Benchmarking in the Dutch Waste-Water Treatment Sector

The Dutch water boards have recently completed a performance measurement and evaluation project for waste-water treatment. This project was intended to strengthen the boards' accountability to their stakeholders and to identify starting points for performance improvement. The Balanced Scorecard was used as a framework to develop a broad set of performance indicators. This article describes the benchmarking project and how the Dutch water boards intend to use the results to improve performance. Finally, the Dutch project is compared with the UK's Best Value project.     

Investment in Africa's Manufacturing Sector: A Four Country Panel Data Analysis

Firm level data for the manufacturing sector in Africa, presented in this paper, shows very low levels of investment. The importance of profit effects on investment is investigated using a flexible accelerator, a specification based on the Euler equation and a simple generalisation of these specificiations. There are controls for firm fixed effects. It is shown that the profit effect is very similar for both the accelerator and Euler equation specifications. A comparison with other studies shows that, for small firms, the effect is much smaller in Africa than for other countries. Reasons for the relative insensitivity of investment to profits in African firms are suggested. For the most general specification tested there are no significant differences in the size of the profit effect across the four countries in the study.     

Modeling structural changes in the volatility process

GARCH-type models have been very successful in describing the volatility dynamics of financial return series for short periods of time. However, the time-varying behavior of investors, for example, may cause the structure of volatility to change and the assumption of stationarity is no longer plausible. To deal with this issue, the current paper proposes a conditional volatility model with time-varying coefficients based on a multinomial switching mechanism. By giving more weight to either the persistence or shock term in a GARCH model, conditional on their relative ability to forecast a benchmark volatility measure, the switching reinforces the persistent nature of the GARCH model. The estimation of this benchmark volatility targeting or BVT-GARCH model for Dow 30 stocks indicates that the switching model is able to outperform a number of relevant GARCH setups, both in- and out-of-sample, also without any informational advantages.     

Credit Constraints in Manufacturing Enterprises in Africa

We investigate the question of whether firms in Africa's manufacturingsector are credit constrained. The fact that few firms obtaincredit is not sufficient to prove constraints, since certainfirms may not have a demand for credit while others may be refusedcredit as part of profit maximising behaviour by banks. To investigatethis question, we use direct evidence on whether firms had ademand of credit and whether their demand was satisfied in theformal credit market, based on panel data on firms in the manufacturingsector from six African countries. Of those firms with a demandfor credit, only a quarter obtained a formal sector loan. Ouranalysis suggests that while banks allocate credit on the basisof expected profits, micro or small firms are much less likelyto get a loan than large firms. We also find that outstandingdebt is positively related with obtaining further lending. Therole of outstanding debt is likely to be a reflection of inefficiencyin credit markets, while the fact that size matters is consistentwith a bias as well, although we cannot totally exclude thatthey reflect transactions costs on the part of banks. We presentan analysis showing how much more profitable small firms mustbe to obtain a loan than large firms.     

Do foreign exchange fund managers behave like heterogeneous agents?

This paper estimates an Heterogeneous Agent Model (HAM) on currency trader indices to explain the large shifts in profitability in currency styles surrounding the global financial crisis. In the model, fund managers allocate capital conditional on recent performance to a value strategy, a momentum strategy, and a carry strategy. Subsequent estimation results reveal that (1) a large part of the behavior of currency managers can indeed be described by these three simple strategies, and (2) currency managers shift capital from recent winning styles to recent losing styles, and hence apply a negative feedback strategy. We finally show that a negative feedback strategy is indeed optimal, but currency managers could improve performance by applying it less aggressively if they were able to.     

Mortgage Insurance Adoption in the Netherlands

Individuals tend to underinsure on low probability, high consequence risks. Using a survey data set from a unique institutional context, we provide an assessment of the underinsurance puzzle by studying mortgage insurance adoption among Dutch homeowners. The results indicate that the demand for mortgage insurance is affected by risk exposure, type of mortgage lender, and the involvement of financial advisors. We document that wealthier and younger mortgagors are more likely to insure. However, locus of control, house price expectations, and precautionary savings are not related to insurance demand. Finally, we find evidence that borrower (over)confidence negatively affects the likelihood that insurance is bought.     

Benchmarking in the Dutch Waste-Water Treatment Sector

The Dutch water boards have recently completed a performance measurement and evaluation project for waste-water treatment. This project was intended to strengthen the boards’ accountability to their stakeholders and to identify starting points for performance improvement. The Balanced Scorecard was used as a framework to develop a broad set of performance indicators. This article describes the benchmarking project and how the Dutch water boards intend to use the results to improve performance. Finally, the Dutch project is compared with the UK’s Best Value project.     

The impact of adoption timing on new service usage and early disadoption

Post-adoption usage can be a crucial element in obtaining substantial revenues from new service introduction, especially when adopters display low usage levels or decide to disadopt the service altogether. Here, the authors specifically examine the effects of adoption timing on post-adoption usage and disadoption. Using a longitudinal, individual-level usage data set of 6296 adopters of a new telecom service, they show that the earliest adopters have lower initial usage levels than do later adopters. However, early adopters show increasing usage after adoption, whereas late adopters tend to decrease their usage over time. Also, disadoption rates are higher among later adopters.     

Beyond national and technological styles of innovation diffusion: a dynamic perspective on cases from the energy and transport sectors

This article argues that styles of innovation diffusion dynamics depend on both national and niche-specific factors and that their respective influence changes during the innovation diffusion process. Based on a review of approaches, dealing on the one hand with differences in national innovation and technology systems and on the other with process of niche formation and development, a theoretical synthesis and pattern of analysis is suggested for interpreting and comparing empirical findings from two different technology examples. The analysis of combined heat and power (CHP) in Germany, UK and the Netherlands, and of electric vehicles in Germany, Sweden and France allows us to identify different styles of innovation diffusion dynamics. These styles are determined by the relative importance of national and niche-specific factors in different phases of the process of technological change. Support in lent to the hypothesis that a style which combines impulses for innovation at both structural and niche is particularly conducive to radical change.