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Preparing MBA students for a complex economic social and environmental context is not the responsibility of a concentration or a specialised MBA. Our approach is to embed an understanding of this complexity in our modules and our overall programme as a means to prepare managers of the future. In addition we offer a compulsory course in governance and managing corporate responsibility which addresses corporate responsibility as a special form of management innovation and organisational change.
Tilburg University has several eco-friendly efforts to create an environmental friendly campus and facilities. The Facility Services Department takes care of a conscientious execution.
Energy Use
Housing and building
Waste and recycling
Public Transport
Conventions and ongoing projects
Annual report on Energy use - An annual report with an overview of energy streams: consumption and costs of electricity, gas, water will appear yearly.
Tilburg University has signed the 'Klimaatverdrag Gemeente Tilburg". 42 organisations based in Tilburg area have signed the convenant.
This course draws on knowledge from the social sciences to understand and strategically approach the management of employment relations by understanding the economic, cultural, legal and psychological factors that influence HR management. We explore with you how HR practices vary internationally in the selection and development of human capital, the use of incentive schemes, and the organisation of the workforce into teams and hierarchies.
Corporate financial statements are a key source of information in reconstructing the economic activities of a firm. In this course we give you a framework for analyzing a broad variety of financial reporting issues. This ability enables you to evaluate the financial performance of an organisation and make a general assessment of the quality of the organisation’s financial disclosures.
Through this course we explore the strategic dilemmas faced by today’s global companies, as well as the current models used to manage these strategic issues. You learn how to identify, analyse and create a competitive position, and then how to make that organisational strategy work.
Organisations require managers with strategic frameworks for decision-making along with persuasion skills for inspiring the teams they lead. International leaders also need a deep understanding of the diversity of worldviews, perspectives and approaches present within their teams, customers and partners. This course helps you consider how you can successful grow into the role of an international leader.
This course gives you insights into the reasons for corporate restructuring. We will focus on mergers and acquisitions and will identify and measure the synergy effects and perform a valuation of takeover projects. To this end, we will also focus on valuation in the context of takeovers. We will also study how the market perceives the announcement of specific takeover events. As not all M&As lead to success, we will also study how we can evaluate takeovers over the long run.
Increased integration in the global economy means a dynamic and culturally diverse marketplace. In this course, we equip you with the strategic considerations necessary to be both effective and ethical when competing or allying your organisation in a new market.
A healthy relationship between business enterprise and the society in which it operates is a requirement for the future of competitive business models. Ethical behaviour, an attitude of concern for the people and the environment connected to the business practices of today’s organisations has been shown to have a positive correlation with corporate performance. This course will enhance your holistic management and leadership skills, enable you to consider the entire value added system from raw materials, to production, to customer use, to end of product life.
An effective manager understands the structures that influence team performance. Through this course, we equip you with the theoretical frameworks necessary to diagnose and resolve organisational problems. We give you insight into the common mistakes made when working with teams, and how a manager can enable a culture of cohesive teams that generate creative solutions, execute group decision-making and deal productively with the diversity of individual team members.
A number of financial assets offer investors non-pecuniary benefits in the form of positive ‘affect’. Socially responsible investments, fine art and wine, and domestic, local or favourite stocks all evoke emotions which can generate an emotive response or ‘feel good factor’, giving investors a non-pecuniary benefit in addition to financial return. When making investment decisions, investors are assumed to maximize risk-adjusted returns; emotions associated with the asset itself are ignored. Typically, risk-adjusted returns are lower for financial assets with non-pecuniary benefits, and investors appear willing to forgo risk adjusted returns.
In this paper we model the difference between an investor’s subjective and objective risk adjusted expected return distribution as a probability weighting function. Investors give additional weight to expected returns for assets which have non-pecuniary benefits, or are ‘affect rich’. For example, socially responsible investments, green investments, fine art or wine, domestic and local stocks. Similarly assets which are ‘affect poor’ are underweighted, such as sin-stocks. We therefore model the investment decision to include an emotional return which investors receive from investing in assets with non-pecuniary benefits using the expected return distribution with lower subjective risk-adjusted returns. Using empirical data for socially responsible investments we show that rational investors are willing to accept lower-risk adjusted returns for assets which offer non-pecuniary benefits, since the emotions evoked reduce the subjective risk.
