José-Manuel Prado-Lorenzo

• Doctor of Business Administration
• Professor (Full) at University of Salamanca

Pósitos were institutions established in Spain from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries onwards to ensure continuity in the supply of grain (at reasonable prices) to sectors of the rural population of modest means, for whom they provided a vitally important subsistence lifeline in years of bad harvests. They were funded by a mixture of contribut...

Governments’ use of debt as a political instrument has been widely studied from the perspective of partisan and electoral cycles, mainly concerning central government. On the whole, previous studies have attempted to determine the effects of political ideology and the proximity of elections on the opportunistic use of public spending. The current s...

Functional decentralization is aimed at increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of public services, among other advantages, by simplifying the organizational structure and by achieving greater proximity to the end user. Nonetheless, the creation of these entities has been criticized because of the potential to make political use of the...

Until relatively recent times, the only responsibility that companies had was to increase profits while fulfilling legal and ethical principles. However, growing public awareness of environmental problems and social inequalities has led organizations to include these criteria along with economic principles as parameters that determine how it acts....

Studies on the disclosure of corporate social information have identified business characteristics, certain internal factors and, to a lesser degree, the functional institutional aspects that define the context within which businesses interact with their stakeholders, as explanatory factors for the behaviour of entities with regard to corporate tra...

The aim of this paper is to analyze if sustainable companies show a higher quality of the accounting information, identified by the lower tendency to carry out earnings management. This relationship is tested for an unbalanced sample of 1960 multinational non-financial listed companies from 26 countries for the period 2002–2010. The use of simultan...

The process of local decentralisation of public services delivery has attracted research attention because of the wide range of factors that induce governments to make this decision. Nonetheless, most such studies have focused on economic and financial aspects, ignoring the impact of political factors. The scarce previous research about political f...

In the last decades, there has been a spectacular increase in the number of entities providing public services in Spain. Functional decentralisation and externalisation processes became relevant and they made it possible to modernise the Spanish public sector, which was out of touch with new ideas in the rest of the Europe. In this study, we expose...

Determinants of functional decentralization and their relation to debt : empirical evidence based on the analysis of Spanish municipalities Functional decentralization is aimed at increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of public services, among other advantages, by simplifying the organizational structure and by achieving greater prox...

The factors most commonly used to measure the quality of life of a population are related to the public services available. In Spain, processes of functional decentralisation and externalisation are implemented by numerous local governments to deliver these services more efficiently, and there may be a relationship between the mode of public servic...

QoL is related to many dimensions of life, although some of them are difficult to measure. In this sense, a lot of literature tries to find an appropriate representation of all dimensions of life through economic series, environmental and social indicators without the need to assign them monetary values for aggregation. In this sense, the aim of th...

The concept of sustainable development refers to doing what is necessary to try and guarantee that future generations will also be able to satisfy their needs. Taking this idea as a reference, the different areas of public administration, the business world and society as a whole are trying to spread the idea of respect for our natural resources as...

Purpose – The ambiguous effect of sustainable business practices on business financial performance is explained empirically as the result of the disparity of the practices analyzed, the inadequate relation proposed and the misspecification of the moderating variables. The purpose of the present study is to determine the effect that each of these fa...

The significant relationship between public spending and political system has led to a considerable increase in the studies being carried out to analyze how the latter affects public spending, debt, and fiscal pressures. Given the effect that municipal finance has on the quantity and quality of the public services that future generations will enjoy...

New business practices are mainly characteristic of large firms, especially those quoted on the stock market. Listed companies show a higher commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices because capital markets allow activists to become a firm’s socially oriented shareholders. These actors, although small in number, have a significa...

The implementation of urban sustainability practices is affected by political obstacles, in that the policy or the objectives sought either involve the deflection of resources initially allocated to other groups or are contrary to the concerns pursued by interest groups who have the power to veto them by exerting pressure on the party in power. In...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the bidirectional relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and innovation according to the resource‐based theory. Design/methodology/approach Based on a sample formed by companies with investments in R&D for the 2003‐2007 period worldwide, a bidirectional model is defined,...

El nivel de endeudamiento público ha sido explicado mediante dos factores políticos, principalmente, la ideología progresista y el ciclo electoral. El objetivo de este trabajo es evidenciar como influyen ambos factores en el comportamiento de los municipios españoles en relación con la deuda que estos asumen dada su capacidad, y como este esfuerzo...

