Tourism as an alternative source of regional growth in Portugal: a panel data analysis at NUTS II and III levels

The role of tourism is of vital economic importance, particularly for small countries with a privileged geographical location and favourable weather conditions. This paper examines the importance of tourism as a conditioning factor for higher regional growth in Portugal by employing the conditional convergence hypothesis of Barro and Sala-i-Martin, associated with the endogenous growth theory. The panel data estimation approach provides evidence of the positive impact of tourism (through the accommodation capacity) on the growth in per-capita income among the Portuguese regions, increasing the rate of convergence. Therefore, tourism can be considered as an alternative source for stimulating higher regional growth in Portugal, if the supply characteristics of this sector are improved.     

Information, Knowledge and Belief

The paper models information as possibilities consistent with signals received from the environment. Knowledge is obtained by reasoning about the signals received as well as those that might have been received but were not. The term 'knowledge' is used to refer to those beliefs that are obtained by reasoning about the available information, and nothing else . That is, one ought to be able to fully justify what one knows by means of the information that is available. The term 'belief' is used to refer to those beliefs that are based on information but not necessarily only on information. The author investigates the relationship between information, knowledge and belief, as well as the issue of updating knowledge and belief in response to changes in information.     

Monopoly with resale

We examine the intricacies associated with the design of revenue‐maximizing mechanisms for a monopolist who expects her buyers to resell. We consider two cases: resale to a third party who does not participate in the primary market and interbidder resale, where the winner resells to the losers. To influence the resale outcome, the monopolist must design an allocation rule and a disclosure policy that optimally fashion the beliefs of the participants in the secondary market. Our results show that the revenue‐maximizing mechanism may require a stochastic selling procedure and a disclosure policy richer than the simple announcement of the decision to sell to a particular buyer.     

Transformational Outsourcing

Outsourcing was once simply seen as a means of controlling costs. Now it is increasingly regarded as a means of achieving a step–change in performance and agility.     

Retraining midcareer managers: Career history and self-efficacy beliefs

Many corporations are retraining midcareer managers in order to combat employee obsolescence and boost corporate competitiveness. The receptivity of midcareer managers to retraining is mixed. Those managers who believe they can master new work-related learning (in the terms of this study, those who have positive self-efficacy in learning beliefs) are most amenable to retraining. The objective of the present study was to determine the antecedents of positive self-efficacy beliefs for midcareer managers facing retraining. We discovered that managers' advancement potential and the relevance of their previous training had a profound impact on their self-efficacy beliefs. These findings have important practical implications. The seeds of receptivity to retraining are planted throughout managers' careers. Hence, retraining should not be viewed on a program-by-program basis, but rather should be understood in the broader context of corporate life and individual career history. To prepare for the inevitable corporate evolution and change demanded in a dynamic business environment, senior executives and human resource managers should be proactive in creating those conditions that facilitate the development of positive self-efficacy in learning beliefs.     

Transatlantic innovation infrastructure networks: public-private, EU–US R&D partnerships

Collaborative, team-based research is now the most significant mode of activity in the global scientific community. Anecdotal and statistical evidence shows moreover that collaboration in scientific research is increasingly global in nature. That is, the groups of researchers who are involved in scientific progress often span one or more nations in origin, location and/or sponsorship. Another significant trend in recent cases of scientific collaboration is the increase in cross-sectoral cooperation, where researchers in a group are employed by government, private industry, and/or academic and other non-profit institutions.
In this paper, we review the scale, scope and intensity of cross-national, cross-sectoral research collaboration through the analysis of historical data on co-authorship of scientific publications. The first part of the paper reviews existing literature on the analysis of co-authorship data, and discusses the limitations of this form of analysis and typical strategies to mitigate those limitations. The second part of the paper describes a preliminary study of cross-national, cross-sectoral scientific collaborations covering the years 1988 through 1997, where we examined the scale (volume of co-authored papers), intensity (co-authored papers versus other kinds of co-authorship), and scope (patterns in co-authorship) for cross-national, cross-sectoral collaborations. The conclusion of the paper discusses significant trends and patterns derived from this study, and their implications for further research into these types of collaborations.     

Institutions and the route to reform of the European Union’s budget revenue, 1970–2017

Using process tracing, this paper charts the history of the changes in the EU’s revenue since 1970, including package deals and the unforeseen consequences of change, comparing the positions of the Council to those of the European Commission and European Parliament. Those revenue decisions allowed European integration to proceed though without a fully autonomous budget as Member States became more careful to calculate their net benefits or costs in relation to the budget. In December 2013, the European Union’s institutions established a High Level Group to recommend changes to the revenue base of the EU’s budget. This reported in January 2017, proposing to resolve the effect of sub-optimal revenue and budget decisions made by the European Union over many years, to reduce direct national contributions, to minimise the risk of unforeseen consequences, and to combine revenue flows with steering effects to discourage certain forms of economic behaviour in line with the wider policy agenda of the European Union.     

Intellectual property rights, multinational firms and economic growth

This paper develops a model of North-South trade with multinational firms and economic growth in order to analyze formally the effects of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in developing countries. In the model, Northern firms invent new higher-quality products, multinational firms transfer manufacturing operations to the South and the Southern firms imitate products produced by multinational firms. It is shown that stronger IPR protection in the South (i.e., the adoption and implementation of the TRIPs agreement) leads to a permanent increase in the rate of technology transfer to the South within multinational firms, a permanent increase in R&D employment by Southern affiliates of Northern multinationals, a permanent decrease in the North-South wage gap, and a temporary increase in the Northern innovation rate.     

Attending to inattention: Identification of deadweight loss under nonsalient taxes

Recent developments in behavioral public economics have shown that heterogeneous biases prevent point identification of deadweight loss. We replicate this result for an arbitrary (closed) consumption set, whereas previous results on heterogeneous attention focused on binary choice. We find that one can bound the efficiency costs of taxation based on aggregate features of demand. When individuals have linear demand functions, the bounds for deadweight loss are easy to calculate from linear regressions.     

Family networks and school enrolment: Evidence from a randomized social experiment

We present evidence on whether and how a household's behavior is influenced by the presence and characteristics of its extended family. Using data from the PROGRESA program in Mexico, we exploit information on the paternal and maternal surnames of heads and spouses in conjunction with the Spanish naming convention to identify the inter- and intra-generational family links of each household to others in the same village. We then exploit the randomized research design of the PROGRESA evaluation data to identify whether the treatment effects of PROGRESA transfers on secondary school enrolment vary according to the characteristics of extended family. We find PROGRESA only raises secondary enrolment among households that are embedded in a family network. Eligible but isolated households do not respond. The mechanism through which the extended family influences household schooling choices is the redistribution of resources within the family network from eligibles that receive de facto unconditional cash transfers from PROGRESA, towards eligibles on the margin of enrolling children into secondary school.