global labor and worksite standards a strategic ethical analysis of shareholder employee relations resolutions the purpose of this paper is to analyze from a strategic ethical perspective four selected shareholder resolutions reported by the social issues service of the investor responsibility research center regarding international labor and workplace standards particular attention will be paid to specific employee relations issues at the operating and tactical level of individual multinational firms the paper concludes with policy recommendations for proxy statements

the brazilian national alcohol programme an economic reappraisal and adjustments abstract the recent economic reappraisal presented in this study shows that the social viability of ethanol production in brazil will only became a reality with considerable increases in productivity and with international oil prices above us 30 00 factors which are only likely to come about at the end of the 1990s however if one accepts that the investments already undertaken in the alcohol production sector can be considered as sunk costs then the prospect of viability is not so remote and perfectly feasible with oil prices in the us 15 20 range the adjustment on fiscal policy discussed here is designed precisely to guarantee the continuation of proalcool with the production of alcohol limited to the sector s current capacity in other words its purpose is to achieve an evolution in the demand for alcohol so as to ensure compatibility with the supply derived from investments already undertaken in the sector through basically an increase in tax on alcohol car sales

social norms and csr performance some institutional investors e g pensions universities and religious charitable and not for profit institutions are exposed to social norms and public scrutiny prior research indicates that these norm constrained institutions engage in negative screening and invest less in firms operating in sin industries we examine whether social norms also motivate these institutions to engage in positive screening where they invest more in firms with better corporate social responsibility csr performance and csr related activism where they promote improvements in the csr of existing investees we find that firms with superior csr performance have greater ownership by norm constrained institutions consistent with positive screening and we use a natural experiment to establish causality we also find that increases in the shareholdings of norm constrained institutions are associated with subsequent improvements in csr consistent with activism further we rule out an alternative explanation for our results where the positive screening and activism are profit driven rather than driven by social pressure thus our results suggest that the influence of social norms on stock markets is more pervasive than documented in the prior literature

the differential incidence of a land tax the paper analyses the sharing of the burden of a land tax between consumers and owners of land at different points in a semi closed city the basic conclusion is that the pattern of differential incidence of the tax depends upon the magnitude of the elasticity of substitution between land and the composite private good in the utility function of residents the share of the burden on landowners increases decreases as the periphery is approached depending upon whether the elasticity of substitution is greater less than unity

evaluating the economy embedded in the brazilian ethanol gasoline flex fuel car a real options approach the introduction of the flex fuel cars in the brazilian market in 2003 changed considerably the consumer decision making process prior to this date it was necessary to choose the automobile type only by gasoline or by ethanol fuel today it is possible to choose a car type with both fuel options this flexibility generates economic advantages for his owner but what are the financial benefits of a flex fuel car in comparison with a car using only gasoline geographically where is the owner of the benefits from this flexibility located this article presents an empirical application of the real options theory in the analysis of the flex fuel car option for five geographic brazilian regions northern northeastern central western southeastern and southern the regional price differences as well as the consumer preferences of these regions were met for this purpose historical fuel prices were considered stochastic and following a mean reverting stochastic process the prediction and option values were

ethics on the web applying moral decision making to the new media this paper examines the advent of the web as a critical media tool in the promotion and sale of goods to consumers and the ethical questions it raises that are issues of public policy we examine four traditional ethical rationales that guide organizational decision making utilitarianism distributive justice moral rights of man and relativism further characterized as ends based equity based rules based and comparison based rationales and we apply them to four moral dilemmas attributed to the proliferation of dot com companies as they relate to consumer welfare we find that ethical rationale in the new media is largely non existent and where it exists it is primarily reactive and driven by utilitarian or relativistic reasoning we attribute this condition to the newness of the industry and to its economic context representing as it does many characteristics embodied in the concept of the perfect market we offer some remedies to improve ethical conduct by e business

institutional ownership of stock and dimensions of corporate social performance an empirical examination collectively institutions own an increasing proportion of outstanding corporate equities as an emergent force in shaping corporate america the linkages between institutional ownership and corporate social performance csp require empirical examination not only do corporate policy makers need to know those areas where social performance may lure or inhibit capital infusions lawmakers also need a better understanding of the social forces guiding corporate policy as anticipated this study found a positive relationship between the amount of institutional ownership of corporate stock and a company s social responsiveness as measured by the representation of women on its board of directors however no statistically significant relationship with social responsibility as measured by charitable giving was found the exemplar of social issues management compliance with the sullivan principles showed an unexpected negative relationship with the level of institutional ownership

