Research grants

Ref: GA 962533
Principal Investigator: Angel Saz
Research group: EsadeGeo
Funding body: European Union
Funding: 198.072,42€ (Total 2.999.973,75€)
Duration: 42 months

The ENGAGE (“Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe”) project advances the goals that are aligned with the European Commission’s push to have a stronger and more united European voice in the world.

The project aims to provide policymakers with a toolbox to improve the capabilities and capacities of the EU’s external action. More specifically, ENGAGE pursues the following 5 general objectives:

Analyse the main contextual challenges that the EU’s external action is facing, arising from the diversification of international relations and global governance, and those originating from the acceptability of EU external action from the perspective of citizens and national decisionmakers.
Assess existing governance structures and policy processes, those that are foreseen in the Treaties but are yet to come into fruition and those that should be devised in relation to the multiple domains of the EU’s external action.
Examine the ways in which the EU can more effectively achieve a set of key goals, including a successful engagement with strategic partners, neighbouring regions, and conflict and crisis scenarios.
Formulate recommendations, presented via a White Paper, on how to accommodate multiple action domains, including traditionally internal policy areas, in a joined-up, coherent, sustainable, and effective external action. Furthermore, ENGAGE will produce suggestions on how to coordinate EU Member States’ foreign policies on the basis of common EU positions.
Inform policymakers on the governance structures needed to ensure joined-up and sustainable EU diplomatic action and international cooperation. ENGAGE will also reach out to other key stakeholders and elaborate on how the EU can devise and ultimately achieve certain key goals in light of the current international and domestic context.

The collaborative research project is coordinated by Esade, with 13 partners from across Europe.

Ref: PID2020-112648GA-I00
Principal Investigator: María José Parada & Jan Hohberger
Other researchers: Xavier Mendoza, Alberto Gimeno, Paula Infantes, Mario Lara, Lina Eze, Cristina Alvarado (UAB), Mattias Nordqvist (Stockholm School of Economics), Leif Melin (Jönköping Univ.), Timo Pihkala (Lappeenrata-Lahti Univ.), Marita Rautiainen (Lut Univ.), Naveed Akhter (Jönköping Univ.) & Allan Discua (Univ. Of Lancaster)
Funding body: Generación del Conocimiento 2020 - Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Funding: €27,757.40
Duration: 36 months

Family businesses are considered engines of most economies, given their capacity to contribute to job creation and the development of their communities. Family businesses represented 90% of commercial companies in Spain and were responsible for 60% of gross added value and 70% of employment generated by the Spanish private sector as a whole (FBI, 2013). Despite the growing evidence of the importance of this type of organizations, we still have a long way to go to understand how they develop, grow, innovate

and use strategies to achieve long-term sustainability. One important caveat about the study of family businesses is that they are usually treated as single units.

However, many of them have grown over time and have developed several businesses, under the organizational form of Family Business Groups (FBGs). We define business groups as a set of firms linked together by formal ties such as ownership links- or informal ties such as family kinship- whose main aim is the shared use of common resources, both nationally and across countries. Although there have been advances on the understanding of FBGs, the area of FBGs offer some interesting avenues to explore. What is still unclear is the extent to which FBGs exist; the internal complexity they must manage in order to thrive; their growth strategies or how they innovate to transform their business models leading to sustainable performance.

We see the need to study more how FBGs overcome challenges that allow them to grow. In other words, how they develop their growth strategies to allow them to survive over time, cope with crises and create value for society. The project follows four main lines of research:

Unveiling FBGs and their complexity: aims at filling this knowledge gap by mapping FBGs in Spain and their growth strategies and exploring how do owners of FBGs manage their internal complexity.
Innovation strategies of FBGs. Understanding how these firms grow via internationalization and diversification strategies and analysing how these firms innovate is critical for understanding where they create value, how they create value and how they make it possible to survive in the long term.
Corporate governance in FBGs. Four main research questions regarding ownership and governance structures of FBGs are included in this research line: (1) analyzing the heterogeneity of different ownership structures of business groups, (2) understanding how business groups invest in foreign subsidiaries and the role of pyramidal ownership structures in entering new markets, (3) understanding the development of governance structures over time, and (4) studying the engagement of family members in the process of institutionalization of governance structures.
Understanding their sources and transmission of resilience for long-term Sustainability. We aim at expanding this important line of research by studying how resilience is transmitted across generations, understanding narratives as an important source for values transmission and resilience capacity.

Ref: 2021-URL-Proj-068
Principal Investigator: Anna Bayona
Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2021- URL
Funding: €5,000.00
Duration: 12 months

How do credit rating agencies affect firm investments? Credit rating agencies have been criticized for playing a critical role in financial crises (e.g., the 2007 global financial crises) since they tend to inflate credit ratings and, as a result, risky investments get funded and this may lead to negative effects for the economy. However, credit rating agencies do provide some valuable information to investors even if credit ratings are inflated. We analyze a setting with feedback effects: the way investors respond to the rating affects the firm’s investment decision which impacts the firm’s credit quality which is in turn reflected in the credit rating. Theoretical studies show that the overall economic effects of credit rating agencies may be positive or negative depending on the economic environment and on the relationship between information and strategic effects.

However, real-market evidence of this mechanism is limited since it is often difficult to isolate the effect of credit ratings on firms’ investments. We plan to conduct a laboratory experiment in order to understand this mechanism. Our experiment will contribute to deepening our understanding of investor behavior and rating inflation in firms’ investments. The experiment consists of several treatments using a between-subject design. In the first treatment, there is no credit rating agency and investors have to take a decision with only private information. In the other treatments, there is a credit rating agency which provides a credit rating (with various degrees of accuracy) to investors. With these treatments we will be able to disentangle the effects of credit rating agencies on firms’ investment decisions and on the overall economy.

This is a joint project with Oana Peia (University College Dublin) and Razvan Vlahu (Central Bank of the Netherlands).

Ref: 2021-URL-Proj-072
Principal Investigator: Petya Platikanova
Funding body: Ajuts a l'activitat de recerca PDI 2021- URL
Funding: €15,000.00
Duration: 12 months

Environmental considerations were once seen as tangential pieces of the business world. However, issues such as climate risk, water scarcity, extreme temperatures and carbon emissions are nowadays commonly accepted as a growing threat to the global economic growth and business practices are often scrutinized for their environmental sustainability.

Over the past decade, investors and consumers became more sensitive to topics related to environment, social and governance (ESG) solutions in leading and newly born business models. Despite the increasing level of awareness of ESG practices, we have limited knowledge how managers view, manage, communicate and commit to reduce the negative consequences of business activities in their communication with the investment community.

The objective of this project is to reveal the subtle nuances and cues in management communication with capital markets on topics related to environmental damage and risk management practices. The environmental risk revealed in business communications (i.e., a comprehensive data on questions by major stakeholders and answers from top managements) will be examined in relation to corporate investment and economic regulation for sustainable environmental impacts (e.g., quotas and pricing of carbon emissions). It is difficult to design effective policy responses to environmental risk caused/faced by corporations without precise information about how decision-makers view, manage and respond to those risk factors. The final results of this project will inform investors, policy-makers and the society in general about how business leaders effectively tackle the urgent demand to design, sustain and make dominant environmentally-friendly business practices, thus improving our knowledge which policy and business solutions may produce desirable results at a better pace.

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Research grants

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National projects

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