Corporate Reputation And Social Responsibility: An Analysis Of Large Companies In Croatia

This paper aims to explore the relationship between corporate reputation and social responsibility (CSR) in selected large Croatian companies. The research is based on the theoretical framework that supports a thesis of their positive relationship. CSR is measured through economic, environmental, and social aspects and is primarily based on testing the relationship between CSR and financial performance to determine whether the relationship is positive, neutral or negative. Many researchers have concluded that it is generally positive, depending on which measures of financial performance are used. At the same time, corporate reputation is considered as a key mediator in the relationship between a firm's CSR and financial performance. In this concept of CSR, reputation is a «global perception» of a group of stakeholders, its «assessment of the credibility of the organization's projection». Company reputations may vary from one stakeholder to another depending of their expectations, which are dynamic and likely to change over time. It is within this context of company relationships with its stakeholders that determines the level of reputation a company will develop over time. Thus corporate reputation will be directly and significantly related to CSR. Based on this hypothesis, they are a few objectives of this research. The first is to analyze the significance of the proposed corporate attributes according to company and customer perspective. For that purpose, seven practical and theoretical background attributes are selected and ranked - quality of products and services, corporate vision and strategy, quality of management leadership, labor force, financial performance, social and environmental responsibility, and corporate governance. Second is to propose indicators for each reputation attribute and rank them according to their significance collected by surveying large companies’ executives. Third is to analyze the correlation between socially responsible companies and their reputation. The research results show that one of the corporate attributes – CSR - is ranked very low from the point of view of company executives and employees, but very high from the perspective of consumers. Among the indicators which represent socially responsible performance, financial performance is ranked first, followed by ecological and social performance. A positive relationship between financial performance and corporate reputation has been statistically confirmed; i.e., socially responsible Croatian large companies have better financial results measured by ROA, ROE, margin profit and EPS

A Measurement System Of Corporate Social Responsibility In The Pharmaceutical Industry Of The Region

Recently, the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been adopted by many business sectors in the world including pharmaceutical industry. The orientation to social and environmental issues in business operations became a subject of much different research since the development of the stakeholder theory. The stakeholder theory emphasised social responsibility because a company’s performance and business in general could not be measured solely by gaining profit. Shareholders and managers should be responsible for all others who «directly or indirectly affect or are affected by a firm's activities». Much attention has been devoted to this concept in the researcher’s analysis in a range of sectors, but CSR research has been limited in the pharmaceutical sector. Measurement system is especially insufficiently analysed in relation to outcome measures to overall stakeholders. Thus, the purpose of the research is to analyse pharmaceutical industry in the Region (some of the ex-Yugoslavian countries - today Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia) which have developed a social responsibility concept in their renowned pharmaceutical enterprises. The research objectives are to investigate the CSR measurement system and make conclusions through critical analysis of the used indicators. The objective is to make a differentiation between pharmaceutical enterprises in using indicators to present economical, environmental and social issues. The final aim is to unify the approach to CSR in the pharmaceutical sector in the Region, as there is no agreement between relevant stakeholders and pharmaceutical industry about socially responsible pharmaceutical companies. The used research methods are: scientific analytical methods, interview, desk research, statistical methods. Research results: based on detailed analysis of the measurement system in the main pharmaceutical companies in four countries in the Region (a total of 12 in the sample) a model of a socially responsible pharmaceutical company is set up

Export boosting policies and firm behaviour: Review of empirical evidence around the world

How effective are direct government policies for boosting exports? We answer this question with a structured overview of 34 studies covering 26 countries around the world, and in doing so, we provide nine findings. We show export boosting policies are heterogenenous by design and include export promotion policies, public grants for exporters, public export guarantee schemes, subsidised export loans, and randomised foreign market access programmes. Our review provides insights into policy effectiveness with respect to extensive and intensive export margins as well as firms' production function inputs and its outputs. Heterogeneity of effects across firm characteristics is emphasised and the discussion is enriched with new evidence on spillover effects from export boosting policies. Finally, we provide back of the envelope calculations of aggregate macroeconomic effects and give recommendations for policymakers. Our findings show export boosting policies are relevant and proven-to-be-effective policy instruments

RECLU:a pipeline to discover reproducible transcriptional start sites and their alternative regulation using capped analysis of gene expression (CAGE)

BACKGROUND: Next generation sequencing based technologies are being extensively used to study transcriptomes. Among these, cap analysis of gene expression (CAGE) is specialized in detecting the most 5’ ends of RNA molecules. After mapping the sequenced reads back to a reference genome CAGE data highlights the transcriptional start sites (TSSs) and their usage at a single nucleotide resolution. RESULTS: We propose a pipeline to group the single nucleotide TSS into larger reproducible peaks and compare their usage across biological states. Importantly, our pipeline discovers broad peaks as well as the fine structure of individual transcriptional start sites embedded within them. We assess the performance of our approach on a large CAGE datasets including 156 primary cell types and two cell lines with biological replicas. We demonstrate that genes have complicated structures of transcription initiation events. In particular, we discover that narrow peaks embedded in broader regions of transcriptional activity can be differentially used even if the larger region is not. CONCLUSIONS: By examining the reproducible fine scaled organization of TSS we can detect many differentially regulated peaks undetected by previous approaches

On-the-fly selection of cell-specific enhancers, genes, miRNAs and proteins across the human body using SlideBase

Genomics consortia have produced large datasets profiling the expression of genes, micro-RNAs, enhancers and more across human tissues or cells. There is a need for intuitive tools to select subsets of such data that is the most relevant for specific studies. To this end, we present SlideBase, a web tool which offers a new way of selecting genes, promoters, enhancers and microRNAs that are preferentially expressed/used in a specified set of cells/tissues, based on the use of interactive sliders. With the help of sliders, SlideBase enables users to define custom expression thresholds for individual cell types/tissues, producing sets of genes, enhancers etc. which satisfy these constraints. Changes in slider settings result in simultaneous changes in the selected sets, updated in real time. SlideBase is linked to major databases from genomics consortia, including FANTOM, GTEx, The Human Protein Atlas and BioGPS. Database URL: http://slidebase.binf.ku.d