on environmental federalism and direct emission control abstract a theoretical exception to the race to the bottom contends that if decentralized environmental policy is comprised of direct controls on each firm emissions standards are set too high when compared to a centralized optimum herein we examine potential distortions in decentralized decision making by reconciling two recent views of direct environmental controls we show that differences in direct control policy can arise from differences in the number of symmetric jurisdictions in an economy our results suggest the race is on once the number of jurisdictions competing for a fixed number of firms increase we see the race is off when few jurisdictions can exploit their form of environmental market power

ethical aspects of investor behavior the neoclassical paradigm assumes that shareholders utility is solely a function of their wealth and prescribes that management should act in a manner consistent with share price maximization the stakeholder view also assumes that shareholders utility derives from wealth but prescribes that managers must balance the shareholder wealth maximization objective against the rights of other constituencies thus while neoclassicists and stakeholder theorists have different prescriptives for management behavior their definitions of the shareholders interest are consistent shareholders are self interested economic agents whose utility is best served by share price maximization however if shareholders are other interested and attack importance to ethical and moral values then both the neoclassical and stakeholder view derive from invalid assumptions in this paper i present evidence that much shareholder behavior is ethically motivated as a result the basis for both the neoclassical and the stakeholder view are weakened

clean air and renewable fuels the market for fuel ethanol in the us from 1984 to 1993 abstract ethanol made from corn has become an increasingly important fuel additive in the us over the past decade the market for ethanol has grown from 550 million gallons in 1984 to approximately 1 5 billion gallons in 1995 recent clean air legislation has mandated the use of cleaner burning fuels in the us in specific regions and seasons the fundamental role of fuel ethanol is changing from a gasoline substitute and octane enhancer to being one of a number of possible clean air additives in addition to these changing market conditions the institutional structure surrounding the ethanol market has changed while there is a uniform national subsidy for ethanol use each state has its own supplemental subsidy level which varied from zero to over 0 40 per gallon recently many state subsidy levels have been declining but significant incentives still remain including the federal 0 54 per gallon incentive this paper explores the economic characteristics of the us ethanol market the market supply and demand for ethanol are estimated econometrically the results highlight the importance of the state and federal incentives and mandates along with transportation costs in making corn based ethanol an attractive alternative to gasoline further investigation using a probit model to predict whether a state has an ethanol market or not reinforces the results of the supply demand market model the implications of the market characteristics for current and future us ethanol policy and clean fuels use are discussed

a nash tax game extending the generality of the henry george theorem abstract this paper analyzes a model of nash tax competition where jurisdictions can finance public goods with taxes on two types of mobile capital and a tax on land efficiency in public good provision results when the land tax becomes the single tax required to fund local government spending this conclusion affirms and extends the generality of the henry george theorem

does equity ownership matter for corporate social responsibility a literature review of theories and recent empirical findings based on the concept of shareholder primacy many scholars have argued that it is more important for businesses to earn profits for their shareholders than to provide benefits to society at large corporate social responsibility csr is often regarded as an investment that comes at the expense of shareholders in contrast research analyzing the connections between the equity ownership structure of a company and its level of csr engagement suggests that csr offers benefits to shareholders that go beyond direct financial returns from investments this study provides a comprehensive review and systematic assessment of theoretical considerations and approaches regarding different forms of equity ownership and their relationships to csr and it discusses the relevant benefits and motivations of shareholders the perceived value of these csr benefits varies among different types of shareholders as they assign unequal values to short term financial or to rather long term csr benefits based on a literature sample of 146 publications this review demonstrates central problems inherent in previous analyses given the ambiguous and partially contradictory findings of prior research this study identifies potential moderating influences that help clarify empirical evidence a contingency approach is suggested in future research as this can help resolve the problem of contradictory empirical findings and theoretical arguments

