Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics最新文献

The impact of board gender diversity on the financial performance of firms is not known. This is because empirical investigations have yielded inconclusive outcomes. This study engages data from 408 microfinance institutions (MFIs) covering the period 2010–2018 from the six microfinance regions to investigate this impact using the Least Squares Dummy Variable (LSDV) and the System Generalized Method of Moments (SYS-GMM) estimation techniques. The study also explores whether judicial efficiency exerts any significant effect on the board gender diversity–financial performance nexus. The study observes that board gender diversity exhibits a strong negative effect on the financial performance of MFIs. The study also observes that the effect of board gender diversity on the financial performance of MFIs escalates in the presence of judicial inefficiency. The study, therefore, unveils the judicial system as a channel through which gender diversity drives the financial performance of MFIs negatively.

We measure the tax advantage of public firms over private firms, which operate at municipality level in the German household solid waste disposal industry. Public firms with sovereign duties pay no taxes, but equivalent private firms have to. In a simple risk-free setting, we develop a measure of the percentage difference of the charges of both types of firms demanded under their respective tax treatments. We model a cost-covering public firm and a net present value maximizing private firm. For sensible model parameters from the German waste disposal industry the private firm has to demand an about 16% to 18% higher charge. The by far biggest impact on the measure has the value added tax, with revenues as a much larger tax base than profits. Tax savings, which directly affect pre-tax profits, only alleviate the disadvantage bit. There is some evidence that at least one type of private firms—that is, private law firms that are also majority privately owned, are productive enough to overcome the tax advantage of public firms and be able to charge a lower price than public firms.

This article examines how determining an optimal environmental tax in a Cournot duopoly with unionized labour markets and managerial firms departing from the strict profit-maximization. It is shown that firm-specific monopoly unions that set wages (1) reduce both the environmental tax and environmental damage and (2) counterintuitively, increase firms’ profitability when the abatement technology is not too “efficient”, and the public evaluation of environmental quality is sufficiently high. Within this framework, the work also develops the endogenous game played by firms that must choose between sales delegation (SD) and profit-maximization. Results show that the SD contract always emerges as the unique, deadlock sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium, thereby solving the (prisoner's) dilemma emerging in the related existing literature assuming a competitive labour market.

Existing research indicates that job seekers are attracted to organizations demonstrating social responsibility. This seems especially true for commercial enterprises that engage in socially responsible practices, but is challenged in the case of social enterprises. While commercial enterprises stay focused on their primary aim of generating financial revenues when engaging in social responsibility, social enterprises’ social responsibility is primary and at the core of their business. However, the attractiveness of social enterprises on the job market has not been the focus of extant research. This study aims to enrich the academic literature by exploring the attractiveness of social enterprises to job seekers. When studying job seekers’ intentions to pursue a job with a social enterprise, we also examine some of the underlying mechanisms that affect individuals’ attraction process to social enterprises. We perform an experimental design study involving 349 Belgian students about to graduate. The results reveal that participants’ intentions to pursue a job with a social enterprise are significantly lower in comparison to their job pursuit intentions with commercial enterprises. Furthermore, factors relating to personal values, like perceptions of value fit and individuals’ prosocial values, play a significant role in the attractiveness of social enterprises.

Empirical evidence of the benefit of farm producer organizations (FPOs) in the developing world is mounting. There is, however, no work in South America on the relationship between FPO membership and farm-level performance. We address the gap by estimating the treatment effect of FPO membership with respect to three outcomes: quantity produced, quantity sold, and price received. The empirical application focuses on the Peruvian coffee sector, where FPOs may have played an important role during the recent price crisis. A sample of approximately 9,000 survey responses from Peruvian coffee producers during the 2015–19 period is used in the analysis. Results show a positive treatment effect of FPO membership on all three farm-level outcomes. Compared to non-FPO members, FPO members produced 120–295 kg/ha more, sold 118–296 kg/ha more, and received 0.42–1.53 PEN/kg more. We also find evidence of heterogeneity in the estimated effect of FPO membership across time, farm size, and membership probability. The findings yield novel implications in terms of policy support for FPOs.

