The ‘light touch’ of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: an urban trick?

Although the fanciful notion that the Black Death bypassed the Low Countries has long been rejected, nevertheless a persistent view remains that the Low Countries experienced only a ‘light touch’ of the plague when placed in a broader European perspective, and recovered quickly and fully. However, in this article an array of dispersed sources for the Southern Netherlands together with a new mortmain accounts database for Hainaut show that the Black Death was severe, perhaps no less severe than other parts of western Europe; that serious plagues continued throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and that the Black Death and recurring plagues spread over vast territories—including the countryside. The previous conception of a ‘light touch’ of plague in the Low Countries was created by the overprivileging of particular urban sources, and a failure to account for the rapid replenishment of cities via inward migration, which obscured demographic decimation. We suggest that the population of the Low Countries may not have recovered faster than other parts of western Europe but instead experienced a greater degree of post‐plague rural–urban migration.     

Improving Supplier New Product Development Performance: The Role of Supplier Development

Suppliers play an increasingly central role in helping firms achieve their new product development (NPD) goals. The literature implicitly assumes that suppliers are able to meet or exceed the quality standards and technological expectations of the firm, and yet, in practice, suppliers often lack the technological capabilities needed to undertake collaborative NPD. In such situations, a firm may choose to intervene and actively develop the supplier's technological and product development capabilities. We develop a theoretical framework that conceptualizes supplier development activities within interorganizational NPD projects as part of a bilateral knowledge‐sharing process: design recommendations, technical specifications, and new technology flow from supplier to the firm, and in turn, the firm can implement supplier development activities to upgrade the supplier's technological capabilities. Antecedents (supplier responsibility, skills similarity, single sourcing strategy) and consequences of supplier development activities (on supplier, product, and project performance) are examined using a sample of 153 interorganizational NPD projects within UK manufacturers. We find broad support for our hypotheses. In particular, we show that the relational rents (in the form of improved product and project performance) attained from supplier development activities in new product development are not achieved directly, but rather indirectly, via improvements in the supplier's creative and technological capabilities. Our results emphasize the importance of adopting a strategic view of the potential returns available from investing in the NPD capabilities of key suppliers, and provide clues about underlying reasons for the suboptimal experiences of many companies' collaborative NPD projects.     

The Endogeneity Problem in Applied Fisheries Econometrics: A Critical Review

Environmental and Resource Economics - The purpose of this essay is to bring attention to some serious problems that exist in econometric application of fisheries economic models. These problems in...     

Tradable water saving certificates to improve urban water use efficiency: an ex‐ante evaluation in a French case study

This paper proposes a system of tradable Water Saving Certificates to improve the efficiency of water allocation between Drinking Water Utilities at river basin level. A market institutional set‐up, inspired from recent policy developments in the energy sector, is proposed. An original analytical price‐endogenous model is developed to simulate trade intensity, equilibrium price and efficiency gains in this urban water market. The economic model is implemented in a French case study using mathematical programming. It is used for conducting an ex‐ante evaluation of trade possibilities and efficiency gains, considering different spatial restrictions aimed at controlling environmental externalities. Our modelling exercise provides evidence of the benefits of the proposed Water Saving Certificate scheme.     

Risk Behaviours and Grazing Land Management: A Framed Field Experiment and Linkages to Range Land Condition

We use a framed field experiment considering hypothetical stocking rate decisions made by grazing enterprise managers and estimate non‐linear multinomial logit models for a range of nested non‐expected utility and expected utility models. The risk and decision‐bias parameters for five models estimated for individual responses are shown to be significantly related to land condition but in ways which suggest behavioural aspects of decision making are critical in understanding land management and stocking rate decisions. Our results show that individual heterogeneity in decision making amongst farming groups is likely to be a significant source of variation in farming intensity and technology adoption decisions. This heterogeneity does not appear to be a reflection of socio‐demographic characteristics. Furthermore, decision functions appear to be biased toward selection of simpler representative functions (e.g. Expected Utility) for sample averages. This suggests that experimental findings that Expected Utility is representative for actual decisions may be due to sample averaging rather than reflect actual behaviour.     

Contradictions of the Climate-Friendly City: New Perspectives on Eco-Gentrification and Housing Justice

As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low-carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle- and upper-income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike- and pedestrian-friendly streets, and in higher-density mixed-use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower-income, often non-white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio-environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low-carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower-income and non-white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.     

Altruism and egoism in investment decisions

We provide survey evidence that personal values have an impact on individual investment decisions, in particular preferences for socially responsible investing. Our findings show that there is a positive link between altruistic values and the relative importance of social responsibility. This effect is stronger when individuals believe that they can make a positive social or environmental impact with their investments, or when they feel morally obliged to invest responsibly. If altruistic individuals associate responsible investments with higher returns, it decreases their motivation to invest responsibly. Egoistic values are negatively associated with the decision to invest responsibly, unless individuals associate responsible investing with higher returns.     

Reviewing the Field of External Knowledge Search for Innovation: Theoretical Underpinnings and Future (Re-)search Directions

The field of external knowledge search for innovation has a long tradition and has inspired several schools of thought resulting in a rich and burgeoning body of research. However, the field suffers from two key limitations. First, the pluralism of research across multiple disciplines impedes our attention to the field as a whole, including its intellectual structure and core ideas. Second, recent developments in the business environment and key new ideas in the field complement taken-for-granted approaches and provide new opportunities for knowledge search. Based on a systematic co-citation analysis, we provide a reflective review of the literature and make several contributions. We integrate existing research across disciplines and offer a synthesis of a fragmented research landscape to present a global view of the field. Moreover, we propose a novel external search concept and introduce the idea of “decoupled search.” Leveraging our synthesis and conceptualization further, we recommend future research directions for the entire field of external knowledge search for innovation.     

Aggregative games and oligopoly theory: short-run and long-run analysis

We compile an IO toolkit for aggregative games with positive and normative comparative statics results for asymmetric oligopoly in the short and long run. We characterize the class of aggregative Bertrand and Cournot oligopoly games, and the subset for which the aggregate is a summary statistic for consumer welfare. We close the model with a monopolistically competitive fringe for long-run analysis. Remarkably, we show strong neutrality properties in the long run across a wide range of market structures. The results elucidate aggregative games as a unifying principle in the literature on merger analysis, privatization, Stackelberg leadership, and cost shocks.     

Community-Based Tradable Permits for Localized Pollution

This paper considers the assignment of tradable permits—representing property rights of an environmental good—to community members who are harmed by pollution generated by firms. These community members can in turn sell permits to polluters according to their personal preferences. For a special case with a sole household, market transactions between the household and polluters achieve an efficient pollution level. However, for a group of households, the decentralized market solution fails to yield social efficiency because of competitive consumption of the environmental goods. We design a revenue-sharing mechanism akin to unitization, under which market transactions also achieve efficient resource allocation. Importantly, in some cases, efficiency can be achieved even when regulators are ignorant of the private valuation of the environmental good.