assessing whether corporate social responsibility influence corporate value abstractthis study used the corporate social responsibility csr index to gauge the corporate value and social responsibility performance of corporations in taiwan we investigated whether csr influences corporate value and whether the extent of that influence varies with corporate value or time the results indicate that the influence of csr on corporate value does not change with time csr exerts a positive influence on company value and this influence does not change over time however the extent of the influence significantly varies with corporate value when the corporate value of a company is not high investing in csr would only increase costs and fail to effectively increase corporate value in contrast if the corporate value of the company is high investments in csr in this circumstance would instead promote the effective increase of corporate value

strategic corporate social responsibility and economic performance this article proposes a novel corporate social responsibility csr index based on a data envelopment analysis dea model acknowledging the argument that companies might favour those csr dimensions that provide strategic competitive advantages we argue that the index can capture companies strategic approach to csr furthermore our findings reveal a neutral relationship between this strategic csr index and economic performance as measured by return on assets roa and tobin s q when controlling for firm unobserved heterogeneity and past economic performance by contrast an equally weighted index of the same csr indicators is found to be negatively related with roa which reinforces our claim that this specific dea based index is a measure of strategic csr

exploring the curvature of the relationship between hrm csr and corporate financial performance this article contributes to the general literature on the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance as well as to the emerging hrm csr literature by exploring the curvature of the relationship between hrm csp and cfp we advance conceptual arguments in favor of an inverted u shaped relationship our results demonstrate a significant quadratic relationship between hrm csp and cfp we provide evidence that this relationship is not linear or s shaped but rather inverted u shaped

should land and capital be taxed at a uniform rate if jurisdictions are allowed to tax land and capital separately they tax only land because capital taxation distorts the allocation of mobile capital to exploit absentee owners however jurisdictions tax land beyond the efficient level as absentee ownership increases throughout the economy land taxation results in greater inefficiency to alleviate the inefficiency of overtaxing land the higher level government intervenes to require jurisdictions to tax both capital and land at a uniform rate because the desire to attract capital lowers the tax rate uniform taxation of land and capital or property taxation thus may be more efficient than separate taxation jel classification h21 h71 est ce que la terre et le capital devraient etre taxes d une maniere uniforme si on permettait aux diverses juridictions de taxer capital et terre separement elles taxeraient seulement la terre parce que la fiscalite imposee au capital cree des distorsions dans l allocation du capital mobile mais pour exploiter les proprietaires absents les diverses juridictions imposent un fardeau fiscal sur la terre qui va au dela de ce que l efficacite commande a proportion que la propriete absente se developpe dans l economie la fiscalite imposee a la terre devient source de plus en plus grande inefficacite pour reduire cette inefficacite attribuable a la sur taxation de la terre le niveau senior de gouvernement intervient pour forcer les juridictions juniors a taxer capital et terre au meme taux parce que le desir d attirer le capital reduit le taux de taxation il se peut donc que la taxation uniforme de la terre et du capital ou de la taxation sur la propriete soit plus efficace que des taux d imposition differents

a study of the link between a corporation s financial performance and its commitment to ethics a number of studies have tested the relationship between a corporation s social and ethical performance and its financial performance in contrast this is the first study to demonstrate a link between overall financial performance and an emphasis on ethics as an aspect of corporate governance it identifies the 26 8 percent of the 500 largest u s public corporations that in their annual report to shareholders commit to ethical behavior toward their stakeholders or emphasize compliance with their code of conduct the financial performance of these corporations ranks higher than that of those who do not at a significance level of p 0 005 using the 1997 business week ranking which averages eight publicly reported measures of historical financial performance these findings should motivate more corporations to utilize the principles of social and ethical accounting auditing and reporting seaar

corporate social and financial performance an investigation in the u k supermarket industry the comparison of corporate social performance with corporate financial performance has been a popular field of study over the past 25 years the results while broadly conclusive of a positive relationship are not entirely consistent in addition most of the previous studies have concentrated on large scale cross industry studies and often with a single variable for corporate social performance in order to produce statistically significant results this weakens the richness of understanding that might be obtained from a single industry study with multiple social variables which would also allow investigation of inter relationships between individual and sub sets of social performance measures and between individual and sub sets of social performance and financial performance measures there have also been criticisms that the results lack a rigorous theoretical basis and the paper demonstrates clearly how stakeholder theory must form the basis for this area of research following a review of the literature this paper presents the initial findings from a study of the u k supermarket industry which suggest that contemporaneous social and financial performance are negatively related while prior period financial performance is positively related with subsequent social performance positive relationships between both age and size of the company with social performance are also found

