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This article aims at investigating knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) between founder firms and corporate foundations (CFs), looking at mechanisms able to enhance CFs’ orientation of effectiveness.

We analyze 50 questionnaires collected through a survey of CFs based in Italy (redemption of 42.7% of the total). We use a number of regressions to verify the change of explained variance moving from a basic model with control variables (enter method) and a model including KTE mechanisms with an impact on orientation to effectiveness (stepwise method).

The analysis produced a model which underlines the influence of knowledge transfer mechanisms in stimulating orientation to effectiveness. The adoption of specific knowledge transfer mechanisms by founder firms can have a significant influence on how CFs manage their effectiveness. Three mechanisms emerge from the study as elements with a positive impact.

The results apply to nonprofit or public bodies, especially if we consider partnerships or organizational networks. The individuated criteria for selecting a positive KTE could drive similar choices of other nonprofit bodies.

The study individuates a set of practices that are potentially able to influence positively the orientation to effectiveness of CFs, and the capacity to perform their activities and respond to social needs more successfully.

This research considers CFs as founder firms’ subsidiaries, with a growing strategic importance. This research reveals how KTE mechanisms can foster the development of orientation to effectiveness if implying interaction, firms’ commitment, autonomy, and alignment with the firms’ strategy and CFs’ purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the interactions between accounting and marketing activities in a Taiwanese telecommunication firm by demonstrating the dramatic impact that improved costing methods had on the firm’s customer portfolio management activities and consequently on the firm’s bottom line.

The paper presents a case study of a firm in the highly competitive telecommunications industry in Taiwan. The case study was constructed by interviewing key individuals within the organization over an extended period and supplementing those reports with an analysis of internal company documents.

The firm dramatically increased profitability through the integration of activity-based costing into their customer portfolio framework requiring marketing and accounting functions to work closely together. In this rapidly evolving market, cost allocation and customer portfolio management are indispensable. Identifying accurate costs and keeping key customers is a critical issue for the case company. While theoretically the approach is simple, in practice considerable hurdles needed to be overcome.

While considerable literature suggests that customer profitability drives the management of an organization’s customer portfolio, critical to the success of such an endeavor is the accurate calculation and allocation of costs to individual customers. As an interdisciplinary study, this paper provides insights for both accounting and marketing highlighting their reliance on each other in a sound firm. The results of this paper will serve as a supplement to past customer portfolio management research as well as a reference for any firm seeking to enhance their approach to portfolio management.

Criminologists spend many hours debating whether they should intervene in the real world to make it better or whether they should limit themselves to taking a detached stance in their research. Debates about the role of criminologists in society have followed the script of the modern academy, which praises the lone hero researcher. Yet, the challenges criminologists confront with their activism have deep cultural and structural roots that only collective action can transform. The injustices criminologists confront (defined as harm or crime committed by individual or collective actors that is corporate-sponsored or state-sponsored) require that criminologists exchange the ‘I’ for a ‘we’, and ask how we can collectively mobilise to transform society. In this chapter, the author discusses how Colombian Indigenous communities and the author, in partnership, have used a pedagogy of liberation to transform the deep sources of violence fuelling their genocide.

The theoretical contribution provided by the transitional theories has fundamentally helped develop a better understanding of the migration process, by showing how migration is interacting with other processes of development. They show that along with development, emigration is following an upside down ‘U’ shaped pattern, being overreached by immigration, while the region changes its migration profile from emigration to immigration. This was the case for the southern European states, which followed a rapid migration transition during the second half of the twentieth century. After large emigration to Western and Northern Europe, these managed to attract large immigration flows from the less developed countries in Africa and Latin America, but also from Eastern Europe after the fall of communist regimes. This chapter aims to test whether Eastern Europe is heading to the same migration transition pattern as the South and change their current status of net migration provider. Thus, the impact of the migration transition drivers in explaining net migration balance is analysed using a panel data for the 2000–2013 period. As a country can encompass both emigration and immigration regions, the current analysis is carried out at European Union (EU) regional level data (NUTS II), while controlling for the regional specifics and unobserved time effects. Overall, most of the factors which led to the migration shift, from emigration to immigration, in Southern Europe were proven to be fundamental at EU regional level as well. Migration flows were shown to be more sensitive to unemployment, urbanisation, segmentation of the labour market and active population share in the eastern as compared to the southern European regions. Nevertheless, accessing the transition drivers evolution during 2011–2013 period, eastern regions are still highly unattractive and their chances for becoming destination regions are currently at low levels.

