1,720,976 research outputs found
Strong planners versus weak planners: An analysis of nonprofit organizations
No full textPrevious academic research found that two broad approaches characterize non-profit foundations when setting objectives. In the first approach, the business-like model, nonprofit foundations are inspired by for-profit organizations, and they adopt methodologies, tools, and practices typical of business management to better respond to social issues connected to their local dimensions. The second approach, the charity-like model, conversely argues that hybridization toward the market risks undermining the peculiarities of the nonprofit sector, thereby emphasizing the need of nonprofit foundations to be guided by the solidarity of interests that resides in the natural interdependencies of various members of society. To date, no study has fo-cused on the role of nonprofit foundation employees to understand the impact of a business-like approach on employee professionalism and job performance. Using responses from 277 employees of nonprofit foundations, this study investigates whether increased participation in planning and control tools increases employees’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the grant process. The results show that a busi-ness-like approach to planning, if well-balanced and considered, can contribute to greater employee professionalism and lead to improved information clarity and project innovation
Accounting for Capital and Reserves, OCI and Profit Distribution
Full text linkOne of the discerning features of the process leading to the passing of the Directive 2013/34/EU on ‘the annual financial statements, consolidated financial statements and the related reports of certain types of undertakings’ (i.e. the EU-D-34/2013 from now onwards) was the attempt to balance the need for a unified set of accounting rules and principles that would homogenise accounting practices of smaller and private firms in the EU, while allowing national legislators to exert enough flexibility to adapt the national general accounting principles to the specific features of the firms and the national economy (Andrè, 2017)
What's in a shade? The market relevance of green bonds’ external reviews
No full textWith the growth of green bonds as an asset class, the certification of the actual climate footprint of projects financed with these bonds is gaining momentum among investors and policymakers. We investigate the informative content of Second Party Opinions (SPOs) issued by external reviewers who assess the quality of green bonds by collecting a global sample of over 1200 corporate green bonds and analyzing matching results for 336 of them. We show that the market assigns a premium to the green bonds with the best SPOs' valuation - namely, the “dark-” and “medium-” green bonds. However, in presence of a formal credit rating, SPO external reviews do not appear to incorporate distinctive information priced by the market. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that stricter green investment regulations, like the adoption of the “EU Taxonomy,” produce a “fly-to-quality” effect that widens the spread between dark and lighter green bonds' returns. Responsible investors also appear to rely on the judgement of external reviewers when a formal credit rating is absent, and they have significantly higher stakes in the greener bonds. Overall, our results indicate that SPO external reviews can reduce information asymmetry between issuers and investors absent of a credit rating, but they are not informative for rated green bonds
A novel extremely localized molecular orbitals based technique for the one-electron density matrix computation
No full textThe 'nearsightedness' of electronic structure is an underlying principle in many of the linear scaling methods recently developed to study large systems. Among them, there are strategies based on the transfer of orbitals strictly localized on molecular fragments, such as the extremely localized molecular orbitals (ELMOs). Unfortunately, due to the non-orthogonal nature of these orbitals, the density matrix calculation is computationally demanding, so preventing a straightforward application to very large molecules. In this Letter, we show how this problem can be overcome by a proper application of the 'Divide and Conquer' strategy to the ELMO approach. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Extremely localized molecular orbitals: Theory and applications
No full textOrbitals that are extremely localized on molecular fragments represent a powerful tool for a number of purposes: to cite a few examples, they allow to reduce strongly the complexity of calculations on large systems and are easily transferable from one molecule to another, providing a suitable and efficient way to build up the electronic structure of large molecules. Recently, we have developed efficient algorithms to determine extremely localized molecular orbitals (ELMOs), which will be reviewed in this paper. As a rigorous localization is strictly connected to a reduction in the number of variational parameters, which reflects into an increased value of the associated energy with respect to the Hartree Fock value, we have developed a number of strategies to relax the wavefunction built up using transferred localized orbitals. The extreme localization has also been exploited in connection with the "Divide and Conquer" technique to determine the electron densities of large polypeptides assembled from orbitals computed on small model molecules. Moreover, we will discuss the recent application of the ELMOs in the framework of the hybrid QM/MM methods to describe the frontier region. We will also show that the ELMOs can be used to extract chemical interpretations from numerical results. A variety of applications will be presented. © Springer-Verlag 2007