does the influence of institutional investors depend on the institutional framework an international analysis this article analyses the effect of institutional ownership in alleviating or exacerbating the conflicts of interests among stakeholders in different legal and institutional frameworks this analysis is carried out based on two characteristics the concentration of power of institutional ownership and the identification of the main types of institutional investors in common law countries consistent with the convergence and entrenchment hypotheses we find a u shape relation between ownership structure and firm performance in civil law countries consistent with the collusion and contest theories we find an inverted u shape relation we also find that when institutional investors are classified as pressure resistant and pressure sensitive according to the strength of their ties with managers pressure resistant investors who operate more independently are the most capable of improving the value of the firm

the agency problems embedded in firm s equity investment we find that agency problems are embedded in firm s excess and abnormal equity investments that are mainly dictated by controlling shareholder s motives and ethical choices manifested in ownership and board structure the excess equity investment is gauged with respect to industry average the abnormal equity investment is specifically referred to the number of nominal investment companies that are fully controlled by the controlling owners while subject to little governance our empirical evidences of 345 taiwanese non financial listed firms show that firm s excess and abnormal equity investments are negatively correlated with controlling shareholder s cash flow rights while are positively correlated with the control cash flow deviation and board affiliation the results are supportive of the positive incentive hypothesis and the negative entrenchment hypothesis put forth by la porta et al 2002 journal of finance57 1147 1171 and claessen et al 2002 journal of finance57 2741 2742 the negative relation between equity investment and firm s value further supports the agency postulation that corporate excess and abnormal equity investments represent a leeway for controlling shareholder to exploit wealth of minority shareholders this study potentially contributes to the literature of business ethics by portraying an empirically testable linkage from controlling owner s ethical choices to his actions and therefore firm s value

efficient decentralized fiscal and environmental policy a dual purpose henry george tax abstract one consequence of decentralized responsibility to set tax policy and environmental standards is that local governments might try to attract industry and jobs by underproviding local public goods with lower taxes or lax environmental standards or both but if local authorities exploit fixed property site i e land taxation to fund local public goods affect firm migration and internalize potential local emission rents herein we find decentralized efficiency is supported this result reflects a dual form of the classic henry george theorem previously overlooked

the corporate social performance financial performance link strategic managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in an environment that is placing more and more pressures on them recent scholarship in strategic management suggests that many of these pressures come directly from sources associated with social issues in management rather than traditional arenas of strategic management using a greatly improved source of data on corporate social performance this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance corporate social performance csp is found to be positively associated with prior financial performance supporting the theory that slack resource availability and csp are positively related csp is also found to be positively associated with future financial performance supporting the theory that good management and csp are positively related 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

corporate contributions altruistic or for profit existing literature has focused on three rationales for corporate philanthropy through the firm giving corporate statesmanship and profit motivated giving the profit motivation argument was exa

how do environmental regulation and environmental decentralization affect green total factor energy efficiency evidence from china abstract green development is critical for china s economic transformation enhancing green total factor energy efficiency hereafter gtfee is vital to emission reduction and to win win industrial development this study uses the panel data of 30 chinese provinces for the period 2005 2016 to investigate the relationship between environmental regulation and china s gtfee the spatial durbin model is employed to control for the possible spatial spillover effect a dynamic threshold panel model that can effectively address the endogeneity problem and regional heterogeneity is utilized to examine the potential non linear relationship between environmental regulation and gtfee under different conditions of environmental decentralization the estimation results indicate that there is a significant u shaped relationship between environmental regulation and china s gtfee with the further expansion of environmental decentralization the local government s autonomous choice of pollution control is improved the improvement of environmental decentralization can lead to negative moderating effect of environmental regulation on gtfee additionally the regression results of dynamic threshold model show that environmental decentralization can increase the negative influences of environmental regulation on gtfee interestingly the non linear impact of environmental regulation on gtfee is dependent on the specific type of environmental decentralization higher degree of environmental decentralization can lead to an increase in the restraining effect of environmental regulation on gtfee however an improvement in the decentralization of environmental supervision and environmental monitoring can increase the negative influences of environmental regulation on gtfee

