Trade and product innovations as sources for productivity increases: an empirical analysis

Increases in total factor productivity (TFP) are commonly associated with technological innovations measured by the stock of R&D. Empirical evidence seems to corroborate this relationship. However, in trading countries like The Netherlands, productivity increases, even in industry, can also be the result of innovations in the way transactions are managed. These innovations reduce transaction costs and exploit the welfare gains from (further) international division of labour. Such innovations are only partly included in R&D data. Consequently there is not much attention for these ‘trade innovations’—as we label them—in policy. In an empirical analysis this paper compares the influence of trade innovations with the influence of the stock of R&D on TFP in The Netherlands. The regression results show that in this country trade innovations are as important for TFP as technological innovations which directly affect the efficiency of production, which we label ‘product innovations’.      

Small firms and the governance of interorganizational exchange

This article explores some new concepts concerned with the coordination of environmental exchange in small firms. The management of communicative networks is presented as a method supplementary to market steering and administrative coordination of exchange relations. The article is based on the results of in-depth studies of 20 sets of inter-organizational relations in five small firms. The results suggest that the building, maintainance and decoupling of the personal relations in a communicative network affects the costs associated with environmental exchange. Communicative networks make it possible to operate at a higher level of system complexity without increasing the transactions costs or losing any of the small-scale advantages of small firms. In this study the difference between discrete instrumental action and communicative action occupies a central place. Communicative action in networks is based on rationality norms that differ from the pure instrumental action patterns of the marketplace. The manager has to act in accordance with the different personal life spheres of the actors involved. The implications for leader competence managing this kind of relations are discussed.     

论旅游业和城市建设的互动与整合——以江西省九江市为例

城市建设是决定旅游业是否发达的基本要素,而旅游业的发展会加速城市建设的进程,二者的互动作用非常明显,其互动作用表现在:旅游业促使城市建设得到完善,城市建设的发展为旅游业的发展提供了基础,二者相互促进,良性发展。以江西九江为例,通过阐述旅游业和城市建设的互动关系,提出了旅游业和城市建设的整合途径。     

Spatial distribution of economic activities: a network approach

The aim of this paper is to analyse co-location patterns of manufactures and service industries at a microgeographic level using Spanish data from the Mercantile Register. Our approach allows us to analyse joint-location and co-location patterns of firms in different industries, and to overcome previous technical constraints in this type of analyses, partially thanks to using homogeneous cells instead of administrative units. This paper contributes to the empirical literature on industry location by developing a multisectorial co-location index computed by comparing differences between observed data about firms’ location and randomly generated data. Multisectorial relationships are analyzed by transposing bilateral relations onto an n-dimensional space. Our results show that dispersed industries tend to locate jointly and that industries with lower joint-location patterns have spatial structures similar to those obtained through input–output relationships, suggesting weak role of co-location patterns as interindustry linkages are not the main location determinants.

     

Some differences between licensed and internalized transfers of machine tool technology: An empirical note

This note uses survey evidence drawn from the machine tool industry in three countries to identify some of the differences in form between technology transfers which are internalized and those governed by licensing contracts between independent firms. The results show that, consistent with transactions cost theory, the internalized mode of governance leads to the transfer of a much broader range of information and skills than licensed transactions.     

Employment from new firm formation in the Netherlands: Agglomeration economies and the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship

Within the recent literature on the geography of new firm formation, much attention is given to the role of regional knowledge sources based on the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship. At the same time, several other studies show the importance of agglomeration economies for new firm formation. The goal of this study is to assess the relative importance of these determinants for differences in the share of employment creation from new firms at the level of municipalities for the period of 1999–2006 in the Netherlands. It is found that the traditional drivers of new firm formation, such as economic growth and agglomeration effects, have a much stronger effect on new firm formation compared to measures of the regional knowledge base. Moreover, it is shown that when not correcting for the presence of agglomeration effects, the role of local knowledge resources is easily over-estimated, pointing to the dangers of misspecifications of models. The results imply that the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship should, at least for the Netherlands, not be exaggerated.     

Reducing revisions in hedonic house price indices by the use of nowcasts

National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) must balance between timeliness and accuracy of the indicators they publish. Because some of the house sales transactions are reported several months after they occur, many countries that include Israel, publish provisional house price indices (HPIs) that are subject to large revisions as further transactions are reported. This happens because the late-reported transactions behave differently from the transactions reported on time. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to minimize the size of the revisions, with illustrations from Israel, but the method can be applied to other countries with appropriate modifications. The proposed methodology consists of nowcasting three types of variables at a subdistrict level and adding them as input data to an extended hedonic model used for the computation of the HPI: (1) the average characteristics of the late-reported transactions such as the average number of rooms and the area size of the sold apartments; (2) the average price of the late-reported transactions; and (3) the number of late-reported transactions. The three variables are nowcasted based on models fitted to data from previous months. Evaluation of our methodology shows more than 50% reduction in the magnitude of the revisions.     

