What hinders innovation performance of services and manufacturing firms in Mexico?

Barriers to innovation are heterogeneous, of financial and non-financial nature. The importance of barriers to innovation and their actual influence on innovation depend on firms’ characteristics such as sectoral affiliation, technological behavior and their response to perceived obstacles to innovation. Firms either continue to engage in innovation, or they avoid the activity altogether. This paper explored the nature and perceived importance of the obstacles to innovation that firms confront, in a developing-country context; we build on survey data about firms in Mexico. Our findings suggest that two kinds of policy interventions should help offset a firm’s perception of barriers to innovation. On the one hand, policies should enhance the innovation capacity of firms interested in innovation; on the other hand, policies need to tackle factors that reduce the interest of firms in innovation. Policies that boost demand for locally generated innovations would assist in achieving both these goals.     

Bridging the gap: How sustainable development can help companies create shareholder value and improve financial performance

This study examines the effect of integrating sustainability into corporate strategy on various aspects of shareholder value creation and financial performance in the British capital market. The employed method is based on the content analysis of corporate disclosures and a new technique for assessing the adoption of the corporate sustainability concept (embracing the environmental, social, and financial aspects of a company's policies at the same time). Using extensive data of FTSE 350 firms covering the years 2006–2012, 65 companies were selected as meeting corporate sustainability criteria. For the above period, we find that these firms were characterized by higher financial risk exposure, lower asset growth rates, lower BV/MV ratios, lower EVA ratios, and higher MVA ratios. Such relations were generally present among different size and industry groupings. The results support the thesis that firms that incorporate sustainability issues into their business operations are better able to leverage their resources toward stronger financial performance and shareholder value creation than other companies. The paper contributes to the literature by offering a more holistic approach to corporate sustainable performance measurement and shedding additional light on its relation to financial performance in the context of the recent global financial crisis and its direct aftermath.     

Collaborative Decision-Making in Non-formal Planning Settings

Planning initiatives outside the formal planning system can constitute a favourable environment for implementing and analysing collaborative decision-making processes. The conceptualisation of the decision-making context in the light of the Policy Network analysis helps to better understand the underlining conditions, as well as their influence in the outcomes. In the case under analysis, were the decision-making conditions were of co-responsibility and power-sharing, the challenge has been to warrant the effectiveness of the decisions, which lies, as is argued, in the reliability of the framework for decision-making and in the ability to translate the collaborative participation outputs into actions at different time-frames. Moreover, as the case-study deals with strategic spatial planning, a future oriented approach is needed to warrant the flexibility and robustness of the plan in addressing the uncertainty associated with long term objectives. Those are the critical issues to be handled in the multi-criteria analysis (MCA) framework which sustains the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) that was used to support the decision-making process.     

The α-stable processes and their relationship with the exponent of self-similarity: Exchange rates of USA Dollar,Canadian Dollar,Euro and Yen

This research work analyzes the yields of the exchange rate parities of the American dollar, Canadian dollar, Euro, and Yen; estimates the basic statistics and the α-stables; carries out the Kolmogorov–Smirnov, Anderson–Darling, and Lilliefors goodness of fit tests; estimates the self-similar exponents and carries out the t and F tests, ruling out that the series of parities are multifractal. It also estimates the confidence intervals of the exchange rate parities and concludes that the estimated α-stable distributions are more efficient than the Gaussian distribution to quantify the risks of the market, and that the series are self-similar. Through the ? index, we can infer the risk of the events, indicating that the parities are anti-persistent and thus have short-term memory, mean reversion, and a negative correlation with the high risk in the short and medium term. The estimation and validation of the α-stable distributions and the self-similar exponent are important in the evaluation and creation of innovative investment instruments through financial engineering, risk administration, and the evaluation of derived products.     

Looking into the abyss? Brazil at the mid-2010s

In 2015, the Brazilian economy was afflicted by a lethal combination of a falling level of activity and accelerating inflation. Expectations for 2016 are equally or even more adverse, since the effects of rising unemployment emerge only after a lag. The domestic debate has opposed analysts who believe the crisis is due exclusively to past policy mistakes to analysts who believe that all was well until the government decided to implement austerity policies in 2015. A closer examination of the evidence shows that in fact both reasons contributed to causing the crisis, but it also suggests that its depth has a more proximate cause in the political collapse of the federal government in 2015, which led Brazilian society to an impasse for which a solution is not yet in view.     

Persistence,mean reversion and non-linearities in the US housing prices over 1830–2013

The objective of this study is to provide a direct estimate of the degree of persistence of measures of nominal and real house prices for the US economy, covering the longest possible annual sample of data, namely 1830–2013. The estimation of the degree of persistence accommodates for non-linear (deterministic) trends using Chebyshev polynomials in time. In general, the results show a high degree of persistence in the series along with a component of non-linear behaviour. In general, if we assume uncorrelated errors, non-linearities are observed in both nominal and real prices, but this hypothesis is rejected in favour of linear models for the log-transformation of the data. However, if autocorrelated errors are permitted, non-linearities are observed in all cases, and mean reversion is found in the case of logged prices, though given the wide confidence intervals, the unit root null hypothesis cannot be rejected in these cases.     

An Alternative Approach to the Measurement of Emotional Attachment

Emotional attachment (EA)—the emotional bond connecting an individual with a specific target—has been identified as an important construct within the marketing domain. Despite all the research, there is no consensus on how the construct should be measured. A major factor contributing to this confusion is that current definitions and, consequently, scales of EA focus on describing reactions toward specific referents of attachment rather than on capturing the extent of emotion an individual feels; hence, hindering construct validity. In this article, the authors scrutinized the concept validity of EA. After defining the construct, scale development procedures were followed to propose an alternative one‐dimensional scale that reflects the abstract nature of EA. Three studies support the scale's reliability as well as the discriminant, convergent, criterion, and nomological validity of the measure. The studies tested the scale under different marketing contexts. Moreover, by employing the new measure, the findings showed that EA and self‐concept maintenance (SCM) are related, yet different constructs. Specifically, the results showed that these constructs interact to predict willingness to pay (WTP) for a brand such that when SCM is low, WTP is predicted by EA. However, when self‐concept is high, the effect of EA on WTP is not that strong. This new scale will help researchers extend research on EA to a broader set of contexts, explore the relationship between EA and related constructs, develop nomological networks, and prevent the confounding of terms.     

Banks’ Net Interest Margin in the 2000s: A Macro-Accounting international perspective

This paper re-examines the determinants of Net Interest Margin (NIM) in the banking industries of 15 developed and emerging economies. It presents three main contributions with respect to previous studies: first, we analyze the determinants of NIM in the years leading to the 2008 financial crisis; second, we account for the role of different accounting standards across countries; third, we use multi-way cluster estimation methodologies which control for cross-sectional and time-series dependence in macroeconomic and banking variables. We find that the introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) contributed to lower NIM variations unexplained by standard accounting variables. Interest rate volatility is found to be positively and strongly related to NIM dynamics, whereas inflation risk is often found to be a relevant driver of NIM cross-country differences.