Using Internet search volume for lottery to capture gambling sentiment shifts, we show that when the overall gambling sentiment is strong, investor demand for lottery stocks increases, these stocks earn positive short-run abnormal returns, managers are more likely to split stocks to cater to the increased demand for low-priced lottery stocks, and initial public offerings (IPOs) earn higher first day returns. Further, the sentiment-return relation is stronger among low institutional ownership firms, headquartered in regions where gambling is more acceptable and local bias is stronger. These results suggest that gambling sentiment has a spillover effect on the stock market.

Multinational enterprises faced new political risks after World War II in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The risks were particularly high in Asia between 1945 and 1970. Although the relevant literature has focused essentially on organizational innovation and strategic choices in explaining how firms dealt with these new political risks, this article explores the informal roles that governments of small, neutral countries played in supporting their multinationals abroad. Looking at the case of Nestlé in Asia, the article argues that the backing of the Swiss federal authorities was crucial for the company to overcome various kinds of risks and ensure a long-term presence in the region.

The first wave of globalization, from 1850 to 1914, is considered to be a period when global trade and investment increased at a steady pace, impacting on global economic growth. Yet that evolution was not consistent across all industries. This article explains why, during that period, global trade in wines and other alcoholic beverages was reversed. Apart from diseases that affected vineyards in the main wine-producing countries of the Old World, various factors in the New World—including local government incentives and the presence of consumers (immigrants) with acquired habits of consumption from European countries—created strong incentives for the imitation and adulteration of wines. This study looks at the strategies used both by the imitators in expanding their businesses and by the innovators to survive in institutional environments that were weak with regard to the protection of their intellectual property.

In a recent article in this journal, David Faraci (2019) argues that the value of fairness can plausibly be appealed to in order to vindicate the view that consensual, mutually beneficial employment relationships can be wrongfully exploitative, even if employers have no obligation to hire or otherwise benefit those who are badly off enough to be vulnerable to wage exploitation. In this commentary, I argue that several values provide potentially strong grounds for thinking that it is at least sometimes better, morally speaking, for employers to hire worse-off people at intuitively exploitative wages than to hire better-off people at intuitively fair wages. Rather than suggesting that hiring badly off people at intuitively exploitative wages is permissible, however, I suggest that this gives us reason to think that employers can be obligated to hire worse-off people rather than better-off people and to pay them nonexploitative wages.