House price risk and the hedging benefits of home ownership

Using a repeat-sales methodology, this paper finds that estimates of house price risk based on aggregate house price indices substantially underestimate the true size of house price risk. This is the result of the fact that aggregate house price indices average away the idiosyncratic volatility in house prices. Additional results show that the idiosyncratic risk exceeds the hedging benefits of home ownership. These results imply that for many home owners, owning a house may well add more price risk than it hedges away. These findings are based on a detailed dataset of individual housing transactions in the Netherlands.     

The Impact and Importance of Mandatory Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards in Europe

In this paper we report the results of conducting a two‐stage analysis on the impact and importance of mandatory adoption of international accounting reporting standards (IFRS) on European Union firms. In the first stage we determined the impact of mandatory adoption of IFRS across 13 countries and twenty industries. This was accomplished by identifying significant differences in return on assets (ROA) for firms computed under IFRS and local, generally accepted accounting principles (LG). Significant positive differences were detected for firms in Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom: only German and Norwegian firms exhibited a negative average significant difference between ROA calculated using IFRS and LG. Repeating the analysis of differences in ROA on an industry‐by‐industry basis yielded additional Portuguese and Spanish firms for the second stage of the analysis in which the impact of mandatory IFRS adoption was assessed. Defining impact in terms of market and financial reporting quality, we found a statistically significant relationship between accounting information and market returns for firms in the all‐countries‐combined sample of 3,530 observations, and in the countries of Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Support for the timeliness of accounting information was uncovered for firms in the all‐countries‐combined sample, and in the countries of Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Finally, evidence to support the proposition that accounting regimes produce quality discretionary accruals was found for firms from the all‐countries‐combined sample of 3,480 observations and from Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. When comparing differential accounting information constructed under IFRS and LG, however, few differences could be found. Specifically, there was no statistical support for any of the samples that accounting information produced under IFRS was any more value relevant than the accounting information derived using LG. When our examination shifted to the timeliness of earnings, a positive differential impact between earnings constructed on the basis of IFRS and local accounting standards was detected only for the all‐countries‐combined sample. Finally, the quality of discretionary accruals was shown to be significantly higher under IFRS than LG for firms in Finland, Greece and Sweden.     

我国银行征信系统的发展和完善探究

我国信用危机现象日益突出,对经济的健康发展造成威胁。银行信贷征信体系建设是我国当前征信业发展的基础,但我国征信管理法规不够健全,理论滞后,银行为主导的征信体系发展经历了逐步壮大的发展历程,并在市场经济交易中发挥重要作用,下一步要继续完善银行征信系统的建设,推动社会信用体系的发展。     

Multinational Exposure and the Quality of New Chinese Exports

We exploit information on the geographic, product and trader characteristics of China's 1997–2009 exports to examine how the evolving city‐industry presence of multinational firms influenced the quality, frequency and survival of new export transactions by private Chinese firms. Our results show that own‐industry multinational firm contact was associated with more frequent, higher‐valued, and longer‐lasting new trade transactions. These effects appear to arise from beneficial multinational spillovers, rather than selection effects due to increased multinational competition, as increases in own‐industry or other multinational presence were also associated with an increase in the number of trade transactions introduced by private Chinese firms.     

“Distribution-free” estimates of efficiency in the U.S. banking industry and tests of the standard distributional assumptions

Studies of efficiency in banking and elsewhere often impose arbitrary assumptions on the distributions of efficiency and random error in order to separate one from the other. In this study, we impose much less structure on these distributions and only assume that efficiencies are stable over time while random error tends to average out. We are able to do so by estimating firm-specific effects on costs using panel data sets of over 28,000 observations on U.S. banks from 1980 to 1989. We find results similar to the literature—X-efficiencies or managerial differences in efficiency are important in banking, while scale-efficiency differences are not. However, we also find that the distributional assumptions usually imposed in the literature are not very consistent with these data.     

Laboratory Testing of Spurious Spatial Structure in Trip Distribution Models

Abstract

In this paper we examine the risk of reporting spurious relationships in trip distribution models. We show how to make synthetic data sets that (by construction) are neutral with respect to clustering effects. We study a particular case with two non-interacting groups of jobs/workers. A competing destinations model is applied to 100 randomly drawn data sets of this type. Quite disturbingly, the loglikelihood ratio test reported a significant clustering effect in all of these data sets. This shows that statistical tests based on likelihood values may not be the right tool to examine the effect of such model extensions.     

