IE University

About: IE University is a education organization based out in Segovia, Castilla y León, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Corporate governance & Supply chain. The organization has 527 authors who have published 1709 publications receiving 64682 citations.

The Crisis and Fair Values: Echoes of Early Twentieth Century Debates?

Abstract: The recent global financial crisis has led to extensive criticism of the role of accounting and its use of fair value measurement in causing and spreading the crisis. This paper argues that the debate surrounding fair value vs. historic cost, and relevance versus reliability, is nothing new; it was at the center of early accounting discussions in the AAA (especially by A.C. Littleton and W.A. Paton), the AICPA (especially G.O. May), and the SEC. Although prominent accounting scholars and practitioners in postdepression 1929 focused on the use of historic cost, the paper discusses the decision of the IASB/FASB to move reliability to a secondary characteristic in its recent conceptual framework. This action ignores lessons learned from a century of research, teaching, and practice of accounting.

The role of fallow in habitat use by the Lesser Kestrel during the post-fledging period: inferring potential conservation implications from the abolition of obligatory set-aside

Abstract: The maintenance of fallows has been shown to prevent the loss of farmland biodiversity caused by agricultural intensification. These are mainly introduced as part of both obligatory and voluntary set-aside schemes. However, the obligatory set-aside has recently been abolished by the Common Agricultural Policy Health Check. In this study, we examine the role of fallow in fine-grained habitat use by a threatened farmland bird (Lesser Kestrel) during summer in northwestern Spain. To analyze Lesser Kestrel occurrence, we used generalized linear models, a theoretic-information approach and a hierarchical partitioning analysis. The best AIC-based models explaining occurrence of Lesser Kestrels showed that fallow was the more important habitat type followed, to a lesser extent, by dry cereal stubble and field margin. In contrast, irrigated crops negatively influenced occurrence. Heterogeneity of crop mosaic was not important in explaining occurrence of Lesser Kestrel. Fallows, like dry cereal stubbles and field margins, seem to be suitable for foraging given the abundance of high food resources and their availability due to shorter vegetation cover. The abolition of the obligatory set-aside could reduce the total surface of fallow land (approximately 40.9%), likely affecting habitat use by Lesser Kestrel through an increase of other non-preferred crops (e.g., irrigated crops) or by decreasing food resources. Agri-environment schemes focusing on the maintenance of low-intensive farming systems with a mosaic of crops and semi-natural habitats interspersed should be promoted in premigratory areas to maintain Lesser Kestrel.

Family Firms’ Religious Identity and Strategic Renewal

Abstract: We examine the role of religious identity in promoting strategic renewal in privately held founder family firms. Religious identity in these firms refers to their collective sense of being that reflects their founders’ and owner family members’ espoused religious values and beliefs, thereby distinguishing themselves from others in what is central, distinct, and enduring about their organization. We propose that such a religious identity determines family firms’ spiritual capital, which influences strategic renewal activities such as conflict resolution and resource allocation. Specifically, we argue that spiritual capital can be a double-edged sword when family firms pursue strategic renewal. We discuss the implications of our work for future research.

The robust multiple-choice multidimensional knapsack problem

Abstract: The multiple-choice multidimensional knapsack problem (MMKP) assumes n sets composed of mutually exclusive items. The goal is to select exactly one item per set, maximizing the overall utility, without violating a family of knapsack constraints. Motivated by recent applications of the MMKP to complex system reliability and quality of service management problems, we propose a robust version. More specifically, we relinquish the assumption that the problem parameters are deterministically known by limiting their values to a pre-specified uncertainty set. Depending on the structure of the variance−covariance matrix used to model the uncertainty, we identify four different cases, leading to robust formulations characterized by second order cone programs. We show how each of these programs is transformed into an equivalent linear program, implying that the use of a robust formulation for the MMKP comes with no extra computational complexity. Finally, using a novel matheuristic designed for the MMKP, we shed lights on the trade-off between the “price of robustness,” i.e., how much worse the objective function value of a robust solution is, compared with the deterministic one, and the “reliability,” i.e., the probability that a robust solution will lead to a feasible scenario for an arbitrary realization of the uncertain parameters.