Strategic Alliance Networks and Innovation: A Deterministic and Voluntaristic View Combined

Over the past decades we have witnessed a tremendous growth in the number of strategic technology alliances and a growing importance of interfirm collaboration in the high-tech sectors. The literature on these topics has grown accordingly. In this respect, our paper serves two aims. One is to provide an overview of the consensus on key issues in this vast body of literature. Second is to identify some major gaps in this literature that may inform future research. In serving these aims, we first discuss the dominant structuralist perspective that stresses the role of embeddedness, but which also reflects a deterministic stance as if firms are subject to an exogenous structure. In contrast, we also explore a more voluntaristic view of how firms may possibly shape their network in view of achieving their strategic aims. This view also seems better able to capture change and network dynamics, an issue that has been largely ignored by the structuralist view.     

Multi-Regime Interactions in the Dutch Energy Sector: The Case of Combined Heat and Power Technologies in the Netherlands 1970-2000

This article is about multi-regime interactions in energy sectors. Multi-regime interactions are interactions between fairly well defined and separated systems of production, intermediation and use. It is argued that multi-regime interactions have been underexposed in previous innovation literature, yet it is hypothesized that multi-regime interactions are critically important for understanding transition processes, and in particular for current transitions in European energy sectors. Based on a case study on combined heat and power (CHP) in the Netherlands, a typology is developed of four types of interaction: competition, symbiosis, integration and spill over.     

Entwicklung des Nebeneinanders von Privat- und Sozialversicherung in den Niederlanden

In the Netherlands, a “dual system” with a public and private sector has been established for health insurance. The advantage of this system is that the positive aspects of a good social policy with room for the employer are combined in order to avoid the buroc-racy and rigidity of a purely public system. In spite of the good experiences with this system over the last years, the Public Health Service is changing and innovations must be given a chance. This explains the willingness of the Netherlands to exchange practical experience with other countries and to discuss with other EU members the possibility of a combined orientated development of the Public Health Service system within the EU.     

An economic evaluation of tourism: A case study of accommodation facilities in southern Maputaland

This article presents the most relevant findings of a case study on tourist accommodation facilities in the Southern Maputaland Biosphere Reserve. The aim of the study was to gather information on the benefits and costs associated with the operation of existing tourist accommodation in the subregion. Twenty private tourism operations ranging from upmarket game lodges to bed and breakfast facilities were sampled. The results present a comparison of indicators of the economic impact and efficiency of tourism, such as revenue generation, annual rates of return on investment, employment creation and wage levels between various types of tourism operation as well as between tourism as a land use option and the alternative of agriculture. They also highlight the economic importance of the protected areas to the local tourism industry.     

Conditioning Information and Variance Bounds on Pricing Kernels

Gallant, Hansen, and Tauchen (1990) show how to use conditioninginformation optimally to construct a sharper unconditional variancebound (the GHT bound) on pricing kernels. The literature predominantlyresorts to a simple but suboptimal procedure that scales returnswith predictive instruments and computes standard bounds usingthe original and scaled returns. This article provides a formalbridge between the two approaches. We propose an optimally scaledbound that coincides with the GHT bound when the first and secondconditional moments are known. When these moments are misspecified,our optimally scaled bound yields a valid lower bound for thestandard deviation of pricing kernels, whereas the GHT bounddoes not. We illustrate the behavior of the bounds using a numberof linear and nonlinear models for consumption growth and bondand stock returns. We also illustrate how the optimally scaledbound can be used as a diagnostic for the specification of thefirst two conditional moments of asset returns.     

Management control of public and not-for-profit activities

Traditional approaches to management control usually fail for public and not-for-profit activities.¹ The type of control applicable to such activities depends on four criteria: are objectives unambiguous, outputs measurable, effects of interventions known, and is the activity repetitive? Depending on where activities stand with regard to these criteria, the control applicable corresponds to one of six different types: routine, expert, trial-and-error, intuitive, judgemental, or political control. The first three types can be represented by cybernetic models; the other three ask for more complex and less deterministic models. For these, a “political” and a “garbage-can” model are described. Key elements in the latter models are the values and the culture of the actors. As an example, the topology for management control is applied to the area of budgeting, covering regular budgeting as well as such techniques as PPBS, MBO, and ZBB and distinguishing between investment budgets, operations budgets for input centers, and operations budgets for input-output centers. Coming back to management control in general, the paper discusses the consequences of choosing the wrong model for a given management control situation: it distinguishes between “Type I” and “Type II” errors. It finally relates management control to organizational adaptation and suggests how to avoid control systems which prevent an organizational system from learning.     

An Impact Evaluation of Education, Health, and Water Supply Investments by the Bolivian Social Investment Fund

This article reviews the results of an impact evaluation ofsmall-scale rural infrastructure projects in health, water,and education financed by the Bolivian Social Investment Fund.The impact evaluation used panel data on project beneficiariesand control or comparison groups and applied several evaluationmethodologies. An experimental design based on randomizationof the offer to participate in a social fund project was successfulin estimating impact when combined with bounds estimates toaddress noncompliance issues. Propensity score matching wasapplied to baseline data to reduce observable preprogram differencesbetween treatment and comparison groups. Results for educationprojects suggest that although they improved school infrastructure,they had little impact on education outcomes. In contrast, interventionsin health clinics, perhaps because they went beyond simply improvinginfrastructure, raised utilization rates and were associatedwith substantial declines in under-age-five mortality. Investmentsin small community water systems had no major impact on waterquality until combined with community-level training, thoughthey did increase the access to and the quantity of water. Thisincrease in quantity appears to have been sufficient to generatedeclines in under-age-five mortality similar in size to thoseassociated with the health interventions.     

Do macro variables, asset markets, or surveys forecast inflation better?

Surveys do! We examine the forecasting power of four alternative methods of forecasting U.S. inflation out-of-sample: time-series ARIMA models; regressions using real activity measures motivated from the Phillips curve; term structure models that include linear, non-linear, and arbitrage-free specifications; and survey-based measures. We also investigate several methods of combining forecasts. Our results show that surveys outperform the other forecasting methods and that the term structure specifications perform relatively poorly. We find little evidence that combining forecasts produces superior forecasts to survey information alone. When combining forecasts, the data consistently places the highest weights on survey information.     

Stock Return Predictability: Is it There?

We examine the predictive power of the dividend yields for forecastingexcess returns, cash flows, and interest rates. Dividend yieldspredict excess returns only at short horizons together withthe short rate and do not have any long-horizon predictive power.At short horizons, the short rate strongly negatively predictsreturns. These results are robust in international data andare not due to lack of power. A present value model that matchesthe data shows that discount rate and short rate movements playa large role in explaining the variation in dividend yields.Finally, we find that earnings yields significantly predictfuture cash flows. (JEL C12, C51, C52, E49, F30, G12)