The raw material basis of global value chains: allocating environmental responsibility based on value generation

A new approach to allocate environmental responsibility, the ‘value added-based responsibility’ allocation, is presented in this article. This metric allocates total environmental pressures occurring along an international supply chain to the participating sectors and countries according to the share of value added they generate within that specific supply chain. We show that – due to their position in global value chains – certain sectors (e.g. services) and countries (e.g. Germany) receive significantly greater responsibility compared to other allocation approaches. This adds a new perspective to the discussions concerning a fair distribution of mitigation costs among nations, companies and consumers.     

Visual displays: analytical study and applications to graphs and real data

Principal axis methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) and correspondence analysis (CA) are useful for identifying structures in data through interesting planar graphic displays. However, some kinds of data sets can be dealt alternatively with PCA or CA. This paper focuses on methods, such as PCA and CA, and on visual displays. Our aim is to illustrate the implications for a potential user of selecting either method, and its advantages and disadvantages, from an applied point of view. This is a matter covered broadly in textbooks and elsewhere considering theoretical arguments. Our purpose is to contribute to the comparison between these methods, over the same data set, in order to illustrate them for the practitioner. In the first part of this paper we present a novel analytical study of a binary matrix associated with a non-oriented axis-symmetric graph and show that CA outperforms standardized PCA for the reconstitution and visualization of such kind of graphs. In the second part we present a case using real data dealing with the distribution of employees in different economic sectors for the countries of the European Union, analyzed by means of standardized PCA and two-way CA, in order to see the differences between the two methods in practice.     

Managers’ psychological diversity climate and fairness: The utility and importance of diversity management in the hospitality industry

ABSTRACT

Despite corporate investments in diversity management programs, there is a dearth in the literature that examines managers' attitudes toward diversity management practices. This is a glaring gap in the literature because the success of diversity management programs is highly depend on managers. A survey was distributed to hotel managers from properties in the southern United States. The results showed that psychological diversity climate predicted the perceived utility and importance of diversity management, and these relationships were mediated by the fairness of diversity management. These results suggest that psychological diversity climate has an impact on attitudes toward diversity management practices.     

解读新一轮改革的逻辑

"十八大"以后,中国进入新一轮改革时期。新一轮改革是一场问题导向式改革,新时期所出现的诸如经济增长乏力、效率低下、市场秩序混乱等新问题是新一轮改革的逻辑起点,放、激、管三管齐下是解决新问题的主要方式。新一轮改革的目标是处理好政府与市场的关系,而理顺政府与市场关系的关键在于充分发挥市场在资源配置中的决定性作用,通过市场发力形成中国经济增长的内生力,探索出一条具有中国特色的市场经济道路,这条道路就是中国模式。     

ASSESSING THE EFFECT OF PUBLIC SUBSIDIES ON FIRM R&D INVESTMENT: A SURVEY

This survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public R&D subsidies and private R&D investment over the past five decades. The survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues. We aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity. In particular, we emphasise a set of issues that, in our view, are critical to understanding the potential effect of public R&D subsidies on private R&D spending. Special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm R&D, the constraints faced by the firm (such as financial constraints), and the amount and source of public subsidies. None of these issues have been investigated in depth. We formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field.     

Does expenditure in public governance guarantee less corruption? Non-linearities and complementarities of the rule of law

Corruption is an endemic societal problem with profound implications in the development of nations. In combating this issue, cross-national evidence supporting the effectiveness of the rule of law seems at odds with poorly realized outcomes from reforms inspired in the academic literature. This paper provides an explanation for such contradiction. By building a computational approach, we develop three methodological novelties into the empirical study of corruption: (1) modeling government expenditure as a more adequate intervention variable than traditional indicators, (2) generating large within-country variation by means of bottom-up simulations (instead of cross-national data pooling), and (2) accounting for all possible interactions between covariates through a spillover network. Our estimates suggest that, the least developed a country is, the more difficult it is to find the right combination of policies that lead to reductions in corruption. We characterize this difficulty through a rugged landscape that governments navigate when changing the total budget size and the relative expenditure towards the rule of law. Importantly our method helps identifying the—country-specific—policy issues that complement the rule of law in the fight against corruption.

     

Multi-product capacitated facility location problem with general production and building costs

This research introduces the multi-product capacitated facility location problem with general production and building costs (MP-CFLPGC). The MP-CFLPGC extends previous problems found in the literature by including multiple products and general production and building cost functions that allow the modeling of different behaviors like economies of scale and congestion. The MP-CFLPGC is formulated as a mixed integer linear program (MILP). To evaluate the performance of the proposed formulation we analyze the results of a commercial optimizer on a set of 288 randomly generated test instances that resemble the Colombian cement industry supply chain. After one hour the optimizer achieved an optimality gap of 1.0 % or less in 55 % out of the 288 test instances. On average the optimality gap was 3.57 %. Additionally, we propose a randomized mathematical-programming-based heuristic for the test instances where the MILP formulation presents significantly high optimality gaps.     

Regime shifts in stock–flow I(2)–I(1) systems: the case of US fiscal sustainability

In the last two decades, fiscal sustainability has been tested through the use of non‐stationary time series analysis. Two different approximations can be found in the literature: first, a univariate approach that has focused on the stochastic properties of the stock of debt and, second, a multivariate one that has focused on the long‐run properties of the flows of expenditures and revenues, i.e., in the stochastic properties of the deficit. In this paper we unify these approaches considering the stock–flow system that fiscal variables configure. Our approach involves working in an I(2) stochastic processes framework. Given the possibility of the existence of regime shifts in the sustainability of US deficit that the literature has pointed out, we develop a new statistic that can be applied to test several types of I(2) cointegration and multicointegration relationships allowing for regime shifts. To test for these kinds of changing long‐run relationships we propose the use of a residual‐based Dickey–Fuller class of statistic that accounts for one structural break. We show that consistent estimates of the break fraction can be obtained through the minimization of the sum of squared residuals when there is I(2) cointegration. The finite sample performance of the proposed statistic is investigated by Monte Carlo simulations. The econometric methodology is applied to assess whether the US fiscal deficit and debt are sustainable. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inflation targeting credibility and sovereign risk: evidence from Colombia

This article relates to the literature on sovereign risk in developing countries. In particular, we present empirical evidence to address the effect of inflation targeting credibility on sovereign risk based on the Colombian experience. The findings denote that credibility is an important improvement in the institutional framework to reduce the sovereign risk premium.