Accelerators as start-up infrastructure for entrepreneurial clusters

ABSTRACT

Infrastructure is commonly conceptualized as a set of facilities that play a critical role in facilitating activities by individuals and organizations. Conventionally, infrastructure is tightly linked to publicly funded projects that facilitate access to key resources and enable diverse activities. Within entrepreneurial clusters research, infrastructure includes universities, research institutions and telecommunication technologies that facilitate entrepreneurial activities. These capital-intensive investments seek to facilitate start-ups emergence by aiding access to markets and development of ideas. Accelerators facilitate the same activities and have only recently been conceptualized as start-up infrastructure. This study builds upon this research stream by elaborating on how accelerators can play this meaningful role at the cluster level. Specifically, and by relying on the analysis of empirical evidence from three distinct studies, we uncover how accelerators provide tangible and intangible dimensions of start-up infrastructure to form a positively reinforcing cycle of entrepreneurial activities. Additionally, our findings allow us to push further the idea that start-up infrastructure development can be an endogenous process involving multiple actors within the cluster. Our empirical findings and the theoretical insights derived from them have meaningful implications for the aforementioned literature, as well as start-up practitioners and policymakers linked to the funding of entrepreneurial clusters.     

Oil risk contracts,business conduct and performance patterns: Data panel analysis

Using the economic and financial performance data of international companies for the exploration, and exploration–extraction (E&E) of oil, as well as the patterns of institutional situation and orientation with the government market and national oil companies or NOCs that receive project offers, we analyze the institutional development and behavior patterns by type of E&E contract, following the strategic actor approach, or the so-called agency theory. Additionally, in light of Mexico's energy reform being implemented between 2015 and 2019, we analyzed the types of license contracts compared to those for production and shared profit. Subsequently, it was determined-through panel data methods in the analysis of 17 companies between 2005 and 2015-that global companies present bigger yields and commitments compared to specialized companies, confirmed by their net income and returns on equity or ROE.     

Going multilateral? Financial markets' access and the League of Nations loans, 1923–8

Why are international financial institutions important? This article reassesses the role of the loans issued with the support of the League of Nations. These long‐term loans constituted the financial basis of the League's strategy to restore the productive basis of countries in central and eastern Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. In this article, it is argued that the League's loans accomplished the task for which they were conceived because they allowed countries in financial distress to access capital markets. The League adopted an innovative system of funds management and monitoring that ensured the compliance of borrowing countries with its programmes. Empirical evidence is provided to show that financial markets had a positive view of the League's role as an external, multilateral agent, solving the credibility problem of borrowing countries and allowing them to engage in economic and institutional reforms. This success was achieved despite the League's own lack of lending resources. It is also demonstrated that this multilateral solution performed better than the bilateral arrangements adopted by other governments in eastern Europe because of its lower borrowing and transaction costs.     

How do Agricultural Programmes Alter Crop Production? Evidence from Ecuador

Evaluating agricultural programmes requires considering not only the programmes’ influence on input and output indicators, but also considering the relationship between these indicators as embodied in the production technology. This article examines the impact on production of an intervention in the Ecuadorian Sierra designed to improve returns to potato production through training and through linking smallholders to high‐value markets. Critical to identifying the impact of the programme is the careful construction of a counterfactual and meticulous data collection. To assess the impact of the programme on production, a weighted estimation, where weights are constructed through propensity score matching, is employed to estimate a production function within a damage abatement framework. The function incorporates a series of interaction terms to assess the impact of the programme on the production technology. The findings provide evidence that the programme enhances yields both through a general shift in technology as well as increased input use. The results suggest that the use of effective farming techniques that are learned through the programme induce this technological shift.     

Hypothetical Bias Reconsidered: Payment and Provision Uncertainties in a Threshold Provision Mechanism

We extend research on the consequentiality of stated preference choices to a threshold provision mechanism for public goods. We develop a simple theoretical model of option price to analyze how option price varies with payment and provision uncertainty. We explore whether threshold provision contributions are similarly influenced by payment and provision uncertainty using an induced value contribution experiment. Results suggest that: (1) the probability of payment has a negative effect on contributions; (2) the probability of provision has a positive effect on contributions. We offer subjective beliefs regarding payment and provision as a plausible systematic explanation for hypothetical bias.     

Contingent Valuation: Controversies and Evidence

Contingent valuation (CV) has become one of the most widely usednon-market valuation techniques. CV's prominence is due to itsflexibility and ability to estimate total value, includingpassive use value. Its use and the inclusion of passive use valuein benefit-cost analyses and environmental litigation are thesubject of a contentious debate. This paper discusses key areasof the debate over CV and the validity of passive use value. Weconclude that many of the alleged problems with CV can beresolved by careful study design and implementation. We furtherconclude that claims that empirical CV findings are theoreticallyinconsistent are not generally supported by the literature. Thedebate over CV, however, has clarified several key issues relatedto nonmarket valuation and can provide useful guidance both to CVpractitioners and the users of CV results.     

Identifying technically efficient fishing vessels: a non‐empty,minimal subset approach

Stochastic frontier models are often employed to estimate fishing vessel technical efficiency. Under certain assumptions, these models yield efficiency measures that are means of truncated normal distributions. We argue that these measures are flawed, and use the results of Horrace ( 2005 ) to estimate efficiency for 39 vessels in the Northeast Atlantic herring fleet, based on each vessel's probability of being efficient. We develop a subset selection technique to identify groups of efficient vessels at pre‐specified probability levels. When homogeneous production is assumed, inferential inconsistencies exist between our methods and the methods of ranking the means of the technical inefficiency distributions for each vessel. When production is allowed to be heterogeneous, these inconsistencies are mitigated. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Do Wages Add to the Health‐Employment Nexus? Evidence from Older European Workers

The role of wages in the health‐employment nexus can be important for designing employment policies aimed at older workers with health limitations. We, therefore, estimate the direct effect of health on employment and hours worked and its indirect effect that is mediated through wages using individual‐level panel data from SHARE. The endogeneity of self‐reported health is controlled for by instrumenting it with severe health conditions in a correlated random effects model. For men, we find that the direct effects of health deterioration, as measured by a reduction in health from the 75th to the 50th percentile of the health distribution, are about a 20% point lower employment probability and about 171 fewer hours worked per year. The indirect health effects through wages work in the opposite directions as health positively affects wages and wages negatively affect employment and hours worked. The total effects of this health deterioration amount to a 12% point lower employment probability and 95 fewer hours worked per year. In particular our finding of a large direct health effect on employment suggests an instrumental role for policy aimed at accommodating workers with health limitations to keep them employed at older ages.