In today’s world, the corporate image of the largest companies is closely linked to their performance in the field of corporate social responsibility and the disclosure of information on that topic, specifically, on climate change. Since the Board of Directors is the body responsible for this process, the aim of this article is to show the role tha...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyse whether CSR practices performed by European companies (both those CSR practices related to marketing‐based strategies and those that are not) create value. That value creation will be gauged through two variables: reputation and shareholder value creation. Design/methodology/approach – To carry out...

Purpose This paper aims to focus on assessing the effect which factors that cannot be controlled by the public administrator on the efficiency of municipalities on rendering sewerage services. Design/methodology/approach The analyses performed to date focus mainly on technical efficiency due to the low importance of public outputs value. For it, a...

Concern about the improper use of natural resources is causing changes to be made in order to reach what is known as Sustainable Development. Local Agenda 21 is a programme that involves the commitment of local government to this goal. In this paper, the characteristics of the social organization used by European municipalities to develop Local Age...

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo evidenciar el papel que el Consejo de Administración de las empresas tiene en el proceso de rendición de cuentas ante los stakeholders, en relación a un aspecto específico de la información medioambiental: las prácticas para el control de la emisión de gases de efecto invernadero. Para ello, controlando determinadas...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to analyse different factors behind the disclosure of corporate information on issues related to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change world‐wide. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analysis carried out was performed in two stages: analysis of the data obtained through content analysis and analysis...

The process of raising public awareness around the world concerning the need to apply criteria of sustainable development was basically set in motion at the Rio de Janeiro Summit in 1992. There it was decided that the most suitable context for fostering the process is the local level, and the Local Action Plan forms a basic element in this process....

Social disclosure, according to Ullmann's conceptual framework (1985), could be explained by stakeholder power, strategic posture and economic performance, where the power of stakeholders is a function of the resources they control that are essential to the company. The aim of this work is to test the effect that shareholder power and dispersed own...

En las últimas décadas hemos acudido a la corporatización creciente de las administraciones públicas españolas. La razón para la utilización de este tipo de proceso hay que buscarla en el amplio espectro de posibilidades operativas, eco-nómicas y de limitación de los mecanismos de control público que facilita. El presente trabajo ha tenido como obj...

Determinados comportamientos medioambientales y sociales han incrementado la presión social sobre la actividad económica de las empresas. Para paliar sus efectos, éstas han generado una vía de legitimación: la divulgación de información sobre responsabilidad social corporativa. El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo establecer la relación existent...

Certain environmental and social behaviours have caused an increase in the social pressure felt by corporations when doing business. To palliate this pressure, companies have generated a means of legitimising their behaviour: the reporting of corporate social responsibility. The objective of this article is to test for the existence of relations be...

Concern about the improper use of natural resources is causing changes to be made in order to reach what is known as Sustainable Development. Local Agenda 21 is a programme that involves the commitment of local government to this goal. In this paper, the characteristics of the social organization used by European municipalities to develop Local Age...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to analyse CSR practices implemented by Spanish companies and the relationship between such practices and corporate financial performance. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analysis carried out was performed in two phases or stages: analysis of the data obtained through content analysis; and analysis of...

The concern for sustainable development reached its greatest form of expression in what is known as the Brundtland Report; however, it was the Rio de Janeiro Conference of 1992 that created the foundations, through agreements such as Agenda 21. Though the success of Agenda 21 depends fundamentally on central governments, local administrations can...

The effect of Participation in the Development of Local Agenda 21 in the European Union

Efficiency evaluation is very important in the municipal realm because of its impact on the people’s standard of living. However, in most cases the value of public output is hardly significant, and therefore measurement is necessarily limited to estimating technical efficiency, which is calculated using physical inputs and outputs. A major part of...

LLa dirección estratégica y los de indicadores gestión son las herramientas que mayor repercusión han tenido en los procesos de control de la gestión en el ámbito de la administración pública. El objetivo del presente trabajo es evaluar el grado de implantación de ambas técnicas, tratando de contrastar la existencia o no de factores vinculados al p...

La aplicación de los indicadores como instrumentos de control ha tenido un auge especial en la administración municipal, debido principalmente a dos motivos: la dificultad para introducir mecanismos de mercado que permitan utilizar la capacidad de elección de los ciudadanos para favorecer la obtención de servicios de mayor calidad; y, la prestación...