Corporate Ownership and Environmental Proactivity

The present paper advances knowledge of the drivers of firms' proactive environmental strategies. In particular, it explores the relationship between different corporate ownership structures and firms' green proactivity, in order to see whether some types of shareholder act as a stimulating driver for firms' proactive environmental behaviors. The study examines the explanatory power of corporate governance issues, such as a firm's ownership structure, as potential determinants of companies' environmental proactivity. Attention is focused on the European firms included into the Carbon Disclosure Project questionnaire 2012. The results show that ownership structure matters in firms' environmental proactivity. In particular, firms with a higher percentage of state ownership present superior green proactivity, while ownership concentration appears negatively related to proactive environmental strategy. The paper offers theoretical and practical implications. It focuses attention on a still underdeveloped research area, namely organizations and their relationship with the natural environment, including corporate ownership as a driver of a company's proactive environmental strategy. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Does the Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme Foster Innovation in European Firms?

This paper studies whether environmental management systems can spur eco‐innovation, analyzing EMAS (Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme) adoption and patented innovations (at the European Patent Office) at firm level. It uses an original panel database of 30 439 European firms belonging to all sectors from 2003 to 2012. An original instrumental variable is implemented to control for potential endogeneity. The analysis reveals that EMAS adoption is conducive to more innovation at the firm level. The results vary across countries and sectors. In particular, EMAS is positively related to green patents for medium and low technology manufacturing. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Online brand community within the integrated marketing communication system: When chocolate becomes seductive like a person

This study proposes brand communities as an effective tool within the integrated marketing communication (IMC) system. The paper utilizes the Brand Concept Map quali-quantitative technique in order to represent and compare mental association texture within one group of non-members of a brand community versus one group of people engaged in the same community. Brand stimulus is Nutella (chocolate cream) which boasts a crowded and lively online brand community: Nutellaville. Results show that brand community is effective in terms of contribution, commonality, and complementarity within the IMC system. In particular, Nutella brand image within the online community participants is composed of some mental associations overlapping other communication tools (commonality), and by new mental associations (complementarity) referred to the brand image dimension named ‘brand as person’ (seductive, popular, reassuring); second, this anthropomorphism effect solves the issue of sense of guilt excited by chocolate (contribution).     

When and how politicians take ‘scandalous’ decisions?

We study the decisions of a politician who maximizes his probability of being re-elected, which depends on the enactment of legislative instruments defined ‘scandalous’ because of their highly redistributive content. The agents are a politician and the voters; the legislative instruments available to the legislator are ordinary and executive laws, which differ according to their visibility. The theoretical model predicts that ‘scandalous’ legislation tends to be passed at the beginning of the legislature, while ‘non scandalous’, broader legislation, is approved mostly at the end of the legislation. Scandalous decisions, moreover, tend to be implemented by means of less visible executive legislation, while ordinary acts are mainly used to implement non scandalous decisions. This explanation of the genesis of legislation cycles is consistent with the findings of the empirical literature.     

Inventory investment and financial constraints in the Italian manufacturing industry: A panel data GMM approach

Three large unbalanced panels of Italian manufacturing firms observed over the period 1991–2009 are employed to assess, by means of a dynamic GMM approach, whether the existence of financial frictions is suitable to explain deviations of inventories from their long-run path. A negative response of inventory investment to the presence of financial burdens might provide evidence of a significant role played by the financial framework in conditioning the real side of the economy, especially during recession years, when liquidity problems arise. The negative effect is found over the entire analyzed period, with firms' dimensional aspects accounting more than risk characteristics to explain the phenomenon, but the inclusion of recessionary dummies into the model leads to controversial and puzzling results. A significant recessionary effect is found during the Nineties, accounting for inventories being more sensitive to financial frictions during the main recessionary peaks, 1993 and 1996. The result is not confirmed by the most recent estimates, especially the ones referring to the 2008–2009 recessionary shock, whose effects are investigated for the first time by a paper addressing the inventory investment–financial constraints subject. Alternative hypothesis for the proposed results have been tested on data. Firms were found to rely on inventory decumulation to a lesser extent compared to the past, to generate internal financing. More specifically, disinvestments in financial assets were found to represent, as a matter of fact, one of the main drivers adopted to ease liquidity tensions: a negative and strongly significant relationship with inventory investment was detected, after controlling for short-run liquidity constraints at firm level. By contrast, only a weak negative relationship was established with fixed capital during the same recessionary biennium.     

