An empirical note about estimation and forecasting Latin American Forex returns volatility: the role of long memory and random level shifts components

Portuguese Economic Journal - A set of RLS-type models with ARMA and ARFIMA dynamics is estimated and compared in a forecasting exercise with ARFIMA, GARCH and FIGARCH models. It is an extension of...     

The education pillar of the Europe 2020 strategy: a convergence analysis

Empirica - In March 2010, the European Commission launched the Europe 2020 strategy ‘for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’ in the EU. Education is a major pillar of the Europe...     

Mapping global sustainability report scoring: a detailed analysis of Europe and Asia

This study maps the General Reporting Initiative (GRI) relations for a set of global enterprises. Enterprise interrelationships are built using the Mutual Information (MI) of the data reported by enterprises. From the MI topology, we describe interrelationships among the enterprises using chord diagrams to represent the inter- and intra-connectivity between geographical regions and economic sectors globally, by continent and country. Detailed maps are presented for European and Asian regions/sectors, including the relationship between Europe and Asia’s top reporting countries. Our findings reinforce previous research regarding the role of Europe as a driver of sustainability and its influence worldwide. We also determined that Spain is a major player in Europe and that Northern Europe does not have the assumed leading role mentioned in related studies. Eastern Asia is, by far, the leader of the region, and the GRI maps demonstrate the preponderant role of China in the region and the minimal role of India. MI topology maps outline the behavior of the economic sectors, for all the studied regions. Furthermore, a measure that relates the inter- to intra-connections is presented to describe the internal an external relationships among regions/sectors.     

Inequality and entrepreneurial thresholds

We explore the relationship between inequality and entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on cross-sectional data from a largescale survey of the economic conditions of individuals across India, we develop a number of dimensions of inequality to explore empirically how inequality interacts with entrepreneurship, operationalized as self-employment or as employing other people. We find compelling evidence that there are thresholds to becoming self-employed, and even more so to assembling the combinations of resources and personal attributes required to become an employer. Greater inequality leaves more people unable to make the transition to self-employment, leaving casual laboring as the occupation of necessity. At the same time, inequality increases the number of employers in a society, by concentrating resources - particularly land and finance - enough for significant numbers of people to be able to cross this higher threshold. Lastly, greater differentiation into social or religious groups curtails the ability to cross either entrepreneurial threshold, presumably by limiting the extent and benefits of social networks of value for entrepreneurship.     

Coordination in a skeptical two-group population

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - This paper explores a situation in which a population split into two groups attempts to achieve the socially efficient outcome of a coordination...     

Is the Retail Gasoline Market Local or National?

This paper studies the effect of station density on prices in the retail gasoline market in the Czech Republic. We estimate the impact of the number of competing stations in various driving-distance ranges around each station on prices. We find that station density has a negative effect on prices; the effect decreases with distance and is statistically significant up to six kilometers. This suggests that the retail gasoline market is local rather than national.     

War and economy. Rediscovering the eighteenth-century military entrepreneur

Abstract

The detrimental effects traditionally assigned to warfare in the development of pre-industrial economies have obscured the prominent role that military entrepreneurs played in economic development in this period. Historiography minimises the extent to which war and the concomitant strengthening of the central state provided a whole new range of opportunities for capital investment, a tendency that has been strengthened by the paradigm of Redlich’s ‘decline of the soldier-entrepreneur’ and the technological determinism of the debate on the Military Revolution among others. The aim of this introduction is to look into the background of this relative lack of interest and to reaffirm the mutual dependence of eighteenth-century state-formation and the business of war.     

From private label to co-branded credit card: an assessment of the impact of a change in value proposition over customer value perception and company value capture

Journal of Financial Services Marketing - Purpose: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the success of a value proposition over time, considering two aspects: customer’s perceived value and...     

Family firm’s management composition: the role played by family members’ age in TMT and supervisor levels

Quality & Quantity - Family firms (FFs) are the backbone of entrepreneurial fabric in many countries. Management of such businesses is complex because of their features: the overlap between...     

Characterization of the Row Geometric Mean Ranking with a Group Consensus Axiom

An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of extracting a ranking of the alternatives from a pairwise comparison ratio matrix. The ordering induced by row geometric mean method is proved to be uniquely determined by three independent axioms, anonymity (independence of the labelling of alternatives), responsiveness (a kind of monotonicity property) and aggregation invariance, which requires the preservation of group consensus, that is, the pairwise ranking between two alternatives should remain unchanged if unanimous individual preferences are combined by geometric mean.