This open access textbook offers a practical guide into research ethics for undergraduate students in the social sciences. A step-by-step approach of the most viable issues, in-depth discussions of ...case histories and a variety of didactical tools will aid the student to grasp the issues at hand and help him or her develop strategies to deal with them. This book addresses problems and questions that any bachelor student in the social sciences should be aware of, including plagiarism, data fabrication and other types of fraud, data augmentation, various forms of research bias, but also peer pressure, issues with confidentiality and questions regarding conflicts of interest. Cheating, ‘free riding’, and broader issues that relate to the place of the social sciences in society are also included. The book concludes with a step-by-step approach designed to coach a student through a research application process.
•We study the adoption of the Equator principles by banks engaging in syndicated project finance between 2003 and 2014.•Banks facing the highest level of peer pressure are 33% more likely to adopt ...than those facing the lowest level of peer pressure.•Even without peer pressure banks collaborating with adopters are more susceptible to become adopters themselves.•Pressure applied through public campaigns increases adoption, except for very large banks.
Critical to the success of the Sustainable Development Goals is the extent to which financial institutions are willing to adopt voluntary regulation aimed at ensuring their actions contribute positively. We study the adoption of the most well-known set of rules, the Equator Principles, by applying a network approach to a unique data set containing 18,729 collaborations of financial institutions funding projects between 2003 and 2014 worldwide. We find that those exposed to the highest level of peer pressure by adopters are 33% more likely to also adopt, compared to those that face the lowest level of peer pressure. Even without this peer pressure institutions that already collaborate with adopters are more susceptible to become adopters themselves. Finally, external pressure applied through public campaigns increases adoption, although particularly large (and presumably powerful) institutions are immune to this external pressure. Our findings are particularly relevant for success of the recently launched Principles for Positive Impact Finance, that are heavily inspired by the Equator Principles.
•Benchmark the efficiency of microfinance institutions with different business models.•Institutions that stay closest to their original mission are the most efficient.•Institutions that attempt to ...pursue a double bottom line are relatively inefficient.•Lending practices can substantially improve efficiency for a given output mix.
The microfinance sector has room for pure for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs), non-profit organizations, and “social” for-profit firms that aim to pursue a double bottom line. Depending on their business model, these institutions target different types of borrowers, change the size of their loans and adjust their loan pricing. We introduce a simple approach that accommodates a wide range of business models and allows us to estimate the operational efficiency of MFIs. Our empirical results show that MFIs with a high depth of outreach are most efficient, resulting in higher levels of outreach and profits for the same input mix.
This article examines to what extent and how the presence of gazelles, young high-impact firms, is related to the growth of industries over time. For this purpose, we analyze gazelles in The ...Netherlands over a 12-year period, annually from 1997 until 2008, and relate them to the dynamics of industry employment. We use a panel vector autoregressive model to explore the relationship between the prevalence of gazelles in an industry and industry employment growth, in an economy-wide dataset including 43 two-digit industries. An increase in the prevalence of gazelles in an industry appears to have a positive effect on subsequent industry growth. We do not find evidence of an inverse causal relationship: there are no long-run positive effects of increases in industry growth on the prevalence of gazelles. There is also no relationship between overrepresentation of gazelles and subsequent industry growth. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This paper sheds new light on the relationship between openness and industrial specialization. The roles of trade and financial openness, separately and in conjunction with each other, are unraveled ...to study specialization patterns for a panel of 30 countries for more than three decades. Results show that trade openness has a stronger association with industrial specialization in countries with a low degree of intra-industry trade, whereas financial openness has a stronger association with specialization in countries with more developed financial systems. Further, the effect of trade (financial) openness on specialization is enhanced by the level of financial (trade) openness.
This paper examines how banks adjust their asset structure in response to changes in loan demand following natural disasters. We demonstrate how banks’ asset diversification strategy helps clients ...smooth consumption and supports local recovery. In the empirical section, we apply the difference-in-differences method and determine that U.S. commercial banks increase real estate lending after disasters and sell government bonds to finance this disaster-driven credit surge. The theoretical section presents a novel multiple-asset dynamic credit allocation model that explains our empirical findings. We use model simulations to predict and quantify the potential impact of climate change on the asset structure and profitability of banks given different scenarios.
•We document banks increasing real estate lending and selling bonds to finance credit surge.•We depict banks' credit allocation behavior in a dynamic model with multiple assets.•We quantify the potential impact of climate change on banks via the natural hazard channel.
► We introduce a new measure of innovation in banking. ► We find evidence of an inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation in US banking. ► We show that many banks in the US have ...moved beyond their optimal innovation level. ► We find that interstate banking deregulation in the US has resulted in less innovation in US banking.
This paper presents new evidence on the relationship between competition and innovation by extending previous literature from manufacturing to financial services. We introduce a new measure of overall innovation by estimating and enveloping annual minimum cost frontiers to create a global frontier. The distance to the global frontier constitutes each bank’s technology gap, which decreases if the bank manages to innovate. Our innovation measure enables us to derive and estimate the model of Aghion et al. (2005b) at the firm level for the US banking industry. Based on individual bank Call Report data for the period 1984–2004, consistent with theoretical and empirical work by Aghion et al., we find evidence of an inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation that is robust over several different specifications. Further evidence on major structural changes in the US banking industry indicates that banks moved beyond their optimal innovation level and that interstate banking deregulation resulted in lower bank innovation. Policy implications to financial reform and prudential regulation are discussed also.
We examine the price impact of traders on commodity futures markets. Following the framework of De Long et al. (1990), we empirically identify the existence of positive feedback traders, passive ...investors, and rational speculators in major global commodity futures markets. Our results show that index trader demand is negatively related to past commodity returns and is positively related to future commodity returns, as De Long et al. (1990) model predicts for passive investors. Furthermore, “non-reportable traders,” who are not obligated to report their positions to the regulators, behave like positive feedback traders, and interact significantly with commodity futures returns as well.
This paper investigates whether technology spills over across national borders and technology regimes. We advocate a modeling strategy where improvements in technical efficiency capture technology ...spillovers as industries absorb and implement the best-practice technology. Dynamic panel-based techniques are used to determine whether efficiency series move together in the long run (cointegrate) and/or move closer together over time (converge). We control for technological heterogeneity and for cross-sectional dependence in the data. For a panel of manufacturing industries in six EU countries, we find evidence of technology spillovers and convergence among industries’ efficiency levels across countries and mainly across adjacent technology regimes.
► We introduce a flexible measure of industry maturity. ► We use a novel approach to model innovation patterns for European manufacturing industries. ► Product (process) innovations decrease ...(increase) with industry maturity. ► Optimal R&D policy depends on the life-cycle stage and market share of industries.
Empirical research has revealed some regularities regarding the innovation that takes place over the industry life-cycle. First, innovation is high when an industry is young and low when the industry matures, and second, product innovation decreases with industry maturity, while process innovation increases. The implications of these regularities are profound, but evidence is to date largely case based and it is hard to generalize and draw policy conclusions. We use a flexible measure of maturity and a novel modeling approach to investigate innovation patterns for 21 European manufacturing industries. Our results strongly support both assertions and lend support to life-cycle based R&D-policy.
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