Impact of funding and value added on Spanish venture capital-backed firms

This paper contributes to the literature on the effect of venture capital (VC) on the economic development of areas in which those specialized investors are active. The work focuses on the separate consideration of two effects that are supposed to explain the superior performance of a large sample of Spanish VC-backed firms, namely funding and value-added services provided by VC managers to their investee firms. The results show that funding is significant regardless of the stage of development of the investee firm. The value added, however, is only significant for the subsample of firms at the expansion stage.     

Speed in the Internationalization Process of the Firm

While firm internationalization processes have been understood as being dynamic, the dimension of speed has rarely been the main focus of research efforts, which, until a decade ago, focused principally on explaining sequences of entry modes and choices of markets. The emergence of the study of international entrepreneurship has enhanced the role of speed, although this has usually been measured in terms of the time lag between a firm's foundation and its initial international action, with little attempt at defining and explaining the speed of the process once it is under way. This study reviews the concept of speed from an internationalization perspective, describes the multidimensional nature of the concept and sets out the different aspects that link timescales with the types of changes – continuous and discontinuous – that take place during internationalizing processes. The paper concludes with a research agenda as a guide for future work on considering the role of speed in the internationalization process.     

Waste identification diagrams

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a very popular tool in lean environments to represent production flows, mapping value stream of a product or family of products, and helps to identify some types of waste. Although very popular, this tool has some limitations as already described in many publications, especially in terms of restrictions in showing most types of waste as well as in its inability to represent various production routes. The purpose of this study is to introduce the waste identification diagram (WID), a new tool to represent production units with its different forms of waste, which overcomes some VSM limitations. The originality of WID comes from the use of its symbols’ dimensions to convey, in a visual and immediate way, relevant information about a production unit. In this paper, WID is applied on a production unit of a lift manufacturer, for testing its performance and comparing it to VSM. The main findings are that WID is in general more effective than VSM in terms of representation of complex production units and in terms of identification of more forms of waste. WID must however overcome some of its limitations such as the lack of information-flow representation and the links to suppliers and clients.     

The Sharing Economy Globalization Phenomenon: A Research Agenda

Sharing economy firms have been able to achieve global levels of success at an unprecedented pace. In this study, we focus specifically on internet-based firms that allow rent appropriation from temporary utilization of underutilized assets. By looking at these firms' main characteristics and the current dynamics revolving around their internationalization process, we develop a framework to guide future research drawing from a business ecosystems perspective. The business ecosystem approach is a promising theoretical lens to assess this phenomenon due to its more holistic view of multisided network effects and multiple stakeholders' participation that can vary across nations. We note that the sharing economy phenomenon has spurred worldwide adoption of platform businesses which, in turn, creates a great opportunity for future research to extend current theories by exploring why, when, and how these firms expand into new countries. We argue that further research on sharing economy firms and its interactions with different national ecosystem configurations can provide important insights to theory as well as relevant information to managers and policymakers.     

Some issues related to the topological aggregation of preferences

This paper deals with the topological approach to social choice theory initiated by Chichilnisky. We study several issues concerning the existence and uniqueness of Chichilnisky rules defined on preference spaces. We show that on topological vector spaces the only additive, anonymous, and unanimous aggregation n-rule is the convex mean. We study the case of infinite agents and show that an infinite Chichilnisky rule might be considered as the limit of rules for finitely many agents. Finally, we show that under some restrictions on the preference space, the existence of a Chichilnisky rule for every finite case implies the existence of a weak Chichilnisky rule for the infinite case.     

Identidad de género, ética protestante y atribución de causalidad

Resumen

El artículo analiza una doble problemática en tomo a la identidad de género: (a) los determinantes sociales de la identidad de género y (b) los sesgos preceptivos-cognitivos en la evaluación y explicación de acciones desarrolladas por un actor según su pertenencia sexual.

Se concluye que la génesis de las diferencias en las identidades sociales de hombres y mujeres esta ligada a la distribución social del trabajo en función del sexo. Igualmente se confirma la existencia de sesgos perceptivo-cognitivos en la evaluación de acciones sociales.     

Monitoring Progress in Child Poverty Reduction: Methodological Insights and Illustration to the Case Study of Bangladesh

Important steps have been taken at international summits to set up goals and targets to improve the wellbeing of children worldwide. Now the world also has more and better data to monitor progress. This paper presents a new approach to monitoring progress in child poverty reduction based on the Alkire and Foster adjusted headcount ratio and an array of complementary techniques. A theoretical discussion is accompanied by an assessment of child poverty reduction in Bangladesh based on four rounds of the demographic household survey (1997–2007). Emphasis is given to dimensional monotonicity and decomposability as desirable properties of multidimensional poverty measures. Complementary techniques for analysing changes over time are also illustrated, including the Shapley decomposition of changes in overall poverty, as well as a range of robustness tests and statistical significance tests. The results from Bangladesh illustrate the value added of these new tools and the information they provide for policy. The analysis reveals two paths to multidimensional poverty reduction by either decreasing the incidence of poverty or its intensity, and exposes an uneven distribution of national gains across geographical divisions. The methodology allows an integrated analysis of overall changes yet simultaneously examines progress in each region and in each dimension, retaining the positive features of dashboard approaches. The empirical evidence highlights the need to move beyond the headcount ratio towards new measures of child poverty that reflect the intensity of poverty and multiple deprivations that affect poor children at the same time.     

Subclinical Psychopathic Traits and Romantic Attachment in Treatment-Seeking Couples

Subclinical psychopathic personality traits have been associated with multiple indicators of couple distress and romantic attachment insecurities but essentially in community samples. This study examined dyadic associations between primary and secondary psychopathy and attachment anxiety and avoidance, assessed with self-reported measures, in 183 French-Canadian cohabiting partners seeking couple therapy. Two Actor-Partner Interdependence Models were tested: Model 1 considered psychopathic traits as independent variables and Model 2 treated attachment insecurities as independent variables. Analyses revealed that in both partners, secondary psychopathy was associated with attachment anxiety and avoidance (Models 1 and 2), while primary psychopathy was not only associated with attachment anxiety (Model 2; actor associations). Partner effects between primary and secondary psychopathy in men and women's attachment anxiety were also found in both models. These findings complement those reported in community samples and have clinical implications for treatment-seeking couples.     

Do Cooperatives with Better Economic–Financial Indicators also have Better Socioeconomic Performance?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The overall performance of cooperatives is related to economic–financial results and actions focused on benefits for...