This chapter assesses the extent to which historical levels of inequality affect the creation and survival of businesses over time. To this end, we use the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey across 66 countries over 2005–2011. We complement this survey with data on income inequality dating back to early 1800s and current institutional environment, such as the number of procedures to start a new business, countries’ degree of financial inclusion, corruption and political stability. We find that, although inequality increases the number of firms created out of need, inequality reduces entrepreneurial activity as in net terms businesses are less likely to be created and survive over time. These findings are robust in using different measures of inequality across different points in time and regions, even if excluding Latin America, the most unequal region in the world. Our evidence then supports theories that argue early conditions, crucially inequality, influence development path.

This paper aims to examine the extent to which social media competence (SMC) determines exporting companies’ actual adoption of social media applications, which eventually might impact these firms’ performance. Quantitative study where data were collected through a web-based survey addressed to Spanish exporters. SEM is employed for testing the hypotheses. SMC has an influence on the firm’s actual use of these social media applications, which in turn has an impact on the firm’s performance. However, the intention to use social media applications mediates the relationship between the firm’s SMC and its social media usage.

The substantial resources devoted to warfare in modern times might explain the increasing relevance that military spending has acquired in social sciences. In this regard, the so-called defence economics has extensively studied the main determinants of military spending and its main consequences in terms of economic performance and institutional transformations. However, one of the main problems for comparative analysis on the causes and effects of military spending is the lack of long-term homogeneous and comparable data in international panel datasets. This paper contributes to fill in this gap by providing new military spending data on Spain from 1850 to 2009 based on NATO methodological criterion. It provides total military spending estimates as well as economic and administrative disaggregated figures for most of the period. These data allow reliable international comparisons while also providing new quantitative evidence to better understand the military history of Spain in modern times.

This paper introduces a unit-consistent Lorenz dominance criterion that allows ranking income distributions according to centrist measures à la Seidl and Pfingsten (1997). In doing so, it defines α-Lorenz curves that generalize the absolute Lorenz curve. These curves allow implementing unanimous rankings for a broad set of centrist inequality notions, whereas they become closer and closer to the absolute curve when α approaches equity. In addition, this paper provides an empirical illustration of these tools using Australian income data. The results suggest that despite the reduction of relative inequality for Australian-born people between 1999 and 2003, their inequality increased for most centrist value judgments.

Recent evidence on the impact of the crisis on developed countries shows that changes in income inequality and poverty have been relatively small in spite of the macroeconomic heterogeneity of the recession across different economies. However, when evaluating individual perceptions linked to the crisis any changes in the chances to scale up or lose ground in the income ladder are also crucial. Our aim in this paper is to analyze to what extent the recession has had an impact on individual equivalent incomes and, in particular, on the prevalence of downward mobility in two developed countries where job losses have been large. We find that income losses have increased, particularly in Spain, and while age and education are key determinants of the probability of experiencing an income loss in both countries, the presence of children only increases the probability of an income loss in Spain.

Many jurisdictions fine illegal cartels using penalty guidelines that presume an arbitrary 10% overcharge. This article surveys more than 700 published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 2,041 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary findings are: (1) the median average long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 23.0%; (2) the mean average is at least 49%; (3) overcharges reached their zenith in 1891–1945 and have trended downward ever since; (4) 6% of the cartel episodes are zero; (5) median overcharges of international-membership cartels are 38% higher than those of domestic cartels; (6) convicted cartels are on average 19% more effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels; (7) bid-rigging conduct displays 25% lower markups than price-fixing cartels; (8) contemporary cartels targeted by class actions have higher overcharges; and (9) when cartels operate at peak effectiveness, price changes are 60–80% higher than the whole episode. Historical penalty guidelines aimed at optimally deterring cartels are likely to be too low.