In accordance with Mc Crudden, the ‘legal research has engaged with the more recent social sciences in ways that would have seemed unlikely even 50 years ago. Socio-legal studies, sociology of law, law and economics must now be seen as integral to legal research’. Looking beyond the single discipline of law, trying to include into the legal discussion and analysis other disciplines seems to be particularly necessary when we refer to the phenomenon of money laundering.

The expected cost of capital is a crucial component for most of the topics in corporate finance. Unfortunately in the presence of risky debt, it is systematically overestimated. This bias is increasing in leverage and the volatility of cash flows. We show the existence of the bias and assess its size. We finally propose a novel methodology to obtain a direct unbiased estimation of the expected return on assets. This method avoids the computational error that is obtained from the estimation of the individual components.

What can companies do to achieve global competitive advantage and extra-ordinary profitability in the challenging years ahead? What are the new dynamics that we can expect in global competition? What are the consequences of connectedness -- from social networks to financial markets -- and how can companies benefit from these dynamics? For companies to thrive in the current environment, they must be able to use their power nodes and shape their business models to tap the sources of “profit power” around them. This gives them the upper hand in every competition, partnership or alliance. Understanding the importance of power nodes, and which ones are potentially part of the future of your enterprise, is the first step to success.

Prior empirical studies price distress under the assumption of normality. We find this assumption to be rejected by the data and subsequently examine the sensitivity of the distress risk premium to the distributional assumptions of the multivariate t (MVT). Large economic differences are evident in estimating the distress risk premium and its related size effect. For example, the difference in the estimated distress risk premium to small firms under the normal and the MVT is an annualized 8.4% over 1978 to 2007 sample period. The results highlight the economic importance of using distributional assumptions that capture in empirical characteristics of the data

This paper connects two strands of literature: gender and ethics, in particular the ethics of care on the one hand, and the recent literature on gender and finance and the financial crisis, in particular those views suggesting that women run finances more responsibly than men on the other hand. In this paper we explore this hypothesis. We do so from the perspective of the ethics of care, in particular the work by Virginia Held, who in a recent book, The Ethics of Care, connects this ethics to markets, politics and globalization. From this literature, we develop an analytical framework of actors in the financial sector in terms of ‘responsible agents’ who act in a particular institutional context, consisting of formal institutions (laws and regulations) as well as informal institutions (social norms, habits, rules of thumb, networks). Together, we understand the behavior of actors in the institutional context of the financial sector as practices, in which moral and economic dimensions of behavior are closely linked. Combining this with the empirical literature on gender and finance (such as about women’s greater risk aversion and lower tendency to try to beat the market as reflected in lower number of transactions compared to males in similar settings), we hope to be able to understand to what extent gender may make a difference in financial sector practices. We include a study case, some empirical data and descriptive data analysis.

Most of the work testing the quantity-quality model has concentrated on the tradeoff between family size and educational attainment. We argue that child health is a plausible measure of quality that has not been fully explored in the empirical literature. Using data from the Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS), we estimate the effect of family size on child mortality and several measures of child health. Our results suggest that even in rural Bangladesh there is little evidence of a tradeoff between child quantity and health.

We develop a comprehensive quantitative account of changing practices in Economics in the last 122 years. The analysis uses “word detection” algorithms to appraise the prevailing practices. We document a shift toward isolation from other disciplines during most of the twentieth century. In sharp contrast, the most recent decades show a strong move towards a more connected discipline. Periods of more connectedness are associated with openness to a broader set of features of economic agents and the economic environment. In parallel, the 1960s and 1970s show a notable acceleration in the move towards a more mathematical approach. This development did not reverse. As a result, the current state of the discipline is characterized by an embrace of mathematical tools together with openness to a wider set of aspects and findings developed in other disciplines. Most of the reported variables show surprisingly high correlations across disciplines and across journals.