Additionally we find that particular investor emotions cause investors’ to be more tolerant towards risk. Subjective risk-adjusted returns are effectively lower. We focus on the emotions of hope, status, and financial well being. When investor emotion is driven both internally by the individual and externally by the product investors are willing to forgo much more financial risk-adjusted return when investing or willing to pay more for products. Results indicate that to encourage investors to invest in and consumers to consume socially responsible and sustainable products not only do the positive attributes of the product need to be reported but also particular emotions need to be evoked.
By Rachel Campbell - Pownell
The two topics addressed in the presentation both relate to the same general question, namely: how well are international and European nature conservation treaty regimes adjusted to changes in nature? The first topic concerns the degree to which legal conservation regimes do or could facilitate the adaptation of species to climate change. The second topic concerns the legal issues raised by the remarkable comeback of large carnivore (lynx, wolf, brown bear) populations in Europe. Both topics require some serious thinking as to how to ensure that legal regimes are dynamic enough to deal with the dynamics of nature.
By Mr Arie Trouwborst.
Even though many people say they would like to engage in more sustainable behavior, only a few are successful in reaching this goal in a sustainable manner. In other words, when it concerns sustainability, there is a large attitude-behavior gap: People do not walk their tal. In a series of studies we show how this gap can be closed effectively by investigating the psychological mechanisms that are underlying this atitude-behavior gap. Special attention will be given to the phenomenon that goal fulfillment often leads to "licensing": when people have shown one "green" behavior, they often feel licensed to be "ungreen".
By Diederik Stapel
This seminar will investigates the properties of intergenerationally equitable discounting by using an axiomatically well-founded welfare function developed by Bommier and Zuber (2008). Instead of seeking for the appropriate value of social rate of time preference, intergenerational equity will be incorporated at axiomatic level. It will be shown that the intergenerational-equity-consistent
(IE-consistent) discount rate can be higher or lower than the standard no-time-preference case without appealing to uncertainty. The relationship between IE-consistent discount rates and risk of world extinction will also be examined with an emphasis on the case where the hazard rate is endogenously determined. With an application to climate change, it will be shown that the IE-consistent discount rate under endogenous extinction risk critically depends on a parameter in welfare function. In particular, endogenous hazard rate can significantly increase the discount rate, which is indicated by relatively less stringent carbon abatement as the optimal climate policy.
By Hiroaki Sakamoto
It has been stated regularly that the existing market mechanism and price theories are not capable of dealing with scarcity of natural values and resources: increasing scarcity does not automatically result in increasing protection. One would think that governmental regulation can ensure sufficient ‘correction’ of the market mechanism. Although in theory this may be correct, in practice the political will to do so is often very limited. Actors closely involved in law making (Ministers, Members of Parliament) are generally reluctant to develop and adopt strict regulations that clearly limit social and economic opportunities and interests. During the TSC-meeting of 4 October, I would like to discuss whether participants agree with this view and next, I would like to relate this discussion to the subject of property right developments. Questions that I hope to discuss is a) whether the increase of scarcity of natural values and resources will automatically result in the further development of property rights and b) whether a further development of property rights might be a path to protect natural values more effectively.
By Kees Bastmeijer
Al Gore came to the Netherlands on 23 November 2010. The former Vice President of the United States received an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University for his tireless efforts worldwide to promote a sustainable society. His visit coincided with the official opening of the Tilburg Sustainability Center.
Al Gore received an honorary doctorate during the celebration of Tilburg University’s 83rd Dies Natalis (Foundation Day) for the tremendous work he has done to put sustainable development and climate change on society’s agenda. His steadfast efforts have brought the worlds of politics, society and science closer together. Al Gore’s core message for the world is that sustainability must form the basis of the economy in the 21st century. His 2006 film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ thrust the theme of climate change into the public eye. Two years later, when the recession really began to take hold, he told about the drastic steps that were needed to reform both the economy and energy policy. Now, in 2010, he is presenting a systematic way of doing just that: ‘Thinking Green’ is both a challenge and a requirement for companies and countries that want to remain economically hale and hearty.
