Coping with coopetition—Facing dilemmas in cooperation for sustainable development: The case of the Dutch smart grid industry

This paper is amongst the first to examine coopetition strategy for sustainable development at the network level. Companies who want to successfully implement complex innovative technologies that support sustainable development need to collaborate with other actors of the innovation ecosystem, including their competitors, so that they can develop standards, interoperable products, pool knowledge, and resources and bundle forces to compete against other technologies. Collaboration with competitors brings benefits, but also many risks. We investigated how firms cope with these risks when establishing an innovation ecosystem to implement a new technology in society. We conducted research in the Dutch smart grids sector and explored how these firms minimize inherent risks of coopetition. We found that system‐building actors in the Dutch smart grid field not only minimize inherent risks, but from the start of their collaboration they implement so‐called enablers to prevent these risks upfront.     

Organizational career management practices and objective career success: A systematic review and framework

The theorization of the relationship between organizational investments in career development and individual success remains underdeveloped, and empirical tests of this relationship, which have been dispersed among several disciplinary areas, have produced inconsistent results. Addressing these issues, the purpose of this article is to propose a theoretical framework that illustrates why and how organizational career management practices translate into career success and under what circumstances the relationship is effective. Using a systematic review of empirical studies on career management practices and objective success, we identify three theoretical mechanisms - developmental, informational, and relational - and two groups of contingency factors that explain this relationship. Our framework advances the extant literature on organizational career management and provides suggestions to companies for designing effective career management systems.     

Local tax interaction and endogenous spatial weights based on quality of life

This paper studied the role of municipal quality of life as a driver of strategic tax interactions among local governments. A number of studies point out the existence of strategic interactions using spatial econometric models in which the spatial weights are mostly based on non-economic criteria or basic economic variables such as per capita gross domestic product (GDP). We propose the more sophisticated well-being indicator of municipal quality of life as the driver for these interactions. To deal with the potential endogeneity, we rely on instrumental variable estimators. The empirical analysis focuses on the main local tax in Spain (property) and on municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, and it confirms the relevance of differentials in quality of life for the understanding of tax choices.     

War and economy. Rediscovering the eighteenth-century military entrepreneur

Abstract

The detrimental effects traditionally assigned to warfare in the development of pre-industrial economies have obscured the prominent role that military entrepreneurs played in economic development in this period. Historiography minimises the extent to which war and the concomitant strengthening of the central state provided a whole new range of opportunities for capital investment, a tendency that has been strengthened by the paradigm of Redlich’s ‘decline of the soldier-entrepreneur’ and the technological determinism of the debate on the Military Revolution among others. The aim of this introduction is to look into the background of this relative lack of interest and to reaffirm the mutual dependence of eighteenth-century state-formation and the business of war.     

互联网金融规制与市场有效性改善*——来自中国网络借贷行业的证据

中国的互联网金融经历了一个先创新发展后监管规制的过程，本文通过对网络借贷行业的实证研究，分析监管规则的出台实施对新型互联网融资市场有效性的影响。实证结果表明，网络借贷平台资金的银行存管、持有ICP证等强制性规定缓解了投资者、平台企业与借款人之间的信息不对称，对克服早期平台间通过竞相承诺高回报率来吸引投资者导致的“柠檬市场”问题、对解决网贷市场上缺乏平台风险性高低有效信号的问题都起到了正向作用，有助于互联网融资市场的有效性提高。     