does social performance really lead to financial performance accounting for endogeneity the empirical relationship between a firm s social performance and its financial performance is still not well established in the literature despite more than 30 years of research and more than 100 empirical studies on the issue the results are still mixed we argue that the heterogeneous results found in previous studies are not due exclusively to problems related with the measurement instruments or the samples used instead we posit that a more fundamental problem related with the endogeneity of social strategic decisions could be driving most of the empirical findings we show that using a panel data of 658 firms from 1991 to 2005 how some of the results found in previous research change and some are even reversed when endogeneity is properly taken into account

pigou tiebout property taxation and the underprovision of local public goods abstract pigou s proposition that the use of distorting taxes rather than neutral head taxes reduces public service levels is examined in this paper a simple model with a national system of competing local governments is utilized to demonstrate that the use of a distorting property tax on mobile capital decreases the level of residential public services the case where public services are an intermediate producer good is also considered

locational choices of firms and decentralized environmental policy with various instruments abstract suppose there exists a federation with a given number of mobile firms generating waste emissions in the jurisdiction in which they locate this paper demonstrates that if jurisdictions use emission taxes or marketable emission rights to control pollution within their boundaries and distribute the revenues captured by these instruments in a socially efficient way firms locate efficiently taking their pollution externalities into account decentralized environmental policy relying on direct controls however prevents locational efficiency of mobile firms furthermore if jurisdictions are small decentralized environmental policy with emission taxes and marketable pollution rights also support an efficient environmental quality while a policy using direct controls sets too high emission standards

moral and conceptual issues in investment and finance an overview as director of the second east carolina university conference in applied philosophy it is my pleasure to introduce this fine collection of papers on moral and conceptual issues in investment and finance the essays address a wide range of topics south african disinvestment the professional responsibil ities of accountants decision theoretic problems for fiduciaries and the rights of employees in corporate takeovers to cite just a few examples consequently any attempt to somehow summarize or tie together all this material would be either extremely super ficial or far exceed the available space instead in what follows i try to supplement the papers first by offering some general observations about our con ference topic and secondly by identifying what seem to me to be some of the fertile areas for further research the title of our conference was meant to em phasize two points first although a number of philosophers and business scholars now study a field commonly called business ethics a more natural and general description of their interests might be philosophical issues in business the study of the particularly abstract foundational or normative aspects of business thus while topics such as the rights of employees or the social obligations of corporations are of course part of the philosophical study of business so are non normative or less explicitly normative questions such as whether and in what sense corporations are persons the extent to

evidence of the empirical relevance of the infant industry argument for the protection of brazilian ethanol production abstract the infant industry argument for protection of import competing industries has a long and almost entirely theoretical history in the literature in this paper the empirical evidence of infant industry dynamics in the brazilian ethanol industry is investigated in brazil ethanol has developed into a primary automotive fuel over the past 18 years this import substitute is attractive because it allows decreased dependence on international oil supplies while at the same time it addresses environmental concerns because it is a clean burning renewable fuel while ethanol was initially a high cost alternative to imported oil observed cost reductions have led to an increased belief that this industry may in fact warrant the subsidization it has received because of infant industry reasons the results of this study suggest that there is no empirical evidence of economies of scale and very little technical change there appears to be no empirical validity to the infant industry argument for subsidization of the brazilian ethanol industry

the ethical context of entrepreneurship proposing and testing a developmental framework the aim of this study is to increase our understanding of the ethical climate of entrepreneurial firms as they grow and develop a developmental framework is introduced to describe the formal and informal ethical structures that emerge in entrepreneurial firms over time factors influencing where firms are within the developmental framework are posited including the entrepreneur s psychological profile lifecycle stage of the business and descriptive characteristics of the venture it is also proposed that the implementation of ethical structures will impact perceptions of the clarity and adequacy of the ethical standards of the firm and the firm s preparedness to deal with ethical challenges as they arise results are reported of a cross sectional survey of small firms at different stages of development the findings indicate the existence of four distinct clusters of firms based on their formal and informal ethical structures superlatives core proponents pain and gain and deficients evidence is also provided of statistically significant relationships between the proposed antecedent and outcome variables implications are drawn from the results and priorities are established for future research

