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The study aims to examine the impact of corporate governance in terms of certain board characteristics on the level of universities’ voluntary sustainability disclosure.

A content analysis based on a comprehensive disclosure index – that also accounts for the impact that COVID-19 exerted on the social dimension of university activities – is performed on a sample of Italian public universities’ websites for the year 2020. An ordinary least squares regression model is estimated to test the association between universities’ board characteristics, namely, board size, board independence and board gender diversity (including the presence of a female rector), and online sustainability disclosure.

This study provides evidence that websites represent a valid tool used by universities to highlight their social performance and demonstrate their commitment to dealing with the pandemic’s social and economic disruption by supporting their stakeholders. Board gender diversity and female Rector’s presence are crucial factors that positively impact voluntary sustainability disclosure levels.

Policymakers and regulators can benefit from the study’s findings. Using the results of this study, they may reflect on the need to regulate sustainability reporting in universities. In addition, findings may offer policymakers inspiration for regulating the presence of women on university boards.

This study offers novel contributions to existing literature analysing the university’s voluntary sustainability disclosure practices through alternative communication tools such as websites. Moreover, it provides novel insight into the role of the board gender diversity in university sustainability disclosure practices.

Free guided walking tours are one of the most successful tourism segments in the digital platform economy. It is beginning to be associated with negative impacts in some of the destinations where it is spreading rapidly. Although the platform economy is generating increasing academic interest, the free tour model remains largely unexplored area in the literature. This study aims to examine how such activity affects cultural destinations.

Focussing on the largest Free Tours platform operating in Spain, GuruWalk, the methodology used analyses its impact in six cultural destinations on two of the sustainability dimensions: the territorial dimension and the governance, through an exploratory study.

The findings help to understand the differences that such activity generates in each destination depending on the phase of its life cycle, and to implement, if necessary, corrective measures. The research confirms that the impacts differ according to the tourist destination’s maturity, concluding that such activity contributes to the increase of tourist agglomerations and the overcrowding of cultural destinations in their middle and mature life cycles. The findings highlighted the importance of the role of local governance on free tour activity.

The main contribution is the association of the impacts they produce (especially in terms of massification) with destination life cycle phases. There were no similar precedents with a spatial or territorial analysis to reliably demonstrate not only that this activity has an impact on the territory but also what type of impact is produced.

This paper examines the moderating effect of environmental capability development on the relationship between supply chain integration and both environmental and financial performance.

The authors use empirical data collected from three diverse sources in the horticultural marketing sector. A total of 97 responses were used. An ordered logit analysis and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression were employed to test the hypotheses.

The results confirm that firm environmental capability development enhances the effects of supply chain integration on firm environmental performance. Additionally, supplier integration and environmental capabilities may be considered firm strategic capabilities that are positively related to financial performance. Thus, public policies should encourage the development of firms' individual environmental capabilities and supply chain integration to improve environmental sustainability.

This study recognizes the importance of environmental capability development as a strategic objective and its fundamental role as a complementary capability with supply chain integration. This paper contributes by empirically analyzing how firms along the supply chain can promote environmental sustainability through the development of environmental and integration capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and further the existing knowledge on supply chain integration (SCI). This study proposes a model and several hypotheses to better understand some SCI antecedents, dependence and resource commitment and their relationships with performance.

Based on diverse theoretical approaches, the author develops and tests an integrated model in which dependence and resource commitment are proposed to enhance external integration, leading to an increase in economic performance. This study's empirical validity is reinforced by collecting data from 142 manufacturing firms in Spain and Germany and testing the model using structural equation model (SEM).

The results support dependence and resource commitment as antecedents of SCI, both with a positive effect. Also, discrepancies in the effect of external integration on performance are found where supplier integration seems not to have any effect on performance.

This study helps to better understand SCI antecedents. It makes both theoretical and managerial contributions by empirically analyzing both antecedents. This furthers extant knowledge regarding the joined impact of resource commitment and dependence on SCI. In particular, it incorporates resource commitment by considering it as the sacrifice firms need to implement to get involved in a long-term relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify to what extent the housing bubble in the early-to-mid 2000s in Spain exacerbated land planning corruption among Spain’s largest municipalities.

The authors exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing prices induced by changes in local mortgage market conditions; namely, the rapid expansion of savings banks (Cajas de Ahorros). Accounting for electoral competition in the 2003–2007 and 2007–2009 electoral cycles among Spanish municipalities larger than 25,000 inhabitants, the authors estimate a positive relationship between housing prices and land planning corruption in municipalities with variation in savings bank establishments using instrumental variables techniques.

A 1% increase in housing prices leads to a 3.9% points increase in the probability of land planning corruption. Moreover, absolute majority governments (not needing other parties’ support) are more susceptible to the incidence of corruption than non-majority ones. Two policy implications to address corruption emerge: enhance electoral competition and increase scrutiny over land planning decisions in sparsely populated.

First empirical evidence of a formal link between the 2000s housing bubble in Spain and land planning corruption.

This research investigates the effect of accessibility to points of tourist interest (buffer) and direct and indirect spatial spillover effects of agglomeration economies on tourism industry revenues in Spain.

Data were collected from the Bureau van Dijk's (BvD) Orbis global database. The data were analysed using a spatial econometric model and the Cobb–Douglas production function.

This study reveals that hotels located inside the buffer zone of points of tourist interest achieve better economic outcomes than hotels located outside the buffer. Furthermore, the results show that there is a direct and indirect spatial spillover effect in the hotel industry.

The results provide valuable information for identifying areas where the agglomeration of hotels will produce a spillover effect on hotel revenue and the area of influence of location characteristics. This information is relevant for hotels already established in a destination or when seeking a location for a new hotel.

The results of this study can help city planners in influencing the distribution of hotels to fit desired patterns and improve an area's spatial beauty.

