Environmental firms' better attitude towards nature in the context of corporate compliance

The recent publishing of the Criminal Code Reform, known as the Corporate Governance Code and by which companies are prosecuted for the crimes they have committed, is contributing towards improving the management of companies involved in using natural resources. This study explores the disposition of environmental companies towards respect for nature in the context of the new Spanish Criminal Code 1/2015. Over 916 companies, including 104 environmental companies, have been asked about their knowledge of the code and the consequences it has for them through a survey. The paper explores the influence of regulatory compliance, coercive enforcement and cooperative actions on environmental companies to develop better attitudes towards nature. Partial Least Squares (PLS) Path Modelling was used to build an interaction model among variables. The results of the research reveal how environmental companies are more inclined to developing organizational standards (Cooperative Environmental Protocols) and to improving compliance with environmental law (coercive regulation). The model has a moderate predictive effect, explaining 54.1% of environmental companies’ Better Attitude towards Nature. The findings may have important implications for environmental authorities when deterring environmental crimes

Three essays in econometrics: robust model and moment selection in GMM and an application of semi-parametric Taylor rules

The first two chapters of this thesis develop a new methodology in the Generalized Method of Moments. Typically, researchers assume that the data come from an unknown ideal distribution. In the first two chapters, we relax this assumption by assuming shrinking neighborhoods of this ideal distribution. We show the conditions that are needed for GMM estimators to have a stable behaviour in these neighborhoods and propose a robust GMM estimator based on these conditions. Finally, we show how to perform Moment and Model Selection based on the robust GMM estimators. The third chapter is an extension of the framework introduced by J. Taylor in 1993. We propose a more flexible setting that can capture asymmetric preferences of the Central Bank between the macroeconomic fundamentals as well as a possibly nonlinear economy