Research
Publications
Adapting corporations to climate change: How decarbonization impacts the business strategy–performance nexus (2022, with França A., Sartal, A., and X.H. Vázquez)
Business Strategy and the Environment
Firm, industry, and country effects on CO2 emissions levels. (2023, with Sartal, A. and X.H. Vázquez)
Business Strategy and the Environment
Making a virtue of necessity once again: assessing the effect of temporary labor on lean practices in highly routinized environments. (2022, with Sartal, A. and X.H. Vázquez)
International Journal of Lean Six Sigma
Working papers
Religious Identity, Contracts, and Hold-Up Problems
This paper explores how principals’ identities shape the use of contractual safeguards and the incidence of hold-up problems. Using 50,083 apprenticeship contracts
registered in Early Modern Venice (1575–1775), I show that masters with a stronger religious identity are significantly less likely to include third-party guarantor clauses.
Religious identity is measured using a continuous, name-based index, and the identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in religiosity induced by earthquake exposure before the masters were born. Evidence from apparitions of the Virgin Mary, a regression discontinuity around Pentecost, and heterogeneity analyses points to three complementary mechanisms: beliefs in supernatural monitoring, religious (prosocial) norms, and in-group dynamics. Contrary to the standard prediction that weaker contractual safeguards should increase agent opportunism, religious masters tend to experience fewer hold-up problems in the form of apprentice early exit. This result appears to be driven by religious masters hiring more religious apprentices, less opportunistic apprentices self-selecting into contracts with religious masters, and a shift toward relational contracting.
The Medieval Church and the foundations of impersonal exchange (with Benito Arruñada)
R&R at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
By refining the moral code and enforcing it through the new ‘mendicant’ orders, the Church of the 13th century laid the cognitive, interpersonal, and institutional groundwork for large-scale cooperation based on one-shot transactions between strangers. However, net outcomes at these three levels stem from opposite-sign effects coherent with the specialization of specific branches within the Church: while exposure to Dominicans had positive effects on traits favoring impersonal exchange, consistent with their emphasis on rationality, exposure to Franciscans had negative effects, related to their emotionality, and favoring personal exchange. Moreover, the effects of exposure to the secular clergy were insignificant. Our causal identification relies on refuting multiple confounders, comparing second-generation migrants, and leveraging within-country differences in mendicants’ exposure in Europe and Mesoamerica.
The Agrarian Origins of Organizational Normative Deviance (with Xose H. Vazquez)
R&R at Social Forces
This paper develops and empirically tests a theory that links organizations’ normative deviance to countries’ agrarian origins. Specifically, we posit that two factors influence this relationship. First, how individual property rights were defined in traditional agrarian systems due to transaction costs for protecting labor rents. Second, the evolutionary process that unfolded since the early stages of agriculture, which led to the development of idiosyncratic informal institutions enforcing normative conformity to varying extents across countries. This theorizing leads to a testable hypothesis, namely, that organizations based in countries whose agrarian origins are related to rice cultivation exhibit lower normative deviance. Empirically, we explore the relationship between rice cultivation in 2000 BCE and firms’ normative deviance regarding socially responsible behaviors. These findings not only contribute to developing theory on the phenomenon of normative deviance and organizational heterogeneity, but also add to the growing social control literature. Moreover, by delving into the historical factors underlying social control, we unveil the origins of organizations’ need to comply with societal expectations. Finally, our work stresses the need to go beyond “institutional black boxes”, such as collectivism or embeddedness, and engage in a more fine-grained explanation of the institutional traits that shape organizational behavior.
lucas.lopez@uvigo.gal 