Tilburg Sustainability Center
The official opening of the Tilburg Sustainability Center (TSC) was on 23 November. Al Gore’s presence on this occasion underscored the importance of scientific research and public debate in the area of sustainability. The TSC has been established to concentrate and enhance Tilburg University’s research into sustainability. The TSC's endeavors take place on the interface of economics, ethics and law. The center focuses on topics such as corporate social responsibility, sustainable development, sustainable investment, environmental economics and climate change and aims at contributing to the public debate on sustainability.
Tilburg University
Tilburg University promotes improvements in societal quality and development by engaging in scientific and socially relevant teaching and research under the motto of ‘Understanding Society’. Tilburg University has a strong international orientation. The university focuses on economics and business administration, social and behavioral sciences, the humanities and theology. The university has approximately 13,000 students and 2,000 members of staff. TiasNimbas Business School is also located on the campus of Tilburg University.
This paper deals with the question of how to conduct expected utility analysis in the presence of catastrophic risks. Economists typically model decision making under risk and uncertainty by expected utility with constant relative risk aversion (power utility); statisticians typically model economic catastrophes by probability distributions with heavy tails. Unfortunately, the expected utility framework is fragile with respect to heavy-tailed distributional assumptions. They analyze this question in the context of extreme climate change.
By Jan Magnus, Roger Laeven, Chris Muris and Masako Ikefuji
"Valuing Improvements in Human Health from Air Pollution Control: The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990"
Benefit –cost analysis frequently is used to make value judgments about the efficacy of government programs to reduce exposure to environmental hazards, such as air pollution. Although measurement of many types of benefits and costs in this setting pose difficult challenges, measurement of benefits of improvements in human health has proven to be particularly vexing and controversial because: (1) health is not traded in markets, so the price of a unit of this good cannot be directly ascertained and (2) alternative methods for imputing health values can yield widely differing estimates. This seminar will provide an overview of key methodological issues and uncertainties in developing estimates of monetary benefits of improved human health from air pollution control, drawing heavily from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recent experience in completing a benefit-cost analysis of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. In this analysis, benefit estimates of human health improvements were large, perhaps even breath-taking, dwarfed clean-up costs, and represented an overwhelming share of total benefits of environmental improvements. In particular, benefits of reduced air pollution brought about by this legislation were predicted to total approximately $2 trillion per year by the year 2020. Benefits of reduced human mortality and morbidity made up more than 90% of this total, with the remainder attributed mainly to improvements in visibility and ecosystem function.
By Shelby Gerking
Globus was originally established as the University center for globalization and sustainable development. Its concern was to develop applied interdisciplinary research on the connection between globalization and sustainable development, providing a forum for research and education on these topics within the university. It also provided a reference point for other universities and constituencies interested in the Dutch and western European perspective on these topics. In 2007 Globus was relaunched as a competence center in TiasNimbas Business School focused on Corporate Global Responsibility and Governance. Its mission is to conduct business relevant research that informs curriculum development for the 5 MBA programs offered through the school. Globus is also the home for the base of the pyramid learning lab Benelux.
Calvin's view on the legitimacy of interest has had a great impact on the economic development of Western society. Although Calvin took a fundamentally positive attitude to interest, he also proposed several restrictions on the charging of interest. In this article, we investigate the relevance of these restrictions to the current credit crisis. We find that each of them provides a relevant interpretation of what went wrong in the buildup of the credit crisis and gives directions to improve policies of banks and governments as well.
This paper researches perceptions of the concept of price fairness in the Dutch coffee market. We distinguish four alternative standards of fair prices based on egalitarian, basic rights, capitalistic and libertarian approaches. We investigate which standards are guiding the perceptions of price fairness of citizens and coffee trade organizations. We find that there is a divergence in views between citizens and key players in the coffee market. Whereas citizens support the concept of fairness derived from the basic rights approach, holding that the price should provide coffee farmers with a minimum level of subsistence, representatives of Dutch coffee traders hold the capitalistic view that the free world market price is fair.