Tracing the origin of raw milk from farm by using automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA) fingerprinting of microbiota
No full textThe aim of the study was to distinguish the raw milk from different farms in relation to their geographical sites within a narrowed territorial district. The goal was achieved by applying a molecular based system for traceability that uses microbial DNA barcodes present in milk. Microbiota of milk were fingerprinted by PCR of the 16Se23S intergenic transcribed spacer using the Automated Ribosomal Intergenic Spacer Analysis (ARISA). A total of 64 markers within the range 279e756 bp were detected on the thirty-eight bulk milk samples, none of which was common to all the patterns. Overall samples did not show relevant differences across the two years of sampling. In fact, every farm maintained a specific
core profile over time, thus demonstrating that the interaction between site and year of sampling is not significant and that the variability between years does not affect the distinction between grouping of farms. The system was able to trace the geographical origin of raw milk with a resolution of less than 5 km. According to the European regulations for the protection of the geographical names of foodstuffs which have a tangible link to the territory, the ARISA system described here may represent a suitable analytical tool for tracing the origin of milk integrating and reinforcing traceability processes of the dairy chain
DENPOL: A new program to determine electron densities of polypeptides using extremely localized molecular orbitals
No full textA new method to compute high-quality electron densities of polypeptides is proposed. The method is based on the transferability properties of extremely localized molecular orbitals, which can be used to describe with great accuracy the different functional groups of a molecule. It is therefore possible to generate a database of such orbitals, each of them associated with specific amino acids or with the peptide bond. A new program, DENPOL, has been written in order to build up the electron density of a generic polypeptide using this database. Due to both the large number of orbitals required to describe a polypeptide and the non-orthogonal nature of these orbitals, a Divide & Conquer strategy has been used to assemble the final electron density. The application of this approach is particularly efficient thanks to the extreme localization of the orbitals. The comparison with the corresponding electron densities generated by the Hartree-Fock method, shows the accuracy of the proposed approach and indicates that the electron densities generated by DENPOL are very close to those generated by an ab initio approach. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
The agency of greenwashing
Full text linkAs climate change increasingly challenges business models, the disclosure of firm environmental performance casts growing attention by corporate stakeholders. This creates wider opportunities and incentives for greenwash behaviors. We propose a novel set of measures to capture greenwashing and we investigate the association between greenwashing and corporate governance features that traditionally mitigate agency problems. We show that board characteristics are variously associated with the apparent degree of corporate greenwashing. Firms with more independent directors tend to greenwash more, the presence of female board directors seems to have a positive impact on the degree of greenwashing, while the effect of board size on greenwashing remains ambiguous. Importantly, we find that greenwashing reduces firm value
Corporate social responsibility and comparative capitalism frameworks : evidence from the United States, Poland, and Italy
No full textUsing the varieties of capitalism perspective and institutional theory as frameworks, we analyze cross-cultural differences between firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches. We investigate three countries with different institutional settings: the United States, representing a liberal market economy; Italy, representing a coordinated market economy; and Poland, an example of a dependent market economy. We examine the differences in their CSR stances, operationalized through Porter and Kramer's concept of the four CSR categories: good citizenship, mitigating harm from the value chain, transforming value chain activities, and strategic philanthropy, based on data from 269 questionnaires administered to managers attending executive seminars at the authors' universities. Focusing on stakeholder engagement activities (SEAs) across the three economies, we show that companies in all three countries engage in the four categories of CSR activities. However, using a series of tests and rankings on means and standard deviations, followed by the subsequent analysis of variance, we argue that SEAs are emphasized more in American than in Polish and Italian companies, with the latter two countries showing more subtle differences despite some institutional similarities. Our
results shed light on how different capitalistic models are associated with different CSR approaches, allowing policy-makers and practitioners to better tackle CSR objectives in
different countries
- …
