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This paper is an attempt to empirically examine the influence of corporate governance on zombie theory. Recent data indicates that the problem affects more than 10% of all firms and is worth close to a billion Euros in the European Union. It is thus an important problem worth analysing in European countries, and Spain is one of the worst affected. The sample studied here thus consists of Spanish companies with negative equity over the five business years from 2013 to 2017. The analysis focuses on establishing how corporate government aspects-board size, dedication to board meetings, concentration of ownership, owners and gender of the CEO-, affect the severity of extreme zombie firms. It uses the amount and temporality dimensions of EZIndex. The results confirm that internal dimensions such as corporate governance are important aspects to be introduced into zombie analysis. To control zombiness our results suggest structuring boards of directors with more than one member, CEOs with non-exclusive dedication, non-concentrated ownership and female CEOs. We also find that all these factors affect both amount and temporality, so factors do not affect zombie companies partially but totally. The contributions of the paper are twofold: first it includes corporate governance factors as a relevant approach for understanding zombie theory; and second, it encourages companies to manage risk-taking decisions efficiently so as to avoid the proliferation of zombies.

A special effort is being made in higher education to adapt to the dynamics required by business management. Teamwork is a priority in business environments so it should also be one among university students. Team diversity and its links to performance comprise one of the aspects most widely worked on, but outcomes are still inconsistent. In this paper we advance the understanding of the relationship between team diversity and performance in two ways: first by blending the two main theoretical approaches (social categorization holding that diversity has a negative effect on team performance versus information/decision-making-based theories that hold the opposite), taking conflict as a mediator variable; and second by contextualizing the link through a contingency approach in which initial within-group cohesion, strength of leadership, and prior experience of group members in working as a group are taken as significant moderator variables. We base our work on an Input-Mediator-Outcome model framework and blend it with a Categorization-Elaboration Model. The results show that only in the right context (group cohesion, strength of leadership, and prior experience of group members) can diversity produce improvements in the performance of working teams.

This paper seeks to discover whether the performance of university students has improved in the wake of the changes in higher education introduced by the Bologna Declaration of 1999 and the construction of the European Higher Education Area. A principal component analysis is used to construct a multi-dimensional performance variable called the LEArning Society-adapted Outcome Index. A quantile regression is then applied to ensure that the analysis does not focus solely on average figures, and the performance of students of various types is analyzed. Significant improvements are found in the acquisition of systemic and interpersonal skills and in student satisfaction but not in cognitive aspects. There are improvements in students of all types, but they are smaller among the best students.

This work analyzes the role of governance of financial entities in the current crisis. Neoliberal eco nomic policies, deregulation and liberalization have characterized financial globalization, giving rise to the financialization of the economy. This paper, using the analysis-synthesis method, shows that the corporate governance of entities has adapted to the new social environment under the influence of the interests of the investors. The results of this paper suggest the need to monitor the over-emphasis on the maximization of short-term shareholder value without relativizing the risk taken to achieve it, as such, the emphasis on short-term shareholder value is considered a crucial contributing factor to the present crisis.

