Can entrepreneurial firms benefit from product piracy?

We examine the potential benefits of product piracy to entrepreneurial firms. Specifically, we use a resource-based perspective to show that a decrease in the inimitability of an entrepreneurial firm's intellectual property does not necessarily diminish performance when piracy increases the value of this resource, and an information economics perspective to explain why and when imitation can increase the value of an intellectual property resource. This explanation reconciles empirical studies that indicate mixed results. It also expands the resource-based view by suggesting that reducing the value of one resource can directly increase the value of another.     

The experience of Latin America with export subsidies

Zusammenfassung Die Erfahrungen Lateinamerikas mit Exportsubventionen. — Vor ann?hernd 30 Jahren wurde aus den ?konomischen überlegungen zum Thema Exportsubventionen abgeleitet, solche Subventionen würden zu gr?\erer Exportdiversifizierung und -leistung fuhren. Die Erfahrung zeigt indessen, da\ das im allgemeinen nicht geschehen ist. Das lag — wie in diesem Aufsatz gezeigt wird — in den meisten F?llen daran, da\ die Exportsubventionen nicht durch eine liberale Importpolitik unterstützt wurden. Im Ergebnis verminderten die Exportsubventionen nur geringfügig die von der Importprotektion ausgehende Exportschw?che lateinamerikanischer L?nder. Zus?tzlich negative Wirkungen sind von sehr unstabilen realen Wechselkursen ausgegangen. Bemerkenswerte Ausnahmen mit guten Exportleistungen sind Brasilien, wo Exportsubventionen von einer Liberalisierung der Importe, einer beachtlichen Stabilisierung der realen Wechselkurse und anderen, exportfreundlichen Ma\nahmen begleitet waren, sowie Mexiko, wo zu den nur minimalen Exportsubventionen eine Abwertung, Stabilisierung und Importliberalisierung hinzukamen.

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Résumé L’expérience de l’Amérique Latine avec les subventions aux exportateurs. — Il y a prèsque 30 années que les économistes ont argumenté que les subventions aux exportateurs augmenteraient les exportations et que les exportations deviendraient plus diversifiées. Mais au contraire, l’expérience démontre que cette expectation n’est pas arrivée en général. Dans cette étude on a argumenté que la raison pour ce résultat est dans la majorité des cas que les subventions aux exportateurs n’étaient pas secondées par des politiques d’importations plus libérales. C’est pourquoi les subventions aux exportateurs réduisaient seulement un peu le désavantage pour des exportations causé par la politique en Amérique Latine. De plus, les taux de change réels très instabiles ont contribué aux résultats négatifs. Mais il y a des exceptions notables avec une bonne performance d’exportations: le Brésil et le Mexique. En Brésil, les subventions aux exportateurs étaient accompagnées par une libéralisation des importations, une stabilisation significative des taux de change réels et d’autres politiques propices aux exportations. En Mexique, les subventions aux exportateurs seulement peu importantes étaient accompagnées par une dévaluation, une stabilisation et une libéralisation des importations.

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Resumen La experiencia de Latinoamérica con subsidios a la exportación. — Casi 30 a?os atrás el razonamiento económico sobre subsidios a la exportación sugería que estos resultarían en una mayor diversificación y en un mayor volumen de exportaciones. La experiencia, en cambio, muestra que esto generalmente no ha ocurrido. En este trabajo se arguye que esto se debe a que, en la mayoría de los casos, los subsidios a la exportación no fueron apoyados por políticas de importation liberales. Como consecuencia, los subsidios a la exportaci?n redujeron sólo marginalmente el sesgo antiexportador de los países latinoamericanos. Efectos negativos adicionales sobre las exportaciones derivaron de la inestabilidad de las tasas de cambio reales (RER). Excepciones notables con un buen sector exportador son el Brasil, donde los subsidios fueron acompa?ados por una liberalización de importaciones, una significante estabilización de las RER y otras politicas propicias al crecimiento de las exportaciones, y México, donde subsidios mínimos a la exportación fueron acompa?ados por una devaluatión, una política de estabilización y una liberalización de importaciones.

     

How do country‐level governance characteristics impact the relationship between R&D and firm value?

This article addresses the question of how country‐level governance characteristics moderate the market valuation of research and development (R&D). Using a valuation model and panel data from companies in the European Union, United States, and Japan, we find that effective corporate governance allows the market to better assess a firm's R&D investments. This finding is the conjunction with the effect of the legal system, the financial system, and mechanisms of control. First, as effectiveness of investor protection increases, the market valuation of R&D projects also increases. Second, more developed financial systems do a better job assessing R&D. Third, effective control mechanisms reinforce the positive effect of R&D on a firm's market value. In sum, our findings shed light on how policymakers can increase the benefits from firms' R&D spending and thus foster economic growth and social welfare using these country‐level governance characteristics.     

