Impact of cultured shrimp industry on wild shrimp fisheries: analysis of price determination mechanisms and market dynamics

Cultured shrimp production has been growing dramatically on the world market over the last 15 years and some of the farm‐raised species are now considered as price‐indicators on the main market places. One may, therefore, expect the price of theses cultured shrimp to have an impact on the price formation of other species and especially on wild shrimp with which they compete. In this paper, the authors address this question in the case of the wild shrimp Penaeus subtilis exploited by the French Guyana fishery (South America) and competing on the French market with the cultured Thai shrimp ‘Back Tiger’. A series of econometric tests issued from the co‐integration theory is performed between the price series of the two products. These tests indicate that the two series are co‐integrated and that the black tiger market acts as a market leader for the French Guyana shrimp product. The authors then discuss the reasons of the current predominance of farm‐raised shrimp on wild‐caught product (and in particular the French Guyana shrimp) and identify the constraints that the French market demand induces on both producers and importers. In the light of this analysis, a commercial strategy that would mitigate the impact of the Thai shrimp on the French Guyana product is suggested.     

Venture capital syndication and the financing of innovation: Financial versus expertise motives

Building on Huang and Xu's (2003) financial syndication model, we model syndication for expertise, and examine its impact on post-investment, venture capitalist involvement. We compare the performances of financial versus expertise motives on the decision to finance innovation.     

The Impact of Biotechnology Pervasiveness and User Heterogeneity on the Organization of Public Sector Research

What is the appropriate institutional set-up for knowledge generation and use in biotechnology? This paper contributes to the debate by addressing the combined--and potentially conflicting--influence, upon the definition of institutional policies and structures, of two of biotechnology's distinctive features. First, its science-based nature, which defines a set of requirements concerning the production of knowledge and the ability to use it; and second its wide applicability, which requires the consideration of the diversity of technological and organizational capabilities displayed by the whole range of potential biotechnology users. In particular the study investigates whether and to what extent institutional models, whose emergence was largely associated with the behaviour of advanced industrial users from science based sectors, are suitable to the requirements of a more heterogeneous set of biotechnology users, and therefore can withstand a variety of industrial specializations. This issue is addressed empirically by analysing the evolution of the scientific and technological infrastructure of Portuguese biotechnology, as well as the strategic positioning and actual behaviour of individual research and technology organizations. The paper discusses the effectiveness of the current institutional model in Portugal and the implications of a mismatch between biotechnology institutional research frameworks and the industrial structure, for organizations, individual researchers and firms.     

Sociocultural Integration in Mergers and Acquisitions: Unresolved Paradoxes and Directions for Future Research

Despite decades of research, the key factors for success in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and the reasons why M&As often fail remain poorly understood. While attempts to explain M&A success and failure have traditionally focused on strategic and financial factors, an emergent field of inquiry has been directed at the sociocultural and human resources issues involved in the integration of acquired or merging firms. This research has sought to explain M&A performance and underperformance in terms of the impact that variables such as cultural fit, management style similarity, the pattern of dominance between merging firms, the acquirer's degree of cultural tolerance, and the social climate surrounding a takeover have on the postmerger integration process. In this article, we attempt to take stock of, and synthesize, the findings from research on sociocultural and human resources integration in M&A, to identify conflicting perspectives and unresolved questions as well as several underresearched areas, and then use our analyses to propose an agenda for the next stage of research in this field. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Market appeal in an emerging economy: Supermarkets and poor consumers in Vietnam

With the arrival and development of supermarkets, Vietnam is currently experiencing significant changes to its food system and more particularly the distribution system. The objective of this paper is to analyse the risks and benefits of this development to poor urban consumers in Vietnam. The analysis is based on surveys of food purchasing practices conducted in Hanoi from 2004 to 2006. It shows that poor consumers depend on a diversified network of formal and informal outlets to ensure food accessibility, credit opportunities and low prices. Poor consumers purchase very little from supermarkets due to material constraints (price, transport, etc.), although they have a high opinion of supermarkets and in particular the quality of the products sold. In order to be favourable to poor consumers, food distribution policies should aim to maintain the balance of the different forms of outlets and enforce public quality standards to guarantee the right of all to safe food.     

Sources of Comparative Advantages in Brazil

Based on the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek model, the authors investigate relative factor abundance in Brazil, as revealed by its international trade. They study two different time periods: one characterized by high trade barriers (1980–85) and the trade liberalization period (1990–95). Two alternative methodologies are used: the estimation of factor intensity regressions on net exports and the direct computation of factor content in net exports. In the factor intensity regression, the authors incorporate technological changes that might have occurred over time, and these turn out to be significant. Both methods yield the same results: the Brazilian international trade reveals relative abundance in capital, land, and unskilled labor, and scarcity in skilled labor, with qualitatively equivalent results for the two time periods studied.     

Rawls's influence and counter-influence on Sen: Post-welfarism and impartiality

Abstract

This article aims to clarify Sen's paradoxical relationship to Rawls's work in the face of some misconceptions. It is argued, first, that the dialogue between the authors did not start with Sen's 1980 article “Equality of What?”: Rather, this article represents the beginning of a transformation in Sen's position towards Rawls. Second, Sen's approach to justice is not a mere extension of Rawls's theory of justice as fairness: The departure relies less on a different metric of justice than on a divergent conception of impartiality, one which undermines the foundation of Rawls's theory of justice.     

Monitoring Financial Distress in a High-Stress Financial World: The Role of Option Prices as Bank Risk Metrics

The current financial crisis offers a unique opportunity to investigate the leading properties of market indicators in a stressed environment and their usefulness from a banking supervision perspective. One pool of relevant information that has been little explored in the empirical literature is the market for bank’s exchange-traded option contracts. In this paper, we first extract implied volatility indicators from the prices of option contracts on financial firms’ equity. We then examine empirically their ability to predict financial distress by applying survival analysis techniques to a sample of large US financial firms. We find that market indicators extracted from option prices significantly explain the survival time of troubled financial firms and do a better job in predicting financial distress than other time-varying covariates typically included in bank failure models. Overall, both accounting information and option prices contain useful information of subsequent financial problems and, more importantly, their combination produces good forecasts in a high-stress financial world.