Businesses in technical bankruptcy are part of the European context, many of them in such financial distress that they have lost all their equity and a very high percentage of them have even incurred negative equity. There is a very little literature analysing these companies; moreover, they are considered as out of the ordinary because they do not fit into conventional theories of business, and are removed from most samples. They are largely neglected. The research questions posed here are a step towards remedying this: "What are the scale and the economic impact of negative equity companies in terms of risk transference?", "Does this problem differ from one European country to another?", "Is it an effect of the crisis?". Using the Bureau Van Dijk's Amadeus database, we find that nearly 20% of companies have negative equity. Such companies handle more than one billion Euros, i.e. nearly 10% of European GDP. So the results suggest that negative equity companies have a high weight in Europe and, based on the country cluster studied, it seems that neither culture nor geographical area is determinant in explaining their distribution across countries. Nor is the crisis a determinant in explaining their existence, so the problem is not cyclical but structural. These findings have potentially important implications in encouraging European decision makers to factor such companies into their policies and to include them in economic models. Keywords moral hazard negative equity stakeholders Amadeus zombies crisis JEL Classification G33, M29 Introduction The world's leading economies are striving to become more competitive so that they can all get onto the path of sustainable growth and into a new economic cycle. A competitive economy needs a competitive fabric of business, and it is precisely in this aspect that the main weakness of many countries may lie. There are companies whose future viability is uncertain and whose ability to compete is highly limited. These companies may transfer risks, and thus losses should they go under, to others with which they maintain trading and other links. They have in fact been described as "zombie companies" (Ahearne and Shinada 2005; Caballero et al. 2008). The most extreme type of zombie company comprises negative equity companies which continue to trade in spite of having lost all their equity (see Mohrman and Stuerke 2014 for an example). The risk posed by these extremely leveraged companies lines not so much in the risk of their going bankrupt but rather in the potential economic impact of all their risks being transferred to other companies. Despite the fact that negative equity companies are part of the national context in European countries, scholars of international finance have paid scant attention to them (Luo et al. 2015; Retolaza et al. 2016). The research questions posed here are a step towards remedying this: "What are the scale and the economic impact of negative equity companies in terms of risk transference?" "Does this problem differ from one European country to another?" "Is it an effect of the crisis?". 1. Research question and structure To answer these questions our study uses the Bureau Van Dijk's Amadeus database to analyze the situation in the European Union in 2012 and the Amadeus Top 250,000 database to test for a country effect and a crisis effect and to analyse the trend over the 4-year period from 2009 to 2012. Earlier studies have also used these data and the quality of the information in Amadeus has been checked for accounting data (e.g. Faccio et al. 2011). We focus on European countries because reporting requirements and practices mean that rich data are available for a large fraction, in terms of euro value, of the universe of equity. The aim of this study is to add to the established literature by looking at extremely leveraged companies, with negative equity understood as the worst capital structure of companies in terms of guarantees of meeting the obligations acquired with their stakeholders. …

Purpose – This paper seeks to identify factors potentially conditioning firms’ financial internationalization. Companies often internationalize their financial areas as part of their larger internationalization strategy. In other words, such an initiative is associated with the internationalization of non‐financial business areas. However, the move to financial internationalization may also obey a specific strategy designed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by increasingly global financial milieus and markets. Then again, of course, it may respond to a combination of the two, in which case all the factors mentioned are likely to exercise some influence.Design/methodology/approach – To test these propositions, a sample of 461 firms located in the Basque Country (Northern Spain), were analyzed between 16 June and 13 July 2004. Primary data were collected by telephone surveys, with a specially designed questionnaire tested previously with a number of pilot businesses. The sample represents a con...

During the 1990s, Spain changed from a net recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) to one of the most important investors in Latin America. Fieldwork in this article identifies trends and directions of Spanish acquisitions, with an emphasis on the 1990 to 2001 period. An overview of the emergence of the Spanish MNC is followed by statistical analysis of their competitive (i.e. ownership) advantage as measured by the relative strength of market size, wage differentials and cultural affinity. This analysis helped in explaining the link between strategic decisions of the Spanish MNCs and their choice of geography and industrial sector. Empirical analysis finds Spanish MNCs responded to privatisation opportunities and to gain access to specific foreign markets rather than to an attempt to create global export platforms.

This paper seeks to determine whether the introduction of new degrees under the European Higher Education Area has brought about any improvement in students’ performance, based on an extended concept of performance and an analysis of the core values and distribution tails, i.e. distinguishing between the improvements achieved by excellent students and by average students. Quantile regression analysis is combined with a least squeres ordinaries (OLS) approach to estimate students’ performance. This method is able to capture the extreme behaviour at both tails of students’ performance distribution. An empirical study is conducted on students’ grades in the subject Business Management: Introduction at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Our principal finding is that although OLS estimation indicates that there is no significant improvement in students’ performance, the results for quantile regression show that in the 25 % quantile final grades increase significantly, while in the extreme deciles (95 %) their performance decrease.