Luis Enrique Pedauga

Do local authorities use NPM delivery forms to overcome problems of fiscal stress

Finding solutions to the unfavourable economic and financial situation that the local authorities are currently facing is of crucial importance. One such solution is to adopt mechanisms for restructuring local public services, through new management approaches to reduce costs and thereby reduce fiscal stress. The aim of this article is to determine the probability of a city council changing the way it manages services, selecting from different options, in response to situations of fiscal stress. To address this issue, we studied a sample of 1572 Spanish municipalities for the period 2002–2009, using a random-effects panel multinomial logit model. The results obtained show that outsourcing and inter-municipal cooperation are the management formulas that councils are most likely to choose in response to a financial crisis, especially the ones arising from insufficient transfers, negative cash flow, debt or budget deficit.

Industries Regulation and Firm Environmental Disclosure A Stakeholders’ Perspective on the Importance of Legitimation and International Activities

The potential negative environmental consequences of the activities of international firms has been scrutinized. In response to these pressures, international firms have started to disclose (voluntarily or not) environmental information in order to increase transparency and ensure legitimacy. While several factors have been pointed out as the drivers of such disclosing behavior, the role of industrial regulation has remained underesearched. To better understand this challenge, we rely on a sample of 1,150 international firms (top vs. nontop) worldwide from regulated and unregulated sectors. Our results suggest that unregulated firms disclose—to cope with higher stakeholders pressures—more environmental information than firms operating in regulated environments. Additionally, a firm’s international position positively influences its environmental disclosure, but it does negatively and partially moderate the relationship between industrial regulation of the sector in which the firm operates and such firm’s environmental disclosure. Our findings may also entail interesting contributions both for practitioners and scholars.

Handling math expressions in economics: recoding spreadsheet teaching tool of growth models

ABSTRACT In the present paper, we develop a teaching methodology for economic theory. The main contribution of this paper relies on combining the interactive characteristics of spreadsheet programs such as Excel and Unicode plain-text linear format for mathematical expressions. The advantage of Unicode standard rests on its ease for writing and reading mathematical expressions. In this sense, our proposal allows incorporating an easily readable and writable methodology to cope with math expressions when interactive spreadsheets are used and designed in Economics teaching. The resulting nearly plain text can be used with few or no modifications in other numerical computing programs.

Trust when financial implications are not the aim: the integration of sustainability into management education

Literature has paid detailed attention to the positive financial implications of considering the stakeholders’ environmental concerns. This paper contributes by using a trust framework to delimitate how stakeholders may influence managers’ environmental decisions even if they are not focused on financial objectives. Specifically, we analyse how perceptions of academic department heads about their stakeholders’ ability and benevolence influence the head’s willingness to integrate sustainability issues into the syllabus of the courses. We also investigate the direct and moderating role of the heads’ interest in financial aims and the direct influence of the school environmental proactivity. Our analysis includes a sample of 74 deans in 46 different business and engineering schools and a sample of 95 department heads in the field of management studies of 25 Spanish universities. The hierarchical moderated regression results confirm the positive influence of the ability and benevolence of the stakeholders and the heads’ interest in the financial aims, but not the moderating effects and the influence of the school proactivity. The paper provides research implications on the stakeholders’ dimensions influencing environmental decisions and practical implications showing that managers of organisations who wish to advance their environmental approaches may use partnerships with their stakeholders based upon trust.