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The purpose of the chapter is to test the hypothesis that food safety (chemical) standards act as barriers to international seafood imports. We use zero-accounting gravity models to test the hypothesis that food safety (chemical) standards act as barriers to international seafood imports. The chemical standards on which we focus include chloramphenicol required performance limit, oxytetracycline maximum residue limit, fluoro-quinolones maximum residue limit, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) pesticide residue limit. The study focuses on the three most important seafood markets: the European Union’s 15 members, Japan, and North America.Our empirical results confirm the hypothesis and are robust to the OLS as well as alternative zero-accounting gravity models such as the Heckman estimation and the Poisson family regressions. For the choice of the best model specification to account for zero trade and heteroskedastic issues, it is inconclusive to base on formal statistical tests; however, the Heckman sample selection and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) models provide the most reliable parameter estimates based on the statistical tests, magnitude of coefficients, economic implications, and the literature findings. Our findings suggest that continually tightening of seafood safety standards has had a negative impact on exporting countries. Increasing the stringency of regulations by reducing analytical limits or maximum residue limits in seafood in developed countries has negative impacts on their bilateral seafood imports. The chapter furthers the literature on food safety standards on international trade. We show competing gravity model specifications and provide additional evidence that no one gravity model is superior.

Using a large sample of diversified firms from 38 countries we investigate the influence of several national-level institutional factors or “institutional voids” on the value of corporate diversification. Specifically, we explore whether the presence of frictions in a country’s capital markets, labor markets, and product markets, affects the excess value of diversified firms. We find that the value of diversified firms relative to their single-segment peers is higher in countries with less-efficient capital and labor markets, but find no evidence that product market efficiency affects the relative value of diversification. These results provide support for the theory of internal capital markets that argues that internal capital allocation would be relatively more beneficial in the presence of frictions in the external capital markets. In addition, the results show that diversification can be beneficial in the presence of frictions in the labor market.

The changes in women’s and men’s work lives have been considerable in recent decades. Yet much of the recent research on gender differences in employment and earnings has been of a more snapshot nature rather than taking a longer comparative look at evolving patterns. In this paper, we use 50 years (1964–2013) of US Census Annual Demographic Files (March Current Population Survey) to track the changing returns to human capital (measured as both educational attainment and potential work experience), estimating comparable earnings equations by gender at each point in time. We consider the effects of sample selection over time for both women and men and show the rising effect of selection for women in recent years. Returns to education diverge for women and men over this period in the selection-adjusted results but converge in the OLS results, while returns to potential experience converge in both sets of results. We also create annual calculations of synthetic lifetime labor force participation, hours, and earnings that indicate convergence by gender in worklife patterns, but less convergence in recent years in lifetime earnings. Thus, while some convergence has indeed occurred, the underlying mechanisms causing convergence differ for women and men, reflecting continued fundamental differences in women’s and men’s life experiences.

Informality is a growing phenomenon in the developing and transition country labor market context. In particular, it is noticeable that working in an informal employment relationship is often not temporary. The degree of persistence of informality in the labor market might be due to different sources: structural state dependence due to past informality experiences and spurious state dependence due to time-invariant unobserved individual effects, which can alter the propensity of being in the informal sector independently from actual informality experiences. The purpose of our paper is to study the dynamics of informality using a genuine panel data set in the Ukrainian labor market. By estimating a dynamic panel data probit model with endogenous initial conditions, we find a highly significant degree of persistence due to previous informality experiences. This result implies that policies attempting to reduce current levels of informality may have a long-lasting effect on the labor market.

An adverse health event can affect women’s work capacity as they need time to recover. The institutional framework in the Netherlands provides employment protection during the first two years after the diagnosis. In this study, we have assessed the extent to which women’s employment is affected in the short- and long term by an adverse health event. We have used administrative Dutch data which follow women aged 25 to 55 years for four years after a medical diagnosis. We found that diagnosed women start leaving employment during the protection period and four years later they were about one percentage point less likely to be employed. Women in permanent employment did not reduce their employment during the protection period and reduced their employment with less than 0.5 percentage points thereafter. Furthermore, we found minor adjustments in the working hours in the short term and no adjustments in the long term. Lastly, we found that for wages, and not for employment and hours, adjustments could be related to the severity of the health condition: women diagnosed with temporary health conditions experienced a short-term wage penalty of about 0.5–1.7 percent and those diagnosed with chronic and incapacitating conditions experienced a long-term wage penalty of about 0.5 percent, while women diagnosed with some chronic and nonincapacitating conditions, such as respiratory conditions, experienced no wage changes in the short or long term.

