On-demand and gig economy are names commonly used when discussing issues related to labor in the collaborative economy. Some of the specific digital platforms in this economy, including Uber and TaskRabbit, and Upwork are quite popular. The term digital labor market has been suggested to distinguish the work mediated by these platforms from that of the traditional labor market. The theoretical work conditions and characteristics of this digital labor market are similar to those of negative nonstandard work arrangements. However, more empirical evidence is required because most of the findings about work conditions are based on anecdotal evidence and the analysis of the platforms’ rules. This study collects the characteristics commonly attributed to the digital labor market and analyzes them based on data about 465 workers extracted from two important digital labor platforms. Our results confirm and refine some of the beliefs found in the literature.

Management and Organization Review (MOR) is announcing a renewed initiative that seeks to encourage and publish research reporting engaged indigenous scholarship in China. MOR invites empirical as well as conceptual studies of indigenous phenomena related to management and organizations. MOR welcomes exploratory studies of new, emerging, and/or poorly understood indigenous research questions that employ abductive reasoning and creative hunches, as opposed to testing hypotheses deduced from non-indigenous Western theories. Data on indigenous phenomena can come from any source, including qualitative and quantitative data from case studies, field surveys, experiments, and ethnographies.

When borrowers are delinquent, senior debtholders prefer liquidation, whereas junior debtholders prefer to maintain their option value by delaying resolution or modifying the loan. In the mortgage market, a conflict of interest (“holdup”) arises when servicers of securitized senior liens are also the owners of the junior liens on the same property. We show that holdup servicers are able to delay action on the first-lien mortgage. When they do act, servicers are more likely to choose resolutions that maintain their option value, favoring modification and soft foreclosures over outright foreclosures. Holdup behavior is more likely to result in borrower self-curing.

The postwar market for films in Italy resembles those found in other developed capitalist economies, in which supply adjusts to demand through a set of institutional arrangements designed to maximize revenue for the film distributor. The outcome is a statistical distribution of revenues that manifests extreme levels of inequality, indicating that the hits of the day were “giants” in relation to the median film and enjoyed throughout the territory. By drawing upon film industry–sourced box-office data for five cities, Milan and Turin in the north, Naples and Bari in the south, and Rome in the center, we can observe the market mechanism operating at the city level, allowing the exploration of differences in preferences between the cities. A relative popularity index (RelPOP) is introduced to measure variation in film popularity across the five cities, and clear evidence is found to support the coexistence of national and local taste. This phenomenon is examined with respect to those films that were exceptionally popular throughout, and those with particular geographically specific audiences. The example of the many films that starred Totò, appealing in particular to southern Italian audiences, is highlighted and contrasted with the Don Camillo series of films that were set in Emilia Romagna and appealed differentially to filmgoers in the north.

Our research investigates the effects of residential energy efficiency audit programs on subsequent household electricity consumption. Here there is a one-time interaction between households, which participate voluntarily, and the surveyors. Our research objective is to determine whether and to what extent the surveys lead to behavioral changes. We then examine how persistent the intervention is over time and whether the effects decay or intensify. The main evaluation problem here is survey participants’ self-selection, which we address econometrically via several non-parametric estimators involving kernel-based propensity-score matching. In the first method we use difference-in-differences (DID) estimation. Our second estimator is quantile DID, which produces estimates on distributions. The comparison group consists of households who were not yet participating in the survey but participated later. Our evidence is that the customers who participated in the survey reduced their electricity consumption by about 7%, on average compared to customers who had not yet participated in the survey. Considering the total number of high-usage households participating in the survey in 2009, we estimate that electricity consumption was reduced by an aggregate of 2 million kWh per year, which is approximately equal to the monthly consumption of 3500 typical households in California with an estimated 1527 metric tons less of carbon dioxide emissions. Because the energy audit program is inexpensive ($10–$20 per household) a key issue is that while the program is cost-effective, is it regressive? We find that as the quantiles of the outcome distribution increase, high-use households save proportionally less electricity than do low-use customers. Overall, our results imply that program designers can better target low-use and low-income households, because they are more likely to benefit from the programs through energy savings.