中国高端装备制造业自主技术创新效率稳定性及影响因素研究

在全面实施创新驱动发展战略的时代背景下，揭示中国高端装备制造业自主技术创新效率稳定性，测度相关因素的影响强度与方向，对揭示中国高端装备制造业自主技术创新规律，制定其发展策略具有重要指导意义。聚焦中国高端装备制造业自主技术创新效率稳定性及影响因素，采用DEA-Malmquist指数方法和Tobit回归模型进行实证研究，结果表明，中国高端装备制造业自主技术创新效率存在一定波动性，且各细分行业技术创新效率内部稳定性较差，产业自主技术创新效率整体稳定性不高；自主技术创新投入因素和环境影响因素对产业自主技术创新效率的影响具有较高的异质性，其中创新资金投入和人力资源投入对自主技术创新综合效率、纯技术效率及规模效率具有正向影响，而新产品开发投入和企业规模对自主技术创新综合效率、纯技术效率和规模效率的影响具有异质性，政策因素与市场因素分别具有显著和非显著负向影响，外源性创新因素具有显著正向影响，且影响强度较大。在此基础上，提出调整政府对高端装备制造业创新支持模式、加强外源性创新与智力引进等策略建议。     

Deep learning for modeling the collection rate for third-party buyers

This study evaluates a wide range of machine learning techniques such as deep learning, boosting, and support vector regression to predict the collection rate of more than 65,000 defaulted consumer credits from the telecommunications sector that were bought by a German third-party company. Weighted performance measures were defined based on the value of exposure at default for comparing collection rate models. The approach proposed in this paper is useful for a third-party company in managing the risk of a portfolio of defaulted credit that it purchases. The main finding is that one of the machine learning models we investigate, the deep learning model, performs significantly better out-of-sample than all other methods that can be used by an acquirer of defaulted credits based on weighted-performance measures. By using unweighted performance measures, deep learning and boosting perform similarly. Moreover, we find that using a training set with a larger proportion of the dataset does not improve prediction accuracy significantly when deep learning is used. The general conclusion is that deep learning is a potentially performance-enhancing tool for credit risk management.     

New development: China renews reform of central–local fiscal relations and provides for basic national public services

China’s reform on central–local fiscal reform has slowed down in recent years. The appointment of a new finance minister experienced in local government affairs is expected to renew the reform affirmed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress in late 2017. China has unprecedentedly identified a comprehensive list of 81 national basic public services as entitlements. Eighteen of them are subject to national and local standards, and co-financed by central and local governments. A new cost-sharing method for 10 of these services classifies sub-national jurisdictions into five tiers, in which the central government’s share declines from 80% to 10%. These measures, effective in 2019, aim at creating a ‘harmonious and moderately prosperous society’.     

Non-linear Gaussian sovereign CDS pricing models

Prior literature indicates that quadratic models and the Black–Karasinski model are very promising for CDS pricing. This paper extends these models and the Black [J. Finance 1995, 50, 1371–1376] model for pricing sovereign CDS’s. For all 10 sovereigns in the sample quadratic models best fit CDS spreads in-sample, and a four factor quadratic model can account for the joint effects on CDS spreads of default risk, default loss risk and liquidity risk with no restriction to factors correlation. Liquidity risk appears to affect sovereign CDS spreads. However, quadratic models tend to over-fit some CDS maturities at the expense of other maturities, while the BK model is particularly immune from this tendency. The Black model seems preferable because its out-of-sample performance in the time series dimension is the best.     

INTERNATIONAL RESERVE MANAGEMENT: A DRIFT‐SWITCHING REFLECTED JUMP‐DIFFUSION MODEL

We study the cost of shocks, that is, jump risk, with respect to reserve management when the reserve process is formulated as a drift‐switching jump diffusion with a reflecting barrier at 0. Inspired by the Brownian drift switching model, our model results in a more realistic dynamic behavior of international reserves than the buffer stock model. The new model can capture both the jump behavior in reserve dynamics and the leptokurtic feature of the increment distribution which has a higher peak and two asymmetric heavier tails than the normal distribution. Through the selection of an initial distribution that reflects certain steady state behaviors, the reserve process becomes a regenerative process. This selection enables us to derive a closed‐form expression for the total expected discounted cost of managing reserves, thus helping us to numerically find management strategies that minimize costs. The numerical results show that shocks at the reserve level have a significant effect on reserve management strategies and that model misspecification can result in nonnegligible additional costs.