The paper analyses the effects of individual and household characteristics on current poverty status, while controlling for initial conditions, past poverty status and unobserved heterogeneity in 14 European countries for the period 1994–2001, using the European Community Household Panel. The distinction between true state dependence and individual heterogeneity has important policy implications, since if the former is the main cause of poverty it may be crucial to break the ‘vicious circle’ of poverty using income-supporting social policies, whereas if it is the latter anti-poverty policies should focus primarily on education, training, development of personal skills and other labour market oriented policies. The empirical results are similar in qualitative terms but rather different in quantitative terms across the EU countries covered in the paper. State dependence remains significant in all model specifications, even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity or when removing possible endogeneity bias. Higher poverty rates and higher poverty persistence are associated with particular welfare state regimes, although the link is substantially weakened when other explanatory variables are included in the analysis.

There has been considerable debate concerning the contribution of venture capitalists (VCs) to their investee companies (Sapienza, Manigart, & Vermeir, 1996). This research has shown that VCs can add value and impact the strategic direction of their investee firms through their skills and knowledge. These skills lie in two distinct areas: financial (monitoring) and non-financial (strategic and operational involvement) skills (Pruthi, Wright, & Lockett, 2003). The monitoring and involvement of VC firms in their investees have been shown to vary according to their needs (Lerner, 1995). On balance, the evidence suggests greater involvement during the more uncertain earlier stages than during the later stages when the firm is more established (Sapienza, Amason, & Manigart, 1994; Elango, Fried, Hisrich, & Polonchek, 1995). This suggests that the VC's ability to bring about change will be mediated by the impact of the history of the firm via path dependency (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997).

Data fusion and the combination of multiple data sources have been part of travel survey processes for some time. In the current context, where technologies and information systems spread and become more and more diverse, the transportation community is getting more and more interested in the potential of data fusion processes to help gather more complete datasets and help give additional utility to available data sources. Research is looking for ways to enhance the available information by using both various data collection methods and data from various sources, surveys or observation systems. Survey response rates are decreasing over the world, and combining survey modes appears to be an interesting way to address this problem. Letting interviewees choose their survey mode allows increasing response rates, but survey mode could impact the data collected. This paper first discusses issues rising when combining survey modes within the same survey and presents a method to merge the data coming from different survey modes, in order to consolidate the database. Then, it defines and describes the data fusion process and discusses how it can be relevant for transportation analysis and modelling purposes. Benefiting from the availability of various datasets from the Greater Montréal Area and the Greater Lyon Area, some applications of data fusion are constructed and/or reproduced to illustrate and test some of the methods described in the literature.

Utilising the resource dependency theory, this study investigates the impact of board interlocks (CEOs' interlocks, women board interlocks, independent board interlocks and total board interlocks) on carbon emissions performance in India.

This research applies varieties of regression methods comprising robust least squares, generalised method of moments and Heckman's regression on a final sample of 63 of India's top 200 Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) listed companies that voluntarily participate in the Carbon Disclosure Project's (CDP) Climate Change Program and disclose their climate change data for years 2013–2020.

We provide strong evidence for a strong negative association between CEOs' interlocks and women board interlocks on carbon emissions performance. Independent and total board interlocks are not found to significantly affect carbon emissions performance.

Our sample is restricted to the proportion of the top 200 BSE firms that voluntarily submit their carbon emissions data to CDP. Also, the study's focus is India, limiting the generalisation of our findings to other emerging economies.

The study's findings provide valuable insight for regulators and corporate board of directors on the important role of CEOs and women board who interlock with other firms in steering the carbon emissions reduction. Specifically, the corporate board of directors should encourage CEOs to build more networks through outside board memberships. The regulators should revisit the Companies Act, 2013 and the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) regulation to increase the number of multiple directorships of CEOs and women board of directors.

This study responds to the dearth of literature on the efficacy of board interlocks on carbon emissions performance in emerging economies.