the provision of local public goods and factors in the presence of firm and household mobility abstract this paper studies the efficiency properties of allocations when firms and households are mobile and when local governments provide local public goods and local public factors the analysis differentiates between immobile land owners and perfectly mobile workers and concludes that an efficient allocation is obtained if there is no outflow of land rents to absentee owners if rents flow out only local public goods are supplied in accordance with the samuelson rule the provision of local public factors is inefficiently low however and jurisdictions tax mobile firms and mobile households inefficiently high in order to restrict the outflow of rents an optimal intervention scheme is derived in this case we also analyze the distortions that result when the non availability of local head taxes makes it impossible to internalize crowding costs

the corporation and profits in this paper i argue that a theory of the firm that takes profit maximizing to be the essential activity and purpose of the firm is seriously inadequate i argue that firms in the actual economy neither are nor should be maximizers of profit i argue instead that firms are and must be satisficers that they must make enough profit to satisfy the various demands which they encounter in their operation yet it should be clear that the notion of satisficing while it escapes the major problems encountered by maximization itself lacks much of any very clear content in the end i claim that the notion of satisficing can best be understood if we abandon the traditional characterization of profits and replace it with a notion of extended profits which i define as that part of corporate revenue which is available for distribution among stockholders management and labor and for reinvestment in the corporation s business operation

corporate social responsibility in the banking industry motives and financial performance abstract the current study investigates the association between corporate social responsibility csr and financial performance fp and discusses the driving motives of banks to engage in csr three motives namely strategic choices altruism and greenwashing suggest that the relationship between csr and fp is positive non negative and non existent respectively we obtained our sample which covered 2003 2009 from the ethical investment research service eiris databank and bankscope database the data consists of 162 banks in 22 countries we then classified the banks into four types based on their degree of engagement in csr this study proposes the use of an extended version of the heckman two step regression in which the first step adopts a multinomial logit model and the second step estimates the performance equation with the inverse mills ratio generated by the first step the empirical results show that csr positively associates with fp in terms of return on assets return on equity net interest income and non interest income in contrast csr negatively associates with non performing loans hence strategic choice is the primary motive of banks to engage in csr

on interjurisdictional competition and environmental federalism herein we construct a competitive interjurisdictional model that reconciles two recent exceptions to the race to the bottom j publ econ 35 1988 333 354 j urban econ 37 1995 290 310 our results suggest that since environmental rents from local production are likely not captured 100 percent by local residents devolved command and control environmental regulation is inefficient moreover faced with the reality of fiscal constraints local governments adopt property tax structures that serve to compound inefficiencies within such a second best setting if a jurisdiction underprovides non environmental public goods and jurisdictional capital productivity and emissions are strong complements a race to the bottom equilibrium is supported

integrating the ethical dimension into the analytical framework for the reform of state owned enterprises in china s socialist market economy a proposal the discussions about the reform of state owned enterprises are so far dominated by economic and legal considerations while the ethical dimension of this highly complex problem is being barely addressed explicitly much less developed systematically and integrated into a broader analytical framework for companies in china this paper is a proposal to introduce this kind of ethical considerations first the main features of the reform of state owned enterprises are briefly summarized and a number of critical issues are identified second the balanced concept of the firm is presented and compared with other approaches to corporate ethics in chiefly western literature discussions on corporate social responsibility the stakeholder approach and social contract theories finally the relevance of this balanced concept of the firm for the reform of state owned enterprises is briefly discussed

corporate social responsibility and corporate performance evidence from a panel of us listed companies we investigate whether inclusion and permanence in the domini social index dsi affects corporate performance on a sample of around 1000 firms in a 13 year interval by controlling for size industry business cycle and time invariant firm idiosyncratic characteristics our results find partial support to the hypothesis that corporate social responsibility is a move from the shareholders wealth to a multi stakeholders welfare target on the one side permanence into the domini index di is shown to increase reduce significantly total sales per employee returns on equity but not when large and r d investing firms are excluded from the sample on the other side lower returns on equity for domini firms seem nonetheless to be accompanied by relatively lower conditional volatility and lower reaction to extreme shocks with respect to the control sample an explanation for these findings suggested by the inspection of domini criteria is that social responsibility implies on the one side decisions leadi

