Industrial Climate Neutrality in the EU: Outline of an Integrated Industrial Green Deal

Intereconomics - Industry, and in particular the energy-intensive extraction and production of basic materials such as chemicals, cement, steel, non-ferrous metals, ceramics, and so on, is...     

Failure prevention and management in business incubation: practices towards a scalable business model

How support systems such as a business incubator deal with failure, a common phenomenon in new venture creation, is less understood. Employing a value creation perspective helps us to understand failure, the inability of an entrepreneurial team to build a scalable business model. Based on case studies at nine Swedish business incubators, we develop a dynamic process model towards understanding failure prevention and management in business incubation. We find business incubation practices towards failure prevention and management to be a mix of predictive and non-predictive strategies. These practices could help prevent and mitigate failure at personal, organisational and social levels towards value creation for the startups and their stakeholders and channel the effects of failure towards social benefit.     

Removing the contextual lens: A multinational, multi-setting comparison of service evaluation models

Four service evaluation models are identified from the literature that are commonly offered to depict the relationships amongst the primary service evaluation constructs of sacrifice, service quality, service value, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions. We comparatively test the models using samples of service consumers in Australia, Hong Kong, Morocco, the Netherlands, and the United States, as well as across varied temporal and service settings. The results of the comparative analyses reveal that one conceptualization, the “comprehensive” model, best captures the identified relationships. This model is the best fitting across all countries and settings, which indicates it has the greatest external validity. These findings are discussed relative to the limitations associated with the use of less generalizable models.     

The Competencies of Regions – Canada's Clusters in Biotechnology

Knowledge-intensive industries tend to concentrate geographically, because of the many spillovers that they generate. Thus new biotechnology firms often set up in regions that have innovative firms, government laboratories and universities, which attract them to enter. In this paper we unveil some of the characteristics of Canadian clusters in biotechnology: the key regions, their relative importance, and the main firms and government laboratories that attract new entrants. Moreover, we develop the concept of regions as nexus of competencies, a notion already put forward for firms, but that may be relevant to regions within nations and, ultimately, to nations as well. Capabilities of organizations and regions vary, and a thorough study of organizational and regional capabilities should precede the analysis of knowledge spillovers.Toronto is the main center of biotechnology in Canada, followed by Montreal, and Vancouver. The total population of the metropolitan area (a proxy for immediate market size and venture capital) explains the size, location and characteristics of most Canadian clusters. University research is also a key factor explaining the size of the biotechnology clusters, once population is held constant.Within nations, scientific and technical competencies vary strongly among regions. Some regions within countries concentrate a disproportionate share of the capabilities of all developed and developing nations. Moreover, regions tend to concentrate competencies on a few domains of expertise. This is what literature calls "agglomeration effects": companies active in the same field of technology tend to cluster geographically. They do so in order to share a common labor pool, and to obtain ready access to research institutions such as government laboratories and universities, or to key markets and customers, such as large assemblers or government facilities (Feldman et al., 1999). The specialized literature calls these institutions and key markets/customers "entry attractors" (Swan et al., 1998).In many types of science-based industries (SBIs), such as biotechnology, information technology and advanced materials, the major attractors are universities and government laboratories. In a few more mature SBIs, including aerospace and aircraft, large assemblers tend to naturally attract smaller producers of, components and specialized software.In this respect Canada is similar, to other nations (Niosi, 2000). Its competencies cluster around a few large and medium-sized urban agglomerations, such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton, and Calgary. Specialized clusters have also developed around smaller cities. This study builds a theory of the competencies of regions using biotechnology as a case study. Government laboratories, as well as universities and a few large firms, attract entry. The goal of the paper is to examine – using quantitative data – the relative competencies of regions in biotechnology, and the role of NRC laboratories and university research.     

The IPO market as a screening device and the going public decision: evidence from acquisitions of privately and publicly held firms

The main purpose of this paper is using a unique data set from IPO filings to study the IPO market as a screening device and the going public decision. We find that private firms that are less likely to have the option to access public equity markets receive 54 cents for each dollar they expected to raise in an IPO, whereas firms that are more likely to have the option to go public but sell privately sell at $1.11 for each dollar they expected to receive at the IPO. This result suggests that the lower valuation for firms sold in private markets compared to firms sold in public markets can be at least partially explained by the lower relative bargaining power of private firms. However, owners that took their firms public before selling received, on average, 40% larger payoffs than owners that had the option to go public but decided to sell privately. The results in this study indicate that these differences in valuation are not fully explained by existing theoretical models on the decision to sell privately or in two stages.     

Empirical evidence of the value of monitoring in joint ownership

Joint ownership of assets by two partners can have an adverse effect on the incentives to invest and can result in unstable and inefficient organizational structures. Control sharing, however, plays an important role in economic, political, and social institutions. There is scarce empirical evidence on the benefits of joint ownership in corporate finance. We analyze acquisitions of corporate assets by joint ventures to empirically ascertain the value of joint ownership in economic activities. The results indicate that firms experience significantly larger returns in joint acquisitions than in full-control acquisitions and that this difference is restricted to the sample of firms in which both partners share equal ownership in the target. These findings suggest that monitoring in joint ownership structures ameliorates the possibility of value-destroying corporate decisions.     

Inequality and living standards under early communism: Anthropometric evidence from Czechoslovakia, 1946–1966

A sample of adolescent heights and weights from the Czechoslovak city of Liberec is analyzed to shed light on the changes in biological standard of living between 1946 and 1966, the early years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The long-term trend in average height was upwards for all social groups but differences in stature between social groups were about as large as in Communist Czechoslovakia as in market economies, such as the UK. Sons of blue-collar fathers and of parents employed in agriculture were generally shorter than sons of clerks and professional employees (teachers, doctors, lawyers). The anthropometric record also suggests that in the immediately post-war years inequality was greater than in the late 1950s and early 1960s.     

Effects of income and social awareness on consumer WTP for social product attributes

Recent developments in environmental and animal welfare issues, and the introduction of new production practices may have affected consumer attitudes and preferences toward differentiated product choice. Factors such as animal well-being, environmentally friendly production, and the use of antibiotics appear to be increasingly core consumer concerns. We link the aforementioned with Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggesting that the higher income consumers should be more altruistic in their consumptive behavior and test this by evaluating consumer preferences for these attributes in pork chops. We also test whether social consciousness of the consumers translates into choice behavior. Data was obtained by choice experiment surveys and mixed logit estimation was used to estimate consumers' willingness-to-pay for the credence attributes. Results reveal that both, higher income and socially aware consumers are on average willing to pay higher premiums for the antibiotic-free attribute, but not for other two social attributes. Also, the group of higher income consumers is highly heterogeneous in their preferences, whereas socially aware consumers tend to be more homogeneous in their preferences.     

Exploiting innovative opportunities in global purchasing: An assessment of ethical climate and relationship performance

Purchasing managers are expected to balance costs, innovation, supplier management, and corporate social responsibility while coordinating expanding areas of the corporation. The increased responsibilities and pressures to innovate brings purchasing managers into potentially increasingly difficult ethical dilemmas. In this study, we examine the relationships between organizational culture, learning, entrepreneurial innovation, and purchasing outcomes in different ethical climates. To address external business conditions that may influence innovation in purchasing, we also examine the moderating effects of technological and market turbulence. Data from 200 purchasing managers in multinational corporations were used to test the relationships through structural equation modeling. We find that entrepreneurial innovation positively affects the quality of the relationships among sourcing participants when operating in a climate valuing ethics. The study results are particularly relevant for managers concerned that establishing an ethical climate may restrict innovation in the purchasing process.