Dice la sabiduría popular que soñar no cuesta nada, pero aun ese oficio no es sencillo en la Argentina. Hace trece años escribí otro prólogo, el de Otro siglo, otra Argentina, al que llamé “un sueño posible”. Allí conjeturaba cómo podría llegar a ser la Argentina del Bicentenario del 2010, sin pensar que llegaría tan rápido, claro. Mi inveterado optimismo me llevó a errar en varios pronósticos, aunque no en todos. Advertía que se trataba de un sueño posible pero de ninguna manera inevitable, ya que así como podía lograrse una mayor realización del país y de sus personas, también podían ocurrir pesadillas diversas y sueños grises, que ciertamente tuvieron lugar. Decía también que para que el “buen sueño” se realizara se requería atravesar muchas fronteras. No bastarían las instituciones políticas y económicas, aun mejoradas. Eran necesarios también cambios en la sociedad y en la cultura. Y era menester gestar una inteligente integración al mundo, una nueva y más integrada geografía, un nuevo modo de ser industrioso, el ahorro productivo como modo de vida, una nueva constitución social centrada en las personas, capaz de revitalizar las empresas y el trabajo y de democratizar el capital y la educación en pos de una síntesis superadora tanto del ‘capitalismo salvaje’ como del ‘Estado Providencia’, un Estado reinventado para el siglo XXI y basado en la total transparencia de nuestros gobiernos y procedimientos públicos y en una renovación de la representación política. En fin, para hacer real el sueño también sería necesario darle primero la forma de un proyecto, no de una utopía

Based on data from 76 strategic initiatives in five multi-business corporations, this paper examines relationships between three dimensions of network relations on the inter-group level and the performance of strategic initiatives. Findings suggest inverted U-shaped relationships between performance and relational and structural dimensions of networks, and a linear, positive relationship for the cognitive dimension. In addition, exploration moderates relationships between performance and all three dimensions of inter-group networks. Compared to exploitation initiatives, negative consequences of strong ties and centrality are more pronounced in exploratory initiatives. Although exploratory groups appear to benefit less from increases in shared vision, shared vision is a positive influence on performance for both types of initiatives.

Siendo la movilidad económica un fenómeno de largo plazo por naturaleza, su medición requiere de un panel largo de variables como salarios, ingresos o gastos de consumo de las personas o de los hogares. Pero la falta de tales datos y la existencia de sesgos debido a los errores de medición ponen algunos reparos en el uso de datos longitudinales. Sin embargo, es posible usar un pseudo-panel dinámico que estime consistentemente la movilidad individual aún en presencia de errores en los ingresos reportados.

Uskali Mäki (2002: 8) has contended that “economics” is a dangerously aggregated notion: “there is no one homogeneous ‘economics’.” Within all the versions of economics two of them have predominated along history. The first one refers to a portion of human affairs related with the material condition of the human being. The second one refers to a perspective of analysis of all human actions. The emergence of the latter has to do with epistemological requirements that economics has incorporated. In the paper, first, these two versions will be introduced together with an appraisal of their pros and cons. Second, a textual analysis of the words related to economics, i.e., economy, economic and economically, will be presented. The intention of this analysis is to discover which of the two versions deals better with what is ordinarily understood as economic. It will also give origin also to a proposal about the tasks of economics. A diagnosis about why economics has become a science about something that is not its real subject will come third. It will follow a proposal of therapy. Finally a conclusion will close.

This paper analyzes the corporate governance system of business groups in Argentina during the post market reforms period. Several cases of -successful and unsuccessful- business groups’ performance are studied in order to determine which are the key variables that allow firms to survive and expand under an increasingly challenging environment. I argue that successful cases share some key features in their corporate governance systems in terms of business structure and strategy. Their corporate governance strategy has evolved during the post market reform era but still holds some characteristics that are a legacy from previous periods. Despite the strong effect towards convergence that globalization is supposed to generate, the corporate governance of Argentine business groups does not seem to be converging to the standards of developed countries’ corporate governance system.

We investigate how the competitive complexity of an industrial sector affects its profitability. For that purpose, we developed a set of simulations representing industries as complex systems where different firms co-evolve linked by multiple competitive dimensions. We show that increases in the complexity of an industry, resulting from increases in the number of players and in the number of competitive dimensions linking them, damages industry performance. We also found that the negative impact on performance resulting from a higher number of competitive dimensions decreases as the number of players in the industry increases and that the decrease in industry performance associated to big increases in the number of players is mediated by the number of competitive dimensions linking them.

This paper studies the consequences of product-market competition on firms’ decisions to delegate more or fewer decision-making responsibilities to managers. By simultaneously addressing the choice of both competitive actions and organizational design, the paper makes an attempt at bringing economic theory and management strategy closer together. I show that, for a given number of firms, and increase in market size increases centralization, as the owner of the firm finds it more costly to accept rent seeking by the managers. However, this increase in market size will lead to the entry of more firms, which calls for more decentralized decision making. Under reasonable conditions, the aggregate effect leads to a U-shaped relationship where firms in both small and large markets are characterized by high levels of discretion, while there is less discretion for intermediate market sizes. Stronger competition, as measured by an increase in product substitutability leads to more discretion in concentrated markets, but to less discretion in dispersed markets, in markets in which the possibilities for product differentiation are important and in markets with high entry costs.