The paper provides insights into how investment, structural characteristics, reputation and location affect hotel revenue.

Wine has been produced for thousands of years and nowadays we have seen a spread in the wine culture. E-commerce sales of wine have increased considerably and online customer's satisfaction is influenced by quality and price. This paper presents a case study of the company “QuieroVinos, S.L.”, an online wine shop founded in 2015 that sells Spanish wines in two main marketplaces.

With the final target of increasing the company profits it has been designed and developed an application to track the prices of competitors for a set of products. This information will be used to set the product prices in order to offer the products both competitively and profitably in each Marketplace. This application must check, by tacking into account information such as the product cost or the minimum product margin, if it is possible to decrease the price in order to reach the top cheapest position and as a consequence, increase the sales.

The application improved in a notorious way the company's results in terms of sales and shipping costs. It must be said that without the use of the presented application, performing the price comparison process within each one of the marketplaces would have taken a long time. Moreover, as prices change very frequently, the obtained information has a very limited time value, and the competitors prices should be analyzed daily in order to take accurate decisions regarding the company's price policy.

Although the application has been designed for the wine sector and the two named marketplace, it could be exported to other sectors. For that, it should be implemented new modules to collect information regarding the competitor's price of the products selling on each corresponding marketplace.

The aim of this research is to analyze the success of digital transformation (DT) in the management and performance of organizations. To do so, the role of IT and its ability to integrate in organizations that provide professional services with high added value for their clients are investigated. These services require highly developed skills as they solve complex problems for the clients and this means that success depends on gathering knowledge from different sources (customers, public administrations and competitors). This study analyses the decisive and complementary role of IT in this process.

The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative methods. After questioning managers of Spanish KIBS companies about certain components of DT, the gathered data are subsequently processed with PLS-SEM to establish causal relationships.

The results show that digital capability is the determinant of DT. It has a positive effect on the digital resources integrated in KIBS companies and on their organizational performances.

Future research should continue to analyze other components of TD that drive the organizational performance of KIBS firms, such as technological culture or government policies that encourage digital transactions. The present study analyzes data from companies that are part of a single economic sector in Spain which may limit the conclusions drawn. It would be particularly useful to confirm the applicability of the results in companies operating in different markets to explore the direct relationship between digital capability and organizational performance.

This research has implications for managers of KIBS companies, as it shows the high potential of the ability of IT to implement and manage a TD process. Managers can benefit from IT management practices using the appropriate tools (ERP, CRM and management software) to gain more knowledge of customer behavior with the possibility of easily codifying and analyzing the data, which significantly influences innovation activities. The objective is to develop a strong internal capability to absorb knowledge from day-to-day interactions with customers by using IT effectively. This process leads to an improvement in the organizational performance of KIBS companies, as they become more effective in decision making with improved internal communication, generate greater employee satisfaction and reach new customers. Following strategies aimed at the implementation and use of the technological resources studied creates more agile firms and helps to close the production gap between SMEs and large companies.

The results obtained can help create sustainable businesses through cloud-based technology tools. It can provide insights for policy makers to implement economic policies that help SMEs to become more competitive and sustainable.

The development of digital technologies and the ability to manage them is one of the decisive factors that conceptualizes DT and improves organizational performance. This research contributes to the understanding of the need for managers of KIBS companies to follow strategies oriented towards the digitization of their organizations and for the collaborators to have a high level of IT training, especially in the use of cloud technology.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of the European Union (EU) Directive on the quality of sustainability reporting under the institutional theory lens. Specifically, the authors evaluate what kind of institutional pressure has the highest impact on the quality of corporate disclosure on sustainability issues.

The authors build a quality index based on the content analysis of sustainability information disclosed, before and after the transposition of the Directive, by Italian and Spanish companies belonging to different industries. The authors use an OLS regression model to analyse the effect of coercive, normative and mimetic forces on the quality of the sustainability reports.

The results highlight that normative and mimetic mechanisms positively affect the quality of sustainability reporting, whereas there is no evidence regarding coercive mechanisms, indicating that the new requirements do not provide a significant contribution to the development of better reporting practices, at least in the two analysed countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies assessing the quality of sustainability reporting through an analysis involving the period before and after the implementation of the EU Directive. It enriches the literature on institutional theory by analysing how the different dimensions of isomorphism affect the quality of information disclosed by companies according to the EU requirements. It contributes to a better understanding of the impact of the non-financial information Directive, and the results of this paper can be relevant for regulators, practitioners and academia, especially in view of the adoption of the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive proposal.

The paper aims to explore the effect of stakeholder pressure on the disclosure of key performance indicators (KPIs) and the patterns of this disclosure in large public interest entities (PIEs).

The study is based on the content analysis of the disclosures provided by 169 large (PIEs) operating in Poland in 2019. The data was hand-collected from the companies’ non-financial statements. The research hypotheses were empirically tested with the use of linear regression.

The explanation for the disclosure of KPIs can be found in stakeholder theory, operationalized by stakeholder pressure linked to industry. In line with the expectations, business-related KPIs are disclosed by companies operating in industries with high pressure from investors, environment-related KPIs are presented by companies operating in environmentally sensitive industries and companies operating in industries with high pressure from employees disclose society-related KPIs. According to the results of the study, reporting on employee-related KPIs is accompanied by environmental and social KPI disclosures.

The study contributes to the literature on corporate non-financial disclosures as it provides new insights into non-financial KPI disclosures in a new and relatively unexplored institutional setting established by the Directive 2014/95/EU. While researchers recognize the stakeholders’ environmental and social concerns, there is nevertheless a lack of understanding of their implications for KPIs in measuring social practice. The research fills that gap by addressing the specific impact of different stakeholder groups on the disclosure of KPIs.