This study investigated the effects of corruption and economic freedom on corporate leverage. We also evaluated how economic freedom shapes the effect of corruption on corporate leverage. Using a sample of Vietnamese firms covering a nine-year period from 2010 to 2018, we find evidence that increased control of corruption has a significant positive impact on firm leverage, whereas the opposite is true for economic freedom. This effect is robust to alternative measures of control of corruption as well as advanced estimation methods, such as firm-fixed effects and quantile regressions. Our results also reveal that the positive impact of corruption controls on corporate leverage is more pronounced for firms with high economic freedom. Econometrically, our findings indicate that firms with better control over corruption prefer debt financing, as demonstrated by their higher leverage ratio.

This paper analyzes the share of state-owned enterprises on the Fortune Global 500 lists from 2005 to 2020. The purpose is to answer two research questions—what is the share of SOEs among the world's largest companies, and is this share increasing over the years? Regarding studies of large sets of companies, the novelty of this article is the method in which SOEs were identified—based on the criterion of actual corporate control of the state and not the threshold of state ownership. The results show that the share of SOEs in the group of the world's largest companies is higher than indicated in previous similar studies, and this value has increased significantly over the last 15 years. In 2005, there were 64 SOEs on the list; in 2020, there were 141 (with the highest number—142—in 2015). In this period, the share of SOEs in revenues doubled (to almost 30%), in assets more than tripled and the total number of employees from SOEs from the list more than doubled. However, these increases were almost solely due to the growth of the Chinese economy, which resulted in more Chinese SOEs being included on the list.

This paper studies the effects of mobilization for war on the development of fiscal capacity and the values of tax compliance (tax morale). We propose a dynamic setting where governments may invest resources to improve the efficiency of the fiscal apparatus and the citizens' tax morality in order to raise the necessary revenues for the defense against a threat (external or internal), and parents optimally choose to transmit their preferences of tax compliance to children. Despite fiscal capacity and tax morale are initially substitutes, we show how a dynamic complementarity may arise in equilibrium from a more efficient transmission of the values of tax compliance in countries with high fiscal capacity, and this may explain why they tend to move together over time. Under reasonable conditions, we obtain that the effect of a higher threat of war on the steady-state level of the culture of tax compliance is negative when fiscal capacity is relatively low, and positive when the latter is large. We show cross-country evidence based on war frequency, fiscal capacity, and tax morale that is consistent with the results of our theory.

Our goal is to participate in the debate on regional well-being. To this end, we explore the relationship between prosperity and the cooperative movement at the regional level in Italy between 2010 and 2019. We summarize prosperity through an index originally proposed by Amartya Sen and we apply it to classify Italian regions. We then perform panel analyses showing that there is a positive and significant association between such an index and the cooperative presence. We detect that, and explain why, the cooperative movement contributes to the regional prosperity more through its employment than in terms of the added value it generates.

We explore whether loan officer gender affects loan repayment performance in Cameroonian microfinance institutions (MFIs). After controlling for demand-side factors (borrower characteristics), lending methodology, loan contract terms, year, and industry fixed effects, we apply a pooled probit model to a unique loan-level dataset including more than 7000 loans approved between 2007 and 2012 by two Cameroonian commercial MFIs. We find that loans granted and monitored by male loan officers perform better than those granted by female officers and that loans approved under joint liability contracts and monitored by male loan officers are less likely to fall into arrears. Our findings also show that the performance advantage of male loan officers over female officers is confirmed only during bad times. Compared to female loan officers, male loan officers seem to intensify their monitoring efforts during a crisis period. The results are robust after controlling for selection bias and are less sensitive to a change in the loan repayment performance measurement.