建设施工安全与安全设计关系的理论研究

建筑业是我国的支柱产业,也是生产安全事故的高发行业。目前,虽然许多国内专家已经认识到设计因素对建设施工安全的影响,但实践中许多建筑企业都忽视了设计因素对施工安全的影响。运用事故因果连锁理论研究建设施工安全与工程安全设计关系表明：设计阶段作为工程建设过程的一个重要环节必然会影响到下游施工阶段的安全生产。     

Estimation of spot volatility with superposed noisy data

By using high frequency financial data, we nonparametrically estimate the spot volatility at any given time point, while the simultaneous presence of multiple transactions and market microstructure noise in the observation procedure are considered. Our estimator is based on the summation of the locally ranged increments, while kernel smoothing give us spot volatility. Besides, the microstructure noise can be estimated and removed, if it is modeled as bid-ask spread, which is a frequently used assumption. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator are established. We do some simulation studies to assess the finite sample performance of our estimator. The estimator is also applied to some real data sets, further, the relationship between multiple records and spot volatility is also explored.     

Abnormal returns, risk, and options in large data sets

Large data sets in finance with millions of observations have become widely available. Such data sets enable the construction of reliable semi-parametric estimates of the risk associated with extreme price movements. Our approach is based on semi-parametric statistical extreme value analysis, and compares favorably with the conventional finance normal distribution based approach. It is shown that the efficiency of the estimator of the extreme returns may benefit from high frequency data. Empirical tail shapes are calculated for the German Mark—US Dollar foreign exchange rate, and we use the semi-parametric tail estimates in combination with the empirical distribution function to evaluate the returns on exotic options.     

Environmental sustainability in container transport: the attitudes of shippers and forwarders

The transport sector accounts for 25% of the global CO₂ emissions. All firms in the transport industry share a responsibility for this environmental impact. This paper explores, as one of the first, the attitude of both shippers and forwarders, as the main purchasers of transport services, towards environmental sustainability in the sourcing of transport services. Based on a literature review we develop several hypotheses and test those through a survey among shippers and forwarders in the Netherlands. We conclude that shippers focus more on sustainability than forwarders, the size of shippers has a positive influence on the demand for transparency of the environmental performance, explicit sustainability targets have a positive influence on the demand for sustainable solutions and the vast majority of shippers and forwarders expect an increased importance of sustainable purchasing.     

“实质重于形式”原则的应用分析

本文对关联交易非关联化的类型进行了总结,指出关联交易非关联化的本质特征是:对交易或事项的会计处理只重法律或制度的形式,而无视甚至有意歪曲经济业务的实质。认为对关联交易非关联化的监管是要强化“实质重于形式“原则在监管中的运用,并对确保“实质重于形式“原则在关联交易监管中贯彻执行的措施和制度做了进一步的阐述。     

Location,Proximity, and M&A Transactions

In this paper, we examine how the geographic location of firms affects acquisition decisions and value creation for acquirers in takeover transactions. We find that firms located in an urban area are more likely to receive a takeover bid and complete a takeover transaction as a target than firms located in rural areas, and takeover deals involving an urban target are associated with higher acquirer announcement returns, after controlling for the proximity between the target and the acquirer. In addition, a target's urban location significantly attenuates the negative effect of a long distance between the target and the acquirer on acquirer returns, a fact that is documented in the existing literature. Our findings reveal a previously underexplored force—firm location—that can affect takeover transactions, in addition to proximity. Our paper suggests that a firm's location plays an important role in facilitating the dissemination of soft information and enhancing information‐based synergies.     

试论中国文化对实施PARTNERING模式的影响

Partnering模式于20世纪80年代起源于美国,目前已经在美国、澳大利亚、日本、欧洲、新加坡以及中国香港的建筑界得到了广泛使用。业界人士普遍认可Partnering模式的优势,如:有利于改善项目参与各方之间的关系,有利于降低工程费用、缩短工期、提高工程质量、减少合同纠纷和诉讼方面,收益非常明显。从本质而言,Partnering模式是古老的“握手”式的商业模式,这种模式在全世界,特别是在东方获得广泛的应用。本文旨在讨论中国文化及其对实施Partne- ring模式的影响。研究结果表明,中国文化与Partnering模式的一些要素吻合,因此能够促进其在建筑界的实施。