We document that a firm’s culture, specifically, its religiosity, affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions. Further, religiosity has additional explanatory power for the cost of bank loans (but not the cost of public bonds) beyond its impact through ratings. This supports the argument that banks have superior abilities in pricing soft information, such as corporate culture. Finally, the impact of religiosity is stronger when the lender is a small bank.

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the amount of scholarship on the history of shareholding in Britain. One area that still remains relatively unexplored, however, is the problematic issue of how British investors actually went about the process of choosing their respective investments. The purpose of this article is to make a start at redressing this gap by using the (perceived) sharepushing crime wave that swept across Britain during the interwar period as a prism through which to evaluate the behavior of Britain’s shareholding population at this time. Ultimately, what it suggests is that, while the interwar British investors may well have had far more potential sources of advice and information open to them than their nineteenth-century forebears, this did not necessarily mean that they were any better informed about the workings of the British securities market.

We study the effects of accounting losses on chief executive officer (CEO) turnover. If accounting losses provide incremental information about managerial ability, boards can utilize the information in losses to assess CEOs’ stewardship of assets, which is why losses may serve as a heuristic for managerial failure. We find a positive relation between losses and subsequent CEO turnover after controlling for other accounting and stock-performance measures. We also find that losses are associated with an increase in board activity and that losses predict poor operating performance and future financial problems. Our results explain why CEOs manage earnings to avoid losses.

We uncover stylized facts of commodity futures’ price and volatility dynamics in the post-financialization period and find a factor structure in daily commodity volatility that is much stronger than the factor structure in returns. The common factor in commodity volatility relates to stock market volatility as well as to the business cycle. Model-free realized commodity betas with the stock market were high during 2008–2010 but have since returned to the pre-crisis level, close to 0. While commodity markets appear segmented from the equity market when considering only returns, commodity volatility indicates a nontrivial degree of market integration.

This article discusses the London & North Western Railway’s (LNWR) marketing activities before 1914. It extends our understanding of British railway marketing by examining how the company forged links with stakeholders in North Wales, particularly the resort authorities, in support of its development of the tourist trade there. While the company remained the dominant force in promoting the region, cooperative working facilitated the sharing of market intelligence, exchange of best practice, coordination of advertising efforts, coordination of services, and the harmonizing of a promotional message that appealed to middle-class discretionary travelers that North Wales was a place for health and pleasure. The article also shows how the LNWR deployed a system of integrated marketing communications, providing one of the earliest known examples within British business of such practice. The sum result was positive impacts on the development of the North Welsh tourist trade in the years before the World War I.

We examine whether speed is an important characteristic of traders who anticipate local price trends. These anticipatory participants correctly trade prior to the overall market and systematically act before other participants. They use manual and algorithmic order entry methods, but most are not fast enough to be high frequency traders (HFTs). Those anticipating price trends have impacts as if they are informed traders, while the case for anticipatory participants affecting the volume of other traders is rejected. A follow-up sample shows significant attrition in accounts and difficulty maintaining the anticipatory strategies. To identify anticipatory traders, we devise novel methods to isolate local price trends using order book data from the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures market.

Values in family firms are influenced by the complex interplay of family and business. Thus, research requires methods that grasp this complexity. This paper presents a fresh methodological approach for family business research with the example of an in-depth analysis of CEOs’ value orientations. Benefits of an integrated use of two qualitative methods – Q-sorts and narrative interviews – which were collected and analyzed for 16 CEOs of family firms are illustrated. Q-method was used to build value patterns, whereas narrative interviews were conducted to reveal how values were contextualized and interpreted. This integrated approach builds qualitative richness in different ways: first, by allowing for a deep understanding of individual experience; second, by providing more contextual insight, and third, by capturing the meaning of abstract values. The approach advanced here can be reproduced for other complex organizational dynamics. Thus, this user-friendly approach is particularly suited for organizational research in a managerial environment.