When Blame-Giving Crisis Communications are Persuasive: A Dual-Influence Model and Its Boundary Conditions

Journal of Business Ethics - Companies faced with a crisis sometimes blame others in their communications, when they feel that responsibility for the negative event lies elsewhere. Research has...     

How the sender’s positioning and the target’s CSR record influence the effectiveness of scapegoating crisis communications

Past research on scapegoating argues that this crisis communication strategy is often ineffective because it can be perceived as an unfair attempt at shifting blame. In contrast, a few studies have shown that scapegoating can be effective by increasing the perceived ethicality of the sender relative to the target that is presented as responsible for wrongdoing. Reconciling these inconsistent findings, we show that the relative effectiveness of scapegoating depends on the perceptions of the sender and of the target. Our findings show that both the positioning of the sender as an underdog or a top dog and the positive or negative CSR record of the target contribute to explaining the effectiveness of scapegoating. Following a crisis, scapegoating appears to be most effective when the sender is an underdog and the target has a negative CSR record. The effectiveness of scapegoating for an underdog is however reduced when the target has a positive CSR record. At the opposite end, scapegoating might backfire when the sender is a top dog that attacks a target with a positive CSR record. Finally, when a top dog attacks a target with a negative CSR record, scapegoating reduces negative word of mouth even though this effect does not appear to be mediated by perceived ethicality. The study contributes to research on scapegoating communications and on the consequences of an underdog positioning and a positive CSR record for companies trying to manage the negative fallout from an ethical crisis.

     

For green or not for green? The effect of cooperation goals and type on environmental performance

Although many scholars have demonstrated that companies engaged in collaborations achieve better environmental performance than other companies, existing studies have not analyzed in depth whether this effect changes considering the characteristics of cooperation. Our paper aims to explore whether collaboration with other companies always has a positive effect on environmental performance or whether it depends on cooperation goals, collaboration type, or company size. Empirical analysis based on a sample of 773 European companies demonstrated that an external source of knowledge is an important way to foster firms' environmental proactivity, especially when environmental goals are shared at the basis of collaboration. Second, we verified that companies involved in JVs with environmental goals achieve greater environmental performance than companies that use M&As to acquire external knowledge. Finally, we demonstrated that it is more important for small companies to be involved in environmental collaboration than larger ones.     

Expectations and industry location: a discrete time dynamical analysis

The new economic geography (NEG) aims to explain long-term patterns in the spatial allocation of industrial activities. It stresses that endogenous economic processes may enlarge small historic differences leading to quite different regional patterns—history matters for the long-term geographical distribution of economic activities. A pivotal element is that productive factors move to another region whenever the anticipated remuneration is higher in that region. Given the long-term nature of NEG analyses and the crucial role of expectations, it is astonishing that most of the existing models assume only naïve or myopic expectations. However, a recent stream of the literature in behavioral and experimental economics shows that agents often use expectational heuristics, such as trend extrapolating and trend reverting rules. We introduce such expectations formation hypotheses into a NEG model formulated in discrete time. This modification leads to a system of two nonlinear difference equations (corresponding, in the language of dynamical systems theory, to a 2-dimensional piecewise smooth map) and thus enriches the possible dynamic patterns: with trend extrapolating (reverting) the symmetric equilibrium is less (more) stable; and it may lose stability only via a flip bifurcation (or also via a Neimark–Sacker bifurcation) giving rise to a period-doubling cascade (or also to quasi-periodic orbits). In both cases, complex behavior is possible; multistability, that is, the coexistence of locally stable equilibria, is pervasive; and border-collision bifurcations are also allowed. In this sense, our analysis corroborates some of the basic insights of the NEG.