ethical commitment financial performance and valuation an empirical investigation of korean companies a variety of stakeholders including investors corporate managers customers suppliers employees researchers and government policy makers have long been interested in the relationship between the financial performance of a corporation and its commitment to business ethics as a subject of research the relations between business ethics and corporate valuation has yet to be thoroughly quantified and investigated this article is an effort to amend this inadequacy by demonstrating a statistically significant association between ethical commitment and corporate valuation measures consistent with anecdotal evidence we have found a significant association between the ethical commitment of korean companies and their valuation on the korean stock market however the result reveals that the association between ethical commitment and financial performance is not significantly supported

socially responsible investment in the spanish financial market this paper reviews the development of socially responsible investment sri in the spanish financial market the year 1997 saw the appearance in spain of the first sri mutual fund but it was not until late 1999 that major spanish fund managers offered sri mutual funds on the retail market the development of sri in the spanish financial market has not experienced the high levels of development seen in other european countries such as france or italy where interest in sri began during the same period this paper presents an analysis of the impact of sri mutual funds managed by spanish fund managers comparing the evolution of managed assets and number of investors we also analyse the investment strategies adopted by these funds which mainly use negative screening criteria and the participation of non governmental organisations as institutional investors an analysis of the take up of socially responsible investment in the spanish financial market shows majors deficits in this process this is due to spanish investors having limited sensitivity to social issues and knowledge of sri and a lack of development of sri investment strategies such as engagement or shareholder activism by fund managers furthermore the take up of sri mutual funds in the spanish financial market coincided with a fall in the stock market at the beginning of the 21st century we conclude with an analysis of the relationship between sri and corporate social responsibility csr

corporate social investments do they pay the stock market reaction to two very different corporate social investments the 1977 sullivan principles adoption announcement and the 1990 mcdonald s corporation environmental statement is explored a market model event study methodology is employed using daily stock returns the results are that the stock market appears to have ignored the 1977 announcement but rewarded the 1990 event future research and possible managerial implications are discussed

interregional interactions and population mobility the institutional level at which policies should be determined is an important issue that has been extensively treated in the economics literature in particular the literature has discussed to what extent decentralization of policy decisions give an inefficient outcome with a homogeneous population and perfect population mobility as it conventionally is modeled the following result is derived for a very general class of economies with interregional interactions a socially efficient outcome is a nash equilibrium of the game of decentralized and uncoordinated policy setting however if decisions about migration take a longer time to make than decisions of policy changes the general result above no longer holds with this decision sequence decentralization may give an inefficient outcome also in situations where the decentralized outcome is efficient in the absence of population mobility

the relationship of ethical decision making to business ethics and performance in taiwan this paper examines the relationship of ethical decision making by individuals to corporate business ethics and organizational performance of three groups i smes small and medium enterprises ii outstanding smes the key stone award winners and iii large enterprises in order to provide a reference for taiwanese entrepreneurs to practice better business ethics the survey method involved random sampling of 132 enterprises within three groups some 524 out of 1320 questionnaires were valid the survey results demonstrated that ethical decision making by individuals corporate business ethics and organizational performance are highly related in summary then high levels of organizational performance were directly attributable to high levels of applied corporate and individual ethics furthermore there is a demonstrable tendency for outstanding smes to reject ethically unsound practices such as padded expense accounts tax evasion and misleading advertising the measurement criteria used to assess organizational performance however did not include an objective evaluation of financial performance

an empirical examination of institutional investor preferences for corporate social performance this study investigates the pattern of institutional shareholding in the u k and its relationship with socially responsible behavior by companies within a sample of over 500 uk companies we estimate a set of ownership models that distinguish between long and short term investors and their largest components and which incorporate both aggregated and disaggregated measures of corporate social performance csp the results suggest that long term institutional investment is positively related to csp providing further support for earlier studies by johnson and greening 1999 academy of management journal 42 564 576 and graves and waddock 1994 academy of management journal 37 1034 1046 disaggregation of csp into its constituent components suggests that the pattern of institutional investment is also related to the form which csp takes investigation of the impact of investment screens on the selection of stocks suggests that long term institutional investors select primarily through exclusion rejecting those firms which have the worst csp