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This issue is dedicated to the memory of Luis J. Sanz and this editorial is made up of three parts: an account of his work with the journal, words from the editor (2001-2013), and a brief CV which he had written shortly before his passing.

Este número se dedica a la memoria de Luis J. Sanz y este editorial consta de tres partes. Un recuento de su trabajo con la revista, el recuerdo de la editora 2001-2013, y un breve CV que él mismo escribió poco antes de su muerte.

This Special Issue is dedicated to the memory of the unexpectedly deceased Professor Luis J. Sanz, president of BALAS and Associate Editor of ARLA. The issue includes six papers from Chile, Spain and Costa Rica/Argentina. The case study is on the privatization of the Buenos Aires underground in 1998, a topic of renewed interest in 2015. One of the studies determines the effect of director education and international experience on the firm’s access to international markets. Another paper studies the effect of corporate board diversity on company reputation. The third analyzes the negative effect of the politicization of State savings banks on the benefits of these financial institutions in Spain. The fourth studies the effect of the diversification strategy and cross-control by shareholder groups on firm value in Chile. Finally, we have a literature review, using meta-analysis methodology, on the relationship between auditor specialization by industry and the structure of audit fees.

Este número especial es dedicado a la memoria del súbitamente fallecido profesor Luis J. Sanz, presidente de BALAS y Editor Asociado de ARLA. Publicamos seis trabajos originados en Chile, España, y Costa Rica/Argentina. El caso trata sobre la privatización del metro de Buenos Aires en 1998, tema de renovada vigencia en 2015. Un estudio determina el efecto de la educación de posgrado y la experiencia internacional de los directores en el nivel de acceso a mercados internacionales de sus empresas. El segundo estudia el efecto de la diversidad en la composición de las juntas directivas sobre la reputación de la empresa. Tercero, se analiza el efecto negativo de la politización de las cajas de ahorros estatales en los beneficios de estas instituciones financieras en España. Cuarto, se estudia el efecto de la estrategia de diversificación y del control cruzado de grupos de accionistas sobre el valor de la empresa en Chile. Finalmente, una revisión de la literatura con metodología de meta análisis sobre la relación entre la estructura de auditores especializados por sector empresarial y la estructura de precios de sus tarifas.

The purpose of this paper is to develop conceptual knowledge and skills in making financial policy decisions in a rapidly growing and profitable enterprise.

This teaching case was written by documenting and analyzing published information available to the public about Apple. It presents Apple's situation at the end of April 2012. The company reported net profits of US$11.6 billion and income from sales of US$39.186 billion both for the January-March 2012 quarter. Given this highly successful situation, students should assume the role of the company's chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, and make recommendations to the board of directors about what to do with what appears to be a huge cash surplus that the company has accumulated through the years.

Students/participants are usually surprised by the fact that accumulating excess cash could become a problem for any company. Through several discussions of the case the authors have found that answers to this central dilemma depend on students/participants’ experiences. Executive education participants try to maintain the cash and find possible investments, while the less experienced (MBA students) worry about the negative effects of the excess liquidity on value creation. While the former group might be influenced by cash constraints situations frequent in Latin America, the latter group approaches the problem from a theoretical perspective.

Since the case was written using public data, therefore it does not take into account the actual opinions and actions of Apple's management team except for those reported by the press.

The case points toward an overall discussion on conceptual topics such as dividend policies, share buybacks, and stock splits. It frames this discussion in terms of a financial strategy matrix developed by Hawawini and Viallet. According to this matrix, the company is creating value with excess liquidity, and this context helps practitioners to determine the optimal solution and provides executives with a clear guideline. The management's problem, in this case, is to find ways to invest surplus liquidity productively, or failing that, to define the best way to return it to shareholders.

This teaching case provides students and practitioners with a practical application of the Hawawini and Viallet framework to the solution of the financial problem faced by successful companies like Apple. Moreover, it shares the teaching experiences of the authors in both MBA and executive education programs.

