Maximizing stakeholders' interests: An empirical analysis of the stakeholder approach to corporate governance

The purpose of this paper is to build on the emerging stakeholder model of corporate governance by analyzing the CSR function at board level, board diversity, and stakeholder engagement, and how it relates to financial performance. Based on an empirical study of an international sample of large companies, we find board responsibility for CSR to be a key factor in promoting engagement with primary and secondary stakeholders of the firm. Depending on the legal tradition of the country in which the company is based, we find evidence that board diversity and stakeholder engagement are positively correlated with firm financial performance.Corporate governance; corporate social responsibility; board diversity; stakeholder engagement; firm performance;

Ownership and Control: A Spanish Survey

The paper analyses the ownership structure of a large sample of Spanish listed companies. The results are analysed in terms of governance implications under the agency theory context. The results show a picture with concentrated ownership where stock markets are relatively low important. Direct ownership and voting blocks, which account for indirect ownership through third companies, are larger for non-financial firms followed by families or individuals and financial firms other than banks. Nevertheless, the use of intermediate companies (pyramiding), is not frequent according to our data. Banks seem not to play the important role they did in the past and the recent privatisation reduced to a minimum level, state shareholdings on listed companies.Ownership, Control, Spain

The Maize Seed Industries of Brazil and Mexico: Past Performance, Current Issues, and Future Prospects

This paper describes results of a study of the main factors affecting the development of the maize seed industries in Brazil and Mexico (and, by extension, other developing countries). The authors develop a framework that researchers and policy makers can use to evaluate seed industry performance in developing countries. This framework is used to analyze the seed industries of Brazil and Mexico, where very different sets of circumstances influence seed industry development, efficiency, and structure. The analysis gives special attention to the different maize breeding strategies pursued by the public and private sectors, measures of industry competitiveness and efficiency, and the trade-offs involved in developing and producing different kinds of maize seed, particularly improved open-pollinated maize varieties versus different types of hybrids. The authors identify key seed industry issues for researchers, administrators of national maize programs, and agricultural policy makers in developing countries, especially issues related to the appropriate roles for public and private organizations in maize seed industries in the developing world.Crop Production/Industries,

Wave-unlocking transition in resonantly coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau equations

We study the effect of spatial frequency-forcing on standing-wave solutions of coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau equations. The model considered describes several situations of nonlinear counterpropagating waves and also of the dynamics of polarized light waves. We show that forcing introduces spatial modulations on standing waves which remain frequency locked with a forcing-independent frequency. For forcing above a threshold the modulated standing waves unlock, bifurcating into a temporally periodic state. Below the threshold the system presents a kind of excitability.Comment: 4 pages, including 4 postscript figures. To appear in Physical Review Letters (1996). This paper and related material can be found at http://formentor.uib.es/Nonlinear

The influence of binarity on the morpho-kinematics of planetary nebulae

The role of central star binarity in the shaping of planetary nebulae (PNe) has been the subject of much debate, with single stars believed to be incapable of producing the most highly collimated morphologies. However, observational support for binary-induced shaping has been sadly lacking. Here, we highlight the results of a continuing programme to spatio-kinematically model the morphologies of all PNe known to contain a close binary central star. Spatio-kinematical modelling is imperative for these objects, as it circumvents the degeneracy between morphology and orientation which can adversely affect determinations of morphology based on imaging alone. Furthermore, spatio-kinematical modelling accurately determines the orientation of the nebular shell, allowing the theoretically predicted perpendicular alignment, between nebular symmetry axis and binary orbital plane, to be tested. To date, every PN subjected to this investigation has displayed the predicted alignment, indicating that binarity has played an important role in the formation and evolution of these nebulae. The further results from this programme will be key, not only in determining whether binary interaction is responsible for shaping the studied PNe, but also in assessing the importance of binarity in the formation and evolution of all PNe in general.Comment: 2 pages, 2 tables, proceedings of the IAU Symposium No. 283, Planetary Nebulae: An Eye to the Futur

Coexistence in neutral theories: interplay of criticality and mild local preferences

Neutral theories have played a crucial and revolutionary role in fields such as population genetics and biogeography. These theories are critical by definition, in the sense that the overall growth rate of each single allele/species/type vanishes. Thus each species in a neutral model sits at the edge between invasion and extinction, allowing for the coexistence of symmetric/neutral types. However, in finite systems, mono-dominated states are ineludibly reached in relatively short times owing to demographic fluctuations, thus leaving us with an unsatisfactory framework to rationalize empirically-observed long-term coexistence. Here, we scrutinize the effect of heterogeneity in quasi-neutral theories, in which there can be a local mild preference for some of the competing species at some sites, even if the overall species symmetry is maintained. As we show here, mild biases at a small fraction of locations suffice to induce overall robust and durable species coexistence, even in regions arbitrarily far apart from the biased locations. This result stems from the long-range nature of the underlying critical bulk dynamics and has a number of implications, for example, in conservation ecology as it suggests that constructing local specific "sanctuaries" for different competing species can result in global enhancement of biodiversity, even in regions arbitrarily distant from the protected refuges.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experimen

Towards Syntactic Iberian Polarity Classification

Lexicon-based methods using syntactic rules for polarity classification rely on parsers that are dependent on the language and on treebank guidelines. Thus, rules are also dependent and require adaptation, especially in multilingual scenarios. We tackle this challenge in the context of the Iberian Peninsula, releasing the first symbolic syntax-based Iberian system with rules shared across five official languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. The model is made available.Comment: 7 pages, 5 tables. Contribution to the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA-2017) at EMNLP 201