infonet-economy

Family firms employ about 60 percent of the global workforce. While it is widely assumed that they are good employers, data about their conduct is mixed. In this study, we extend stewardship and agency theories to test competing propositions about the impact of family on employment practices using data from 14,961 private Belgian firms over a 19-year period. Higher investments, lower…

Power-to-gas (P2G) is a technology that converts electrical power to gas fuels like methane for storage in the natural gas grid. Due to the low efficiency, the production of synthetic methane is only profitable if electricity is sufficiently cheap. However, P2G facilities are flexible consumers and can benefit from short-term price fluctuations on the electricity spot market. We use…

Access to external funds is crucial for the entry and expansion of entrepreneurial firms and the sectors they predominantly arise in. This paper reports three important results. First, comparative advantage is shaped by factor endowments as well as fundamental determinants of corporate finance. In particular, a larger equity ratio of firms and tough governance standards relax…

We document a drift in exchange rates before monetary policy changes across major economies. Currencies tend to depreciate by 0.7 percent over ten days before policy rate cuts and appreciate by 0.5 percent before policy rate increases. We show that available fixed income instruments allow to accurately forecast monetary policy decisions and thus that the drift is foreseeable and…

The focus of this research is to observe the purchaser integration within business service procurement and its impact on the collaboration with both internal customers and external service providers (suppliers). Therefore, different service types were examined in more detail occurring as a contingent factor. Based on structural equation modelling, partial least square analysis (PLS)…

The main objective of this article is to develop a conceptual framework for blockchain-driven supply chain finance (SCF) solutions. The frame of reference intends to foster the coordination in buyer-supplier relations and eliminates existing inefficiencies in the execution of discrete SCF-instruments, such as reverse factoring and dynamic discounting. Moreover, we introduce value…

This paper investigates the impact of investor information on financial innovation. We identify specific channels through which issuers of financially engineered products exploit retail investors by using their privileged access to information. Our results imply that imperfect investor information regarding volatility and dividends is crucial to explain the pricing and design of…

What if the statutory fiscal depreciation of buildings was higher than their effective economic depreciation? This would imply that markets would value buildings more than their social fundamental value. I prove that this would allow house price bubbles to emerge and open the door to sudden crashes. This paper provides an example of how a misaligned fiscal policy measure could…

The literature on IPO long-term performance generally focuses on three- to five-year post-issue time horizons. Research published in the 2000s shows that the apparent underperformance of IPOs docu-mented in the 1990s disappears when the different risk exposures between IPO and mature firms are accounted for by using a Carhart (1997) factor model. In this paper, we show that a sample…