This chapter deals with the development of banking in the Crown of Aragon from the end of the thirteenth century through the establishment of money changers, which followed similar patterns as in other Western European territories. It starts with a review of existing literature and follows with an explanation on the different banking services provided by money changers and the specific legal framework that supported such activities. It then examines the geographical distribution of private banks in cities and towns within the domains of the kings of Aragon, as well as their evolution throughout the fourteenth century. After that, it offers an analysis of the most common professional profiles among these bankers and financers. Finally, drawing on a heterogeneous pool of unpublished data, it seeks to shed light on the diversity of investors and clients of these establishments, a crucial proof of their role in integrated financial markets.

With the opening up of the economy since the 1959 Economic Stabilization Plan, was it the production of electricity that drove the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) in Spain or, on the contrary, was it the growth of GDP that drove the production of electricity well into the 21st century? The purpose of this paper is to answer this question.

A cointegration approach based on the studies conducted by Pesaran and Shin (1999) and Pesaran et al. (2001) is applied, as it is suitable for short data series like those used in this paper.

The results of this paper allow us to conclude that electricity production boosted economic growth in Spain during the period under study, confirming the growth hypothesis.

The results of this paper should be interpreted with caution, as electricity today amounts to less than a quarter of the total amount of energy used in Spain. It was not possible to incorporate other inputs to the production function (such as other energy inputs, technological or human capital), but the methodology used avoids the problems of omitted variables and of autocorrelation.

The results show that a small economy with limited resources, such as the Spanish one, is more vulnerable to energy shocks than other energy-sufficient economies. As Spain is a country with high energy dependence from abroad, the government must first ensure the electricity supply. Increased availability and access to different sources of electricity will improve the outlook for the Spanish economy. Conversely, a shortage in supply of electricity will constrain the regular pace of economic growth.

Spain should investigate and explore more efficient and cost-effective sources of energy, in particular the renewable energies, as traditional energy sources will be scarce before long.

This paper differs from previous ones carried out for Spain in several aspects: it considers a broader period of time, from 1958 to 2015; the relationships between electricity production and GDP are analysed for the first time in a neo-classical production function where electricity, capital and employment are considered as separate factors; and a cointegration approach based on the studies conducted by Pesaran and Shin (1999) and Pesaran et al. (2001) is applied, as it is suitable for short data series like those used in this paper.

Airport capacity constraints lead to operational congestion and delays, which have become major threats to the aviation industry. They impose large costs on airlines and their passengers. Uncertainty in demand or unexpected events can cause a mismatch between capacity and demand, resulting in either capacity oversupply, with a decrease in efficiency, or airport congestion over an extended period. Moreover, airport capacity is rather difficult to define due to its multifaceted and dynamic nature, and it depends both on the available infrastructure and on operating procedures. Additionally, traditional capacity management methods do not consider relevant behavioral economic challenges to conventional analysis, particularly failure of the expected utility hypotheses and dependence of valuations on reference points. This study aims to develop a preliminary framework to include economic concepts when evaluating expansions of airport capacity.

This paper reviews major opportunities in airport demand and capacity management from an economic perspective while appraising the challenges involved in airport capacity expansion processes that have not been fully completely in past studies. Although welfare economics provides the conceptual foundations for demand/capacity analyses, the authors integrate the findings regarding capacity definition, uncertainty management and behavioral economics into standard economics to guide the measurement of the airport capacity expansion problem.

The authors obtain several insights regarding airport capacity and demand management. First, airport capacity is a complex metric when evaluating airport expansion, and it depends both on the available infrastructure and on operating procedures. Furthermore, airport throughput is highly conditioned by factors that shape capacity and delay and shows significant variability when these factors are modified. Second, a marginal change in capacity at congested airports may have a great impact on demand distribution, airline competition, aircraft types, fares, operating revenues, route map and other characteristics of a given airport. Behavior after capacity expansion is highly reliant on the slot allocation models. Additionally, overall social welfare is usually affected after changes in infrastructure in terms of increased connectivity, economic benefits and negative externalities, including noise and local pollution. Third, on-time performance is clearly nonlinear, and thus sensitive to variations in demand and capacity. Finally, airport capacity and demand management involve a trade-off between mitigating congestion and maximizing capacity utilization, so decision-making tools are required to support and enhance policy and managerial choices. Three main challenges arise when developing new methods for evaluating airport expansions: the definition of capacity, the management of uncertainty in demand and the need to consider economic concepts.