Fiscal Transparency,Fiscal Performance and Credit Ratings

Fiscal transparency can provide policymakers with incentives to adopt better policies by enhancing the public debate on the design and sustainability of fiscal policy and establishing accountability for their implementation. Fiscal transparency can also reduce uncertainty about fiscal policy and fiscal outturns by providing more information on the underlying fiscal position and fiscal risks. Both effects suggest that countries should benefit from adopting transparency enhancing policies through better market assessments of their sovereign risk. In this paper, we investigate whether fiscal transparency has an effect on market perceptions of sovereign risk, as measured by sovereign credit ratings, and if so, through which channels. We find that fiscal transparency has a positive and significant effect on ratings – one standard deviation increase in fiscal transparency increases credit ratings by 0.7 and 1 notches (or steps in the credit rating scale) in advanced and developing economies, respectively – but its effect works through different channels in advanced and developing economies. In advanced economies, fiscal transparency is associated with better fiscal outcomes, leading indirectly to higher credit ratings. In developing economies, the direct uncertainty‐reducing effect of fiscal transparency seems to be more important. Indeed, the effect of fiscal transparency on fiscal performance is found to increase with the level of institutional development.     

Characteristics of non-fatal injuries in Leon, Nicaragua - 2004

This article describes the epidemiology of injuries collected in the Injury Surveillance System in Leon Hospital in Nicaragua. A total of 6659 persons were treated for injuries in 2004. It was discovered that 88% of all injuries were unintentional, 9% involved interpersonal violence, 2% were self-inflicted and 0.2% was undetermined. Men accounted for 64.7% of the cases, with the highest rate among 20 - 24 year olds (5625.8 per 100,000 inhabitants). Among women, the highest rate was in those aged 64 years and older (5324.2 per 100 000 inhabitants). The most common mechanisms were falls (33.9%), blunt force (26.8%), cut/pierce/stab (15.1%) and transportation-related (12.8%). These results indicate the need to identify prevention strategies for those injuries that were most commonly treated in emergency, such as unintentional falls among older women, self-inflicted poisoning among young women and blunt force and transportation-related injuries among young men.     

Capital-induced labor migration in a spatial Solow model

Journal of Economics - In this work we consider labor mobility in the spatial Solow model for economic growth. Besides considering that labor diffuses from regions with higher density to regions...     

On measuring speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data

This article provides a critical assessment of the line of research that measures speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data. It makes several contributions. First, a detailed theoretical analysis of the measures proposed in the previous literature as proxies for speculative activity clarifies the circumstances in which they fail, as well as the assumptions that have to be made, when they are used as intended. Second, we propose a new way of combining the volume and the open interest figures, which provides additional information regarding the type of trading activity that takes place in the market on a given date. Finally, we analyse empirically the basic statistical properties of all the ratios when they are applied to real data for some of the stock index futures contracts most actively traded in the world. This empirical analysis shows the diverse behaviour of the ratios when they are applied to a common sample of real data, which confirms our previous theoretical findings. Our contributions should be taken into account when any of the measures is used as a proxy for the relative importance of speculative demand in empirical analyses.     

Detecting nonlinearity in time series by model selection criteria

This article analyzes the use of model selection criteria for detecting nonlinearity in the residuals of a linear model. Model selection criteria are applied for finding the order of the best autoregressive model fitted to the squared residuals of the linear model. If the order selected is not zero, this is considered as an indication of nonlinear behavior. The BIC and AIC criteria are compared to some popular nonlinearity tests in three Monte Carlo experiments. We conclude that the BIC model selection criterion seems to offer a promising tool for detecting nonlinearity in time series. An example is shown to illustrate the performance of the tests considered and the relationship between nonlinearity and structural changes in time series.     

Measuring the Impact of Corporate Investment Announcements on Share Prices: The Spanish Experience

We bring together three disparate strands of literature to develop a comprehensive empirical framework to examine the efficiency of security analysts' earnings forecasts in Singapore. We focus specifically on how the increased uncertainty and the negative market sentiment during the period of the Asian crisis affected the quality of earnings forecasts. While we find no evidence of inefficiencies in the pre-crisis period, our results suggest that after the onset of the crisis, analysts (1) issued forecasts that were systematically upward biased; (2) did not fully incorporate the (negative) earnings-related news; and (3) predicted earnings changes which proved too extreme.     

Do stable strategic time periods exist? Towards new methodological and theoretical insights

This paper investigates a fundamental issue in the current research on strategic groups: the existence or non‐existence of the so‐called ‘stable strategic time periods’ (SSTPs). Our study provides new evidence by adding new methodological and theoretical insights. The research setting is the Spanish banking industry over a 15‐year period, 1983–1997. Unlike all prior longitudinal research that found SSTPs, the multi‐method procedure that we used in this study (i.e. equality of variance and covariance matrix and mean vector of strategic variables and a subsequent grouping analysis performed through the MCLUST) has led us to reject the existence of SSTPs in the industry under study. Based on these original findings, we conclude by suggesting a proposition which should be corroborated in future empirical studies on strategic groups. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.