The debate on the influence of markets on virtues has focused on two opposite hypotheses: the doux commerce thesis and the self-destruction thesis. Whereas the doux commerce hypothesis assumes that capitalism polishes human manners, the self-destruction hypothesis holds that capitalism erodes the moral foundation of society. This paper will develop a more balanced position by using the virtue ethics developed by Aristotle, which distinguishes several virtues. The research will focus on the question for which virtues the doux commerce or self-destruction thesis is likely to hold. An extensive literature survey shows that market competition tends to stimulate diligence, crowd out temperance, generosity, and sociability, and stimulate envy. The effect on other virtues - i.e. courage, high-spiritedness, justice, and prudence - is ambiguous.
This paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on industry location and compares it with other determinants of location such as agricultural, education and R&D country characteristics. The analysis is based on a general empirical trade model that captures the interaction between country and industry characteristics in determining industry location. The Johnson–Neyman technique is used to fully explicate the nature of the conditional interactions. The model is applied to data on 16 manufacturing industries from 13 European countries. The empirical results indicate that the pollution haven effect is present and that the relative strength of such an effect is of about the same magnitude as other determinants of industry location. A significant negative effect on industry location is observed only at relatively high levels of industry pollution intensity.
Global firms often struggle to replicate practices among their culturally and geographically dispersed subsidiaries. Part of the reason for this is that certain practices, including human resource management (HRM) practices, are complex and context specific. In this study, we develop a framework to help identify how firms might overcome challenges of practice replication through alignment of information systems, application processes, and people. We find that managerial alignment of formal processes and systems, along with informal alignment of people (shared objectives), improve the capability of a multinational corporation (MNC) to replicate human resource practices across subsidiaries. We also discuss managerial implications.
Manuscript Type: Empirical. Research Question/Issue: Does recent institutional shareholder activism have a precedent in the form of (ad hoc) shareholder coalitions that force the manager to leave poorly performing companies? Research Findings/Insights: To address the above question, we investigate whether or not shareholder voting coalitions disciplined managers in the pre-Cadbury era. We find that the voting power held (Shapley values) by financial institutions (mainly, the insurance companies) are positively related to executive director turnover. Coalitions of industrial and commercial companies with strong relative voting power penalize poorly performing managers. In contrast, coalitions of executive directors are able to resist board restructuring. Finally, we a strong relation between top management substitution and high debt levels, especially in companies in need of refinancing. Theoretical/Academic Implications: We use Shapley values which are power indices developed in the field of (oceanic) game theory in order to capture the relative voting power of a shareholder in all possible shareholder coalitions. A shareholder who is pivotal in many potential coalitions is hence powerful and received a high Shapley value. The use of such power indices yield much stronger results in our models that any of the other measures traditionally used in corporate governance research to measure voting power/ownership concentration. This methodology enables us to draw clear conclusions on the existence of voting coalitions. Practitioner/Policy Implications: This paper shows that voting coalition of shareholders can be instrumental in bringing about change in poorly performing companies.
Investment subsidies are widely used to induce adoption of new technologies that can lower the (marginal) cost of reducing emissions. To economize on these subsidies, governments would like to distinguish between firms that need to receive a subsidy to adopt a new technology, and firms that would adopt that technology even without subsidies. We show that policies consisting of a menu of emission taxes and investment subsidies can potentially induce firms to self-select.
The growing importance of SRI in the investment arena has resulted in considerable academic interest in the performance of socially responsible equity mutual funds. Remarkably, no attempts have been made to evaluate the performance of mutual funds that invest in socially responsible fixed-income securities. This study fills that gap by measuring the performance of socially responsible bond and balanced funds relative to matched samples of conventional funds, over the period 1987–2003. Using multi-index performance evaluation models, we show that the average SRI bond fund performed similar to conventional funds, while the average SRI balanced fund outperformed its conventional peers by more than 1.3% per year. The expenses charged by SRI funds, match those charged by conventional funds and, evidently, do not cause SRI funds to underperform
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