The increasingly frequent involvement of companies’ line managers in human resource (HR) activities leads us to investigate the strategic value that these managers grant HR. This research focusses on the line managers’ perception of the strategic importance of HR, versus the perception of HR managers themselves, as a relevant factor in line managers’ own involvement within the execution of HR-related tasks. If line managers do not perceive the relevance and strategic importance of HR and its key role in the company’s strategy and performance, it is difficult to guarantee the managers’ commitment and effectiveness in HR management implementation. Based on interviews with HR development and line managers in 100 Spanish firms, we verified discrepancies in HR versus line managers’ perceptions, confirming that the assessment given by the line managers is slightly lower and, in turn, providing us with references to draw useful conclusions for a successful implementation of HR practices.

Practitioners of benefit-cost analysis face many difficulties. Despite the best training, guidance, and intentions, practitioners can stumble: actual benefit-cost analysis is hard and mistakes get made. Over the years, I have collected the mistakes I have seen in actual benefit-cost analyses. Many of the same mistakes occur over and over: the pitfalls of practical benefit-cost analysis. In this paper, I describe common pitfalls and suggest ways to avoid them.

The accounting information of a firm is analogous to the characteristics of an organism that contain biological information that influences decisions; such characteristics result from organizational routines (genes). Organizational routines result from organizational learning, and learning from an associated company is an efficient approach for a new venture to establish routines. The study results revealed that the subsidiaries inherited routines from the parent companies related to financial ratios, so we suggest that people should judge the adequacy of a firm’s financial situation by not only referring to the standard of its industry but also to its parent company.

This paper reports on an exploratory study into critical success factors as they are perceived by Māori small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners in the Otago/Southland regions of New Zealand. We draw on interview responses from 11 Māori business owners and four representatives of SME support services. The aim of this study is to explore Māori SME characteristics in terms of the critical success factors that help or hinder the achievement of their business aspirations. The findings indicate three main thematic concerns: Māori SME owners’ perception of being Māori impacts on how they position themselves as a business; the regional business environment has particular features that impact in a particular way on Māori SMEs; and, notions of business strategy are culturally nuanced. We propose that a culturally constituted regional business support system will better enable Māori SMEs to achieve their aspirations.

Despite growing interest in Indigenous entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial orientation, few studies bridge these two domains empirically. We address this gap by developing a model for exploring entrepreneurial orientation in Indigenous communities. We assess the possible dimensions of Indigenous entrepreneurship orientation in a qualitative study of Māori business owners in New Zealand. The findings suggest that Indigenous worldview and entrepreneurial ecosystem influences the entrepreneurial orientation of participants, leading to a continuum of Indigenous entrepreneurial orientation. The results have important implications for Indigenous entrepreneurship policy, practice and theory.

We test for the presence of a tail risk premium in the cross-section of mutual fund returns and find that the top tail risk quintile of funds outperforms the bottom by 4.4% per annum. This premium is not simply a reward for market risk, nor do commonly used risk factors offer an adequate explanation. Our findings hold across double-sorted portfolios formed on tail risk and a number of fund characteristics. We also find that funds susceptible to tail risk tend to be small, young, have high management fees, and have managers who do not risk their own capital.

Using a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of an increase in default risk on firm actions, I find little evidence managers shift risk to corporate pension plans following an exogenous shock to the firm’s long-term liabilities. The finding is robust to focusing on firms where the incentive to engage in risk shifting is arguably the greatest, such as financially vulnerable firms and firms with fewer agency conflicts. This study casts doubt on the risk-shifting hypothesis and shows managers do not take risk-shifting actions that would increase shareholder value even when those actions pose little threat to managerial utility.

We study the theoretical implications of cointegrated stock prices on the profitability of pairs-trading strategies. If stock returns are fairly weakly correlated across time, cointegration implies very high Sharpe ratios. To the extent that the theoretical Sharpe ratios are “too large,” our results suggest that either i) cointegration does not exist pairwise among stocks, and pairs-trading profits are a result of a weaker or less stable dependency structure among stock pairs, or ii) the serial correlation in stock returns stretches over considerably longer horizons than is usually assumed. Empirically, there is little evidence of cointegration, favoring the first explanation.