This paper explores and produces an in-depth understanding of the problem of airport capacity and demand balance. The authors propose a preliminary framework that considers the challenges that have been previously identified and that, particularly, provides an economic perspective for airport capacity expansion processes. This framework is completed with a theoretical model to help policymakers and airport operators when faced with a capacity development decision.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

An important and challenging question for air transportation regulators and airport operators is the definition and specification of airport capacity. Annual capacity is used for long-term planning purposes as a degree of available service volume, but it poses several inefficiencies when measuring the true throughput of the system because of seasonal and daily variations of traffic. Instead, airport throughput is calculated or estimated for a short period of time, usually one hour. This brings about a mismatch: air traffic forecasts typically yield annual volumes, whereas capacity is measured on hourly figures. To manage the right balance between airport capacity and demand, annual traffic volumes must be converted into design hour volumes, so that they can be compared with the true throughput of the system. This comparison is a cornerstone in planning new airport infrastructures, as design-period parameters are important for airport planners in anticipating where and when congestion occurs. Although the design hour for airport traffic has historically had a number of definitions, it is necessary to improve the way air traffic design hours are selected. This study aims to provide an empirical analysis of airport capacity and demand, specifically focusing on insights related to air traffic design hours and the relationship between capacity and delay.

By reviewing the empirical relationships between hourly and annual air traffic volumes and between practical capacity and delay at 50 European airports during the period 2004–2021, this paper discusses the problem of defining a suitable peak hour for capacity evaluation purposes. The authors use information from several data sources, including EUROCONTROL, ACI and OAG. This study provides functional links between design hours and annual volumes for different airport clusters. Additionally, the authors appraise different daily traffic distribution patterns and their variation by hour of the day.

The clustering of airports with respect to their capacity, operational and traffic characteristics allows us to discover functional relationships between annual traffic and the percentage of traffic in the design hour. These relationships help the authors to propose empirical methods to derive expected traffic in design hours from annual volumes. The main conclusion is that the percentage of total annual traffic that is concentrated at the design hour maintains a predictable behavior through a “potential” adjustment with respect to the volume of annual traffic. Moreover, the authors provide an experimental link between capacity and delay so that peak hour figures can be related to factors that describe the quality of traffic operations.

The functional relationships between hourly and annual air traffic volumes and between capacity and delay, can be used to properly assess airport expansion projects or to optimize resource allocation tasks. This study offers new evidence on the nature of airport capacity and the dynamics of air traffic design hours and delay.

This paper aims to define and demonstrate the importance of crowdsourcing for the improvement of diverse functions of hotels, the advantages and disadvantages of this technique and, specifically, the relevance of crowdvoting for enhancing hotel sales, and diverse hotel performance dimensions.

A total of 45,103 opinions from Booking.com, a sample of 184 questionnaires addressed to hotel managers and partial least squares (PLS)-path modeling were combined to contrast the hypotheses.

The results empirically show the direct and positive impact of the opinions of the crowd on the amount of hotel sales that do not depend on physical intermediaries, and the impact that this has on the performance dimensions of hotels.

The paper shows the relevance of following strategies addressed at increasing the customers’ recommendations in the main social media or virtual travel agencies, as a mechanism to reduce tourism and hospitality organizations’ traditional weaknesses and increase their long-term performance.

The novelty of crowdsourcing, means that few works (although with an explosive increase and with high impact) have focused on this aspect in the literature, especially in the tourism and hospitality literature. The results of our research open new areas of research and contrast the relevance of crowdsourcing and specifically crowdvoting for the success of hotels. In addition, the methodology employed, by mixing the data from a social media, with a questionnaire addressed to managers, can open new ideas for future works.