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We investigate the reasons why income inequality is so high in Spain in the EU context. We first show that the differential in inequality with Germany and other countries is driven by inequality among households who participate in the labor market. Then, we conduct an analysis of different household income aggregates. We also decompose the inter-country gap in inequality into characteristics and coefficients effects using regressions of the Recentered Influence Function for the Gini index. Our results show that the higher inequality observed in Spain is largely associated with lower employment rates, higher incidence of self-employment, lower attained education, as well as the recent increase in the immigration of economically active households. However, the prevalence of extended families in Spain contributes to reducing inequality by diversifying income sources, with retirement pensions playing an important role. Finally, by comparing the situations in 2008 and 2012, we separate the direct effects of the Great Recession on employment and unemployment benefits, from other more permanent factors (such as the weak redistributive effect of taxes and family or housing allowances, or the roles of education and the extended family).

The term ‘strategy’ is one of the most frequently used terms in business, and its application in marketing is particularly common. Company strategy, market strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, promotion strategy, distribution strategy, low pricing strategy – it would take a long time to list all of them. Although this term is so commonly in use, its definition is not as straightforward and it can be interpreted in different ways. In comparison with tactical decisions, strategy is much more significant for an organisation as it brings long-lasting consequences. It is implemented by higher level managers on a regular basis, and it is based on external, often subjective information, so decisions – especially at the time they are made – are difficult to evaluate.

Taking into consideration the fact that strategy refers to a long-term rather than a short-term period, strategic decisions serve as the basis for undertaking operational activities. However, marketing refers to the market and the competition. It is possible to claim that marketing strategy is trying to find an answer to the question to which path an organisation should follow in order to achieve its goals and objectives. If, for example, a company has a goal to generate a profit of PLN 1 million by selling 100,000 pieces of a product, the market strategy should answer at least the following two questions:

1. Who will be our target group, for example, who will purchase the 100,000 pieces of the product?

2. Why is it us from whom a potential buyer should purchase the product?

Who will be our target group, for example, who will purchase the 100,000 pieces of the product?

Why is it us from whom a potential buyer should purchase the product?

The target market will be defined if a reply to the first question is provided. The second question identifies the foundations of competitive advantage. These two issues, that is, target market and competitive advantage are the strategic marketing issues. You cannot change your target group unexpectedly while competitive advantage is the basis for changing decisions regarding prices, promotions and sales.

This chapter describes the measures of marketing activities which refer to strategic aspects and testify a company’s market position – the measures of the performance of target groups and competitive advantage. Readers’ attention should be also focused on the indices that are less popular in Poland and, therefore, may be underestimated. It seems that some of them, for example, the index of marketing resources allocation and the marketing risk index, provide a lot of valuable information and, at the same time, make it possible to show the value of marketing investments. Their wider use in the near future is only a matter of time.

This study examines how creditor interventions after debt covenant violations affect corporate tax avoidance. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that creditor interventions increase borrowers' tax avoidance. This effect is concentrated among firms with weaker shareholder governance before creditor interventions and among those with less bargaining power during subsequent debt renegotiations. Our results indicate that creditors play an active role in shaping corporate tax policy outside of bankruptcy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the incidence of employee financial participation (EFP) schemes in Europe and examine the factors that influence the likelihood of (i) a company offering EFP schemes and (ii) employees taking up EFP schemes.

Using a combination of descriptive and econometric techniques, the paper provides information on the incidence of EFP schemes in the EU and profiles a typical company and a typical employee that, respectively, offers and takes up EFP schemes. The empirical investigation is based on two models employing probabilistic techniques. Data used for this analysis include the European Company Survey (ECS) conducted in 2009 and three rounds of the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) conducted in 2000, 2005, and 2009.

Results display a significant rise in EFP in the EU-27 in the last decade. In addition, results seem to suggest that the employees’ and companies’ characteristics, as well as sector and region of operation explain some of the variation in likelihoods of companies and employees, respectively, offering and taking up EFP schemes.

Due to data limitation, our analysis lacks a dynamic assessment of the relationship between parameters. Studies that exploit longitudinal data are suggested to follow this paper.

This paper contributes to the existing empirical literature by examining jointly the determinants of financial participation from both employers’ and employees’ perspective.

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand, colonial governments experimented with other ways to anchor their paper monies to real values in the economy. These mechanisms included tax-redemption, land-backed loans, sinking funds, interest-bearing notes, and legal tender laws. I assess and explain the structure and performance of these mechanisms. This was monetary experimentation on a grand scale.

Existing research shows that popular income inequality measures fail to reflect their respondents’ perceptions of income inequality. However, most of the current literature focuses on what is negative, telling us what individuals do not perceive. This paper presents an alternative methodology to help uncover actual perceptions of inequality, how people perceive inequality instead of how they don’t. Multidimensional scaling, a statistical tool for visualizing dissimilarity data as a low-dimensional map, is used on results of a simple grouping task with a given distribution set. The outcome is a perception map that presents respondents’ answers spatially, which enables additional insight into respondents’ thinking. The map created by the respondents’ replies, presented in this paper, indicates that their decisions are driven by two factors: what the biggest gap in incomes of a given distribution is and whether some groups have equal incomes. The result additionally validates multidimensional scaling as a tool for measuring income inequality perception and opens new ways of improving inequality perception questionnaires.