration dominates the converging effect of low‐skill migration. Thus, concerns for an ‘internal brain drain’ from Southern regions look not groundless.     

Pricing to market of Italian exporting firms

This article investigates the pricing-to-market (PTM) behaviour of Italian exporting firms, using quarterly survey data by sector and by region over the period 1999q1 to 2005q2. A partial equilibrium imperfect competition model provides the structure according to which the orthogonality of structural shocks is derived. Impulse response analysis shows non-negligible reactions of export-domestic price margins to unanticipated changes in cost competitiveness and in foreign and domestic demand levels, even though these effects appear to be of a transitory nature. For the period 1999 to 2001, a typical PTM behaviour emerges, while, during the most recent years favourable foreign demand conditions allowed firms to increase their export-domestic price margins in face of a strong deterioration of their cost competitiveness. Macroeconomic implications of the observed PTM behaviour are also discussed.     

Pricing to market, firm heterogeneity and the role of quality

We build a pricing-to-market (PTM) model with firm heterogeneity, which allows for imperfect competition and market segmentation in the presence of flexible exchange rates, horizontal and vertical differentiation and different tastes of consumers in destination markets. We derive firm’s pricing behaviour in response to price and quality competition shocks. We show that there is PTM heterogeneity across firms if quality has a role. We empirically assess the main predictions of our theoretical framework on Italian firm-level data. We document that export-domestic price margins are significantly affected by price and quality competitiveness factors even controlling for foreign demand conditions, size, export intensity, destination markets and unobservables. Finally, we provide evidence of strong heterogeneity across firms in their reaction to price and quality competitiveness.     

Core and equilibria in coalitional asymmetric information economies

We study coalitional economies under uncertainty and asymmetric information, assuming a finitely additive measure space of agents and finitely many possible states of nature. We introduce a suitable core notion showing that it is equivalent to Walrasian expectations equilibria. The finitely additive approach proposed in the paper permits also asymmetric information economy with countably many agents, rather than requiring only a continuum. Moreover, it allows us to overcome well-known criticisms related to the interpretation of individual private core notions.