Can sustained growth be attained through trading exhaustible resources for foreign research?

We analyze the existence and the stability of a sustained balanced growth equilibrium (SBE) in a model of two non-homogeneous trading economies. A technological leader country which sells patents of new intermediate products in exchange for an exhaustible resource extracted by a technological follower trade partner. Considering a growth-essential resource, the ‘knife-edge’ assumption of exactly constant returns to scale (CRS) to manmade inputs can be alleviated, and the scale effects associated with R&D-based growth models overcome. A fully endogenous SBE is proven to exist, although its stability turns out to be a ‘knife-edge’ possibility. The long-run equilibrium is saddle-path stable assuming CRS in manmade inputs. Conversely, considering increasing returns to scale together with a completely specialized two-country trade, the equilibrium could be reached only if the two economies initially guard a particular relation, described by a particular subset of the state space.     

Customer satisfaction's key factors in Spanish grocery stores: Evidence from hypermarkets and supermarkets

The marketing literature has shown how certain attributes of the store are key for grocery retailers to differentiate themselves in the final markets. From this preliminary consideration the present work proposes a step forward by ascertaining the main factors that underlie the attributes of the store which have already been identified in the literature. All of this is taken into account with the object to examine which of these factors presents a greater influence on customer satisfaction. To test the proposed analysis, a sample of 358 Spanish customers that had carried out their purchase in different types of grocery stores (in particular, hypermarkets and supermarkets) has been analyzed considering a key variable of retail patronage behavior: the store format in which the purchase had been carried out. This study has enabled us to obtain interesting conclusions about the variables that have the most influence on customer satisfaction, providing useful managerial recommendations for decision-making in grocery retailing.     

An analysis of health expenditure on a microdata population basis

The objective of this paper is to analyse the hospitalisation and the pharmaceutical expenditures of a population. To do so, we will use cross-sectional information for the year 2004, referring to the whole population of one of the seventeen autonomous communities that make up the Spanish public health system, namely, Aragón. Given the important proportion of null expenditures, a model that takes into account the censored nature of the data must be specified. In our case, the model we choose is Heckman's (1979) selection model. The results are conclusive. i) Age, being a pensioner and being of Spanish nationality positively influence the generation of both types of expenditure; ii) on the contrary, the distance from the health centre to the hospital affects them negatively; iii) sex notably influences the generation of both types of expenditure, women generating higher level of expenditures; iv), in both cases, significant differences appear associated with the zone to which the user belongs; and v) we have also found that pharmaceutical expenditure depends significantly on the doctor who is prescribing.     

The Dynamics of Labour Flexibility: Relationships between Employment Type and Innovativeness

This paper investigates the relationship between flexible human resource (HR) practices and innovativeness. Testing the research model in a sample of first‐tier automotive suppliers indicates that internal flexibility practices are positively related to innovativeness. Regarding external flexibility, the association depends on the type of contingent employee: negative association for ‘short‐term hires’ and positive association for ‘consulting/contracting firms’. The relationships to innovativeness for practices associated with knowledge transfer are moderated by environmental dynamism, but the non‐knowledge related practices are not. Firms in highly dynamic environments can benefit more from flexible HR practices than firms in less dynamic environments.     

Labour market outliers: Lessons from Portugal and Spain

Spain has the highest unemployment rate (22.2%) of any European Union country, Portugal one of the lowest (7.3%). Superficially, these countries share many labour market features: the toughest job security rules in the OECD, an apparently similar architecture of wage bargaining, and comparable generosity of their unemployment insurance systems, at least since 1989. We address the puzzle by examining Portuguese and Spanish labour market institutions, in particular job security, unemployment benefits and the system of wage bargaining. We then conduct empirical analysis of Spanish and Portuguese unemployment outflows and wage distributions, using micro data. We find differences in unemployment benefits (non-existent in Portugal until 1985, and less generous nowadays), differences in wage flexibility (wage floors by category established by collective agreements are set at a lower relative level in Portugal), and, in practice, higher firing costs in Spain. A key explanation of the difference in Portuguese and Spanish unemployment rates is the wage adjustment process. Generous benefit levels may have been necessary for the path Spanish unions took, but this was not the sole explanation of different wage setting in Spain and Portugal.     

Antecedents of customer loyalty in residential energy markets: Service quality,satisfaction, trust and switching costs

A conceptual framework is proposed that analyses the effect of perceived service quality, customer satisfaction, trust in the energy provider and perceived switching costs on customer loyalty in residential energy markets. Three distinct dimensions of perceived service quality are identified: technical quality of core services, technical quality of peripheral services and service process quality (functional service quality). The proposed model is tested within the scope of a representative survey of Spanish residential energy customers. Regarding the dimensions of service quality, the results indicate significant effects only of service process quality on satisfaction and, indirectly, on customer loyalty. Loyalty effects of further variables in the model are significant.     

AHP-Group Decision Making: A Bayesian Approach Based on Mixtures for Group Pattern Identification

This paper proposes a Bayesian estimation procedure to determine the priorities of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in group decision making when there are a large number of actors and a prior consensus among them is not required. Using a hierarchical Bayesian approach based on mixtures to describe the prior distribution of the priorities in the multiplicative model traditionally used in the stochastic AHP, this methodology allows us to identify homogeneous groups of actors with different patterns of behaviour for the rankings of priorities. The proposed procedure consists of a two-step estimation algorithm: the first step carries out a global exploration of the model space by using birth and death processes, the second concerns a local exploration by means of Gibbs sampling. The methodology has been illustrated by the analysis of a case study adapted from a real experiment on e-democracy developed for the City Council of Zaragoza (Spain). Partially funded under the research project Electronic Government. Internet-based Complex Decision Making: e-democracy and e-cognocracy (Ref. PM2004-052) approved by the Regional Government of Aragon (Spain) as part of the multi-disciplinary projects programme.     

Immigration and local spending in social services: evidence from a massive immigration wave

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between immigration and redistributive public spending by using the recent, massive arrival of immigrants in Spain. Specifically, we focus our analysis on the effect of 1998–2006 changes in local immigrant density on contemporaneous changes in municipal spending in social services. To address the potential endogenous location of immigrants, we adopt an instrumental variables approach that uses the distribution of rental housing in 1991 to predict the location of immigrant inflows. The results indicate that (per capita) social spending increased less in those municipalities that recorded the largest increases in immigrant density. We interpret our results as a reduction in natives’ demand for redistributive public spending.     

The determinants of increasing equity market comovement: economic or financial integration?

This paper investigates to what extent the substantial increase in exposures of local European equity market returns to global shocks is mainly due to a convergence in cash flows (“economic integration”), to a convergence in discount rates (“financial integration”), or to both. We find that this increased exposure is nearly entirely due to increasing discount-rate betas. This finding is robust to alternative ways of calculating discount-rate and cash-flow shocks.     

PERSPECTIVE: Cross‐Functional Integration in Spanish Firms

Published studies of new product development in Spain provide conflicting evidence regarding the role of cross‐functional integration in new product success. One possible explanation for these results is the use of idiosyncratic scales for measuring the level of cross‐functional integration. This study adopts the scale items used in a previous study and replicates that research process using data collected from managers of 134 Spanish companies involved in new product development. Findings confirm the appropriateness of these scales in a Spanish context and the importance of cross‐functional integration to new product success in Spanish firms. No support is found for the hypothesis that participative management is positively correlated with the level of cross‐functional integration. Cross‐functional integration is found to be negatively related to goal incongruity and positively related to top‐management support for integration.