Effects of local fiscal policy on firm profitability

For decades, scholars and policy-makers have been interested in how fiscal policy influences entrepreneurship. Until now, research has focused on fiscal policy at the federal or regional level and used macro-economic outcome measures. Considerably less attention was given to how municipal governments can influence economic outcomes at the micro level. The present study examines the effect of municipal taxes, spending and tax compliance costs on firm profitability within the Flemish hospitality industry. This is an interesting research setting, since Flemish municipalities have far-ranging fiscal autonomy which has resulted in a proliferation of local taxes, many of which are specific to the hospitality industry. The findings reveal that local taxes have a negative impact on firm profitability, while aggregate public spending has a positive influence. The tax effect is economically relevant and exceeds the public spending impact. Finally, we find no impact of compliance costs from local taxes

Risk Diversification by European Financial Conglomerates

We study the dependence between the downside risk of European banks and insurers. Since the downside risk of banks and insurers differs, an interesting question from a supervisory point of view is the risk reduction that derives from diversification within large banks and financial conglomerates. We discuss the limited value of the normal distribution based correlation concept, and propose an alternative measure which better captures the downside dependence given the fat tail property of the risk distribution. This measure is estimated and indicates better diversification benefits for conglomerates versus large banks

Clarifying the Concept of Corporate Sustainability and Providing Convergence for Its Definition

Organizations are under mounting pressure to adapt to and to adopt corporate sustainability (CS) practices. Notwithstanding the increasing research attention given to the subject and the meaningful theoretical contributions, it is claimed that a definition, and a commonly accepted understanding of the concept of corporate sustainability, is still missing. Alignment on the meaning of CS is of critical importance for enabling coherent and effective practices. The lack of a sound theoretical foundation and of conceptual clarity of corporate sustainability has been identified as an important cause of unsatisfactory and fruitless actions by organizations. To address the questions “What is Corporate Sustainability?” and “Is it true there is a lack of convergence and clarity of the concept?”, we perform an ontological analysis of the different and interrelated concepts, and a necessary condition analysis on the key constitutive features of corporate sustainability within the academic literature. We demonstrate that the concept of corporate sustainability is clearer than most authors claim and can be well defined around its environmental, social and economic constitutive pillars with the purpose to provide equal opportunities to future generations.</p

Wicking properties of polyamide nanofibrous structures

The hydrophilicity of nanofibrous structures is a key characteristic for many applications. However due to the high porosity of the structures, it is difficult to measure this property with contact angle measurements. Therefore a characterisation through wicking behaviour is more appropriate. The ISO-norm on wicking behaviour needs some refining to account for the specific nature of the highly porous nanofibrous structures. This refined method is used on polyamide 6 nanofibrous structures with different diameters and on polyamide 6 nanofibres with an incorporated hydrophilic compound. It was found that the fibre diameter is the major characteristic which influences the wicking behaviour

Estimating the financing gap of SMEs

Using a novel methodology, we estimate the gap between supply and demand financing of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing in several European countries. We find the largest loan gap spreads are in Poland and the Netherlands. Specifically, our results show the upper boundary of the loan gap is the lowest in Romania and the highest in the Netherlands. Moreover, the lowest lower boundary of the equity gap is in the Netherlands, while the highest lower boundary is in Romania. Overall, our results suggest that there is a significant difference between the estimated demand and supply of equity, which is on average 3% of GDP