A fuzzy-based roadmapping model for enhancing high-tech small firms’ technological entrepreneurship capabilities: cases of Iran

ABSTRACT

Technology-based firms need to survive via technological changes. Technological entrepreneurship is concentrated on identifying and exploiting the tech-opportunities for creating product innovation. This paper introduces a fuzzy-based tool to promote innovation throughout firms in order to enhance technological entrepreneurship capabilities (TEC). The effort involves identifying components of TEC to develop the inference system, specifying the fuzzy relationship among these components, assessing the TEC in firms, and designing a TEC roadmap after a fuzzy-based gap analysis. Designed roadmaps introduce technological change priorities as a growth path to firms to move up along the ladder of competitiveness. Based on the results, a method for categorizing firms into four distinct levels that involve passive, reactive, proactive and innovative is introduced. Hence, firms have an action plan to enhance TEC from passive to innovative level in a time-based transition pathway.     

How does the flow of remittances affect the trade balance of the Middle East and North Africa?

ABSTRACT

The Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) economies have one of the highest degrees of dependency on received remittances worldwide. In this study, we have examined the role of remittances in the trade balance of 11 labour abundant MENA countries. Our panel regression analysis showed that the inflow of remittances has fostered the trade deficit. We also found that the final effect of remittances depends on the level of domestic capital formation. The results are robust after controlling for other drivers of trade deficit such as income, inflation, exchange rate and institutions as well as country and year fixed effects.     

Retail-center viability and urban form: a micro analysis

Location is commonly axiomatically stated as the most important real estate feature. However, little attention is given to the urban system that reveals how location is configured, and how that configuration sustains the viability of site-specific retailing activity in the metropolitan region. In this paper, we use block-level, GIS-aided spatial data that reveal the physical qualities of the retail center’s built environment as well as employment and business activity. Thereby, we examine a hypothesis that retailing viability is linked to urban form and set out to determine a statistical relationship. Retail sales data indicate the viability of businesses in two matched shopping centers, urban and suburban, each anchored by an identical big-box retailer downsized to a neighborhood supermarket, with pedestrian-friendly orientation and proximity to housing. The paper concludes with regression estimates of the urban form determinants of business viability by various distances from the retail center.     

The One.Tel Collapse: Lessons for Corporate Governance

One.Tel was a major corporate collapse in Australia in 2001. At the time of its collapse, it was the fourth largest telecommunications company in Australia with more than two million customers and operations in eight countries. Analyses of quantitative and qualitative data from diverse sources suggest that One.Tel's collapse is a classic case of failed expectations, strategic mistakes, wrong pricing policy, and unbridled growth. The company's meteoric rise and fall was associated with serious deficiencies in its corporate governance, including weaknesses in internal control, financial reporting, audit quality, board's scrutiny of management, management communication with the board, and poor executive pay‐to‐performance link. Thus, the collapse of One.Tel has several important lessons on the role of corporate governance in preventing corporate collapse.     

North–South Trade Liberalization and Economic Welfare

We consider a general equilibrium model of a developing economy (the South) that opens to trade with a developed economy (the North). The southern economy is characterized by open urban unemployment and rural–urban migration, a competitive agricultural sector and a monopolistically competitive manufacturing sector. Hence, there is potential for both inter‐ and intra‐industry trade to arise on liberalization, in addition to distortionary effects of duality. Southern comparative advantage in agriculture may arise from the labor market distortion and the basis for intra‐industry trade is love for variety. We characterize various configurations of the trade pattern, and the resulting welfare consequences of opening to trade in this context. We illustrate a new mechanism under which in some circumstances it may be possible for trade liberalization to lower economic welfare in the South.     

Revisiting the paradox of whether retail buyers behave more like consumers or industrial purchasers: the case of price discounts

Marketing Letters - A long-lasting debate in marketing literature is whether retail buyers who purchase consumer products behave like consumers or like industrial purchasing managers. We address...     

Does terrorism reduce life satisfaction?

We study the effect of terrorism on life satisfaction for a sample of 81 countries over the 1994–2009 period. We find that terrorism is robustly associated with less life satisfaction. This effect, however, translates into only modest social costs.     

Capital specificity,imperfect labor mobility and growth in developing economies

Labor markets in developing economies may be afflicted by a multiplicity of interacting distortions. We consider a general equilibrium model of an economy distorted by both sector-specific sticky wages and imperfect mobility of labor. In this framework, we contrast the implications of capital accumulation in the short and long run. We show that, in contrast to both the case in the absence of a sector-specific sticky wage and the case in the absence of imperfect labor mobility, the short and long-run effects of growth on the economic system converge as the degree of labor mobility is limited.