Slotting Allowances and Manufacturers' Retail Sales Effort

A manufacturer's incentives to undertake noncontractible investments depend on the profit margin on her sales to the retailer, and slotting allowances can facilitate such incentives by increasing unit wholesale prices. At first glance it is tempting to conclude that slotting allowances should be particularly prevalent for product categories where the manufacturer's scope for undertaking noncontractible sales effort is relatively large. At odds with this, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) among other organizations, reports that slotting allowances are more commonly used for product categories where the scope for noncontractible effort by the manufacturer is presumably relatively small. To scrutinize this puzzle we set up a simple model with one manufacturer and one retailer, where the manufacturer undertakes noncontractible demand‐enhancing investments. The predictions from the model are consistent with market observations.     

Is Exporting a Source of Productivity Spillovers?

This paper investigates whether exporting generates positive productivity spillover effects on other plants in the same industry and on plants in vertically related industries. Using data for Chilean manufacturing plants from 1990 to 1999, we find strong evidence that domestic as well as foreign-owned exporting plants improve productivity of local suppliers. We also find some evidence of horizontal spillovers from exporting but these are mainly generated by plants with foreign ownership. These results suggest that positive productivity spillovers are not only generated by the presence of foreign-owned exporting plants but also by exporting activity of domestic firms. The results are robust to controls for agglomeration of economic activity, the importance of non-exporting foreign-owned plants, and plant unobserved heterogeneity. JEL no.  F10, F23, O3, O54     

Defining Globalisation

A clear and precise definition of globalisation is crucial to advance contemporary knowledge and policy. When taken to mean internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation or westernisation, ideas of globalisation reveal little new. Important novel insight is opened when globalisation is understood as the spread of transplanetary – and in recent times also increasingly supraterritorial – connections between people. That said, this conception needs to be carefully qualified in order to avoid globalist excesses.     

Budget Forecast Deviations in Municipal Governments: Determinants and Implications

This paper analyses the determinants of municipalities’ budget forecast quality, showing opportunistic behaviour influenced by the electoral cycle. Incumbents overestimate revenue to spend more and underestimate expenditure in the quest for popularity and electoral support. Our results suggest that the budget forecast procedure should be made transparent and externally audited or monitored.     

Empirical validation of Metcalfe’s law: How Internet usage patterns have changed over time

Few doubt that Digital Information Networks (DINs) such as the Internet constitute the basis of a new technology-driven economic era. A large body of literature tries to understand and quantify the value of DINs to help policy makers justify investments in new or improved infrastructures. The prevailing methodological approach is to depict DINs as an observable production input changing the uncertainty regarding the performance of an economic system. In such context, the value of DINs is typically measured with regression techniques between the penetration rate of DINs and economic growth. This approach provides too little insight on the actual causality between DINs and economic value. We recently developed a framework that identified 13 different ways (“capabilities”) how users convert information into economic value. In this article, we show how a simple quadratic relation (Metcalfe’s law) can be used to quantify how adequate these capabilities are in converting the ability to access information into economic value. To our knowledge, this is the first time that Metcalfe’s law is empirically validated as such.     

Income measurement and comparisons

The purpose of this paper is to provide a way for better measuring a country's global income when official statistics fail to account for the existence of a thriving underground, or black economy. Another purpose of this research is to discuss adequate ways to perform international comparisons of income, and income per head, and to correct for depreciation. Besides the general interest of this problem, there are two more specific reasons behind this work. First, the allocation of development funds by international agencies (for example, the structural funds in the European monetary system) are conditioned on this measure. Second, the measurement of unemployment may be totally distorted by failing to account for the hidden economy. This paper has benefitted from comments by the participants at the Forty-Seventh International Atlantic Economic Conference, Vienna, Austria, March 16–23, 1999, and especially Michael Pickhardt. Financial support is acknowledged from the Dirección General de Ciencia y Tecnología, under project SEC 98-1112, and the Junta Castilla y León, under project SA 29/99. Comments by the participants at the 1997 Applied Econometrics Association conference on public deficits are also acknowledged. The authors are solely responsible for any remaining errors.     

Exploring the Relationship between Sustainability Reporting and Sustainability Management Practices

There has been a dramatic uptake of sustainability reporting (SR) and sustainability management practices over the last two decades, in turn raising questions about the relationship between external disclosure and internal practice of corporate sustainability. Previous literature has emphasized the role of external pressures in driving SR adoption. However, as recent practitioner surveys also identify the existence of internal motives for SR, a more comprehensive analysis of this relationship is needed. In order to address this issue, we develop a framework accounting for four company‐level SR configurations, resulting from different levels of importance of external and internal motives for SR. Then, four exploratory cases serve to illustrate these configurations and to describe the respective roles of SR at the company level. As considerable diversity among these SR practices is found, our findings point to the relevance of both external and internal motives in understanding SR contribution to corporate sustainability. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Recursions for Distribution Functions and Stop-Loss Transforms

For any function f on the non-negative integers, we can evaluate the cumulative function o f given by o f ( s )= ~ s x=0 f ( x ) from the values of f by the recursion o f ( s )= o f ( s -1)+ f ( s ). Analogously we can use this procedure t times to evaluate the t -th order cumulative function o t f . As an alternative, in the present paper we shall derive recursions for direct evaluation of o t f when f itself satisfies a certain sort of recursion. We shall also derive recursions for the t -th order tails v t f where v f ( s )= ~ X x=s+1 f ( x ). The recursions can be applied for exact and approximate evaluation of distribution functions and stop-loss transforms of probability distributions. The class of recursions for f includes the classes discussed by Sundt (1992), incorporating the class studied by Panjer's (1981). We discuss in particular convolutions and compound functions.