Crowding,satiation, and saturation: The days of television series' lives

The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: Niches become saturated—reduced in their ability to support products—as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the United States from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Barriers to women entrepreneurship. Different methods,different results?

Building on research by Akehurst et al. (Serv Ind J 32:2489–2505, 2012), this study analysed internal and external factors in women entrepreneurship and linked these factors to the barriers that women face when starting businesses. To do so, two contrasting statistical techniques were used: PLS and QCA. After analysing results from each of these techniques, we observed that family duties and difficulties in obtaining financing (both internal and external) were the main factors related to barriers faced by women entrepreneurs.     

Is China Living a Minsky Moment? Between the “Lender of Last Resort” and the Chinese Shadow Financial System

After Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008, the Central Bank of China (PBOC) created a big 1.8 trillion dollars package to boost the Chinese economy. It was a necessary key measure not only to prop up the economy, but also to try to preserve the two-digit growth of the GDP that existed before the Great Recession. The financial instability of international financial circuits made necessary the involvement of the central bank. Ten years later, China’s debt explosion went up during the financial crisis, from six to twenty-eight trillion dollars between 2007 and 2016. In other words, it went up from 148 to 260 percent of GDP during the same period. The goal of this article is to analyze whether China is living a “Minsky moment” or not, and what its implications are for international financial markets.     

Financial Innovation and Divisia Money in Taiwan: Comparative Evidence from Neural Network and Vector Error-Correction Forecasting Models

In this article a Divisia monetary index is constructed for the Taiwan economy, and its inflation forecasting potential is compared with that of its traditional simple sum counterpart. The Divisia index is adjusted in two ways to allow for the financial liberalization that Taiwan has experienced since the 1970s. The powerful artificial intelligence technique of neural networks is used and is found to beat the conventional econometric techniques in a simple inflation forecasting experiment. The preferred inflation forecasting model is achieved using networks that employ a Divisia M2 measure of money that has been adjusted to incorporate a learning mechanism to allow individuals to gradually alter their perceptions of the increased productivity of money. The explanatory power of the two innovation-adjusted Divisia aggregates dominates that of the simple sum counterpart in the majority of cases. (JEL C4 , E4 , E5 )     

What Are the Characteristics That Software Development Project Team Members Associate With a Good Project Manager?

In this study we investigate what software development project team members consider to be a good project manager. Previous research has been carried out using project manager self‐assessments, other project stakeholder views, or recruiters’ views. This qualitative study used the repertory grid technique to identify the characteristics that project team members associate with a good project manager. This technique has been adopted because of its strength in eliciting personal constructs. Among the 18 characteristics identified, the seven most relevant were classified and compared with previous findings, which reveals differences between the team members’ and project managers’ and other stakeholders’ perceptions. Those findings complement the existing skill set and could be considered when recruiting and training project managers and staffing projects.     

Industry,management capabilities and firms' competitiveness: An empirical contribution

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of strategic factors that explain the competitive position reached by firms in their activity sector. We have used a survey carried out in 1999 on 287 executives that belong to the service sector in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. We have analysed the differential factors that distinguish the strategic performance of competitive vis‐à‐vis non‐competitive firms, by jointly assessing the variables representative of the sector (five competitive forces defined by Porter) and variables of an internal feature. Finally, we have moved the level of analysis from the industry to the firm; specifically, we have focused on managerial capabilities due to the significant role played by managers in the strategic decision‐making process. The use of cluster analysis to classify firms depending on their degree of competitiveness and the application of the See5 induction algorithm of rules and decision trees to determine the differential factors that distinguish competitive from non‐competitive firms, provide a methodological framework for the most significant contributions of this work. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A comprehensive conceptual and bibliometric study of person-centered methodologies

Person-centered approaches, such as latent profile analysis (LPA) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), have gained in popularity in organizational scholarship because of their ability to provide insight into how interrelations between a group of conditions can lead to a particular outcome. Despite the growing acceptance of person-centered approaches in social science research, traditional variable-centered approaches continue to prevail, although their dominance is increasingly questioned. This paper offers in-depth analysis of the current state of QCA and LPA from both a conceptual and a bibliometric perspective. This study thus aims to contextualize the role of person-centered methodologies in organizational scholarship. This aim is important, given the significance of exploring novel approaches to advance knowledge in organizational research. This paper provides scholars with quantifiable and readily comparable information on the use of these emerging but promising methods in organizational studies. Ultimately, this scientific contribution sheds light on the current and prospective applications of person-centered methods in research. Moreover, it offers scholars who are considering applying these methods objective analysis of the scientific production in this area thus far.

     

Which commercial partners are important for the most recently admitted EU countries?

This paper describes the degree of trade integration inside the European Union (EU) after the fifth enlargement in 2004. To achieve this goal, we build a database of information on trade flows between the new EU countries (EU‐10) and 180 commercial partners in six different sectors from 1999 to 2011. Using the standard gravity model and estimating a difference‐in‐differences specification, we analyze how joining the EU affected the intensity and direction of the EU‐10's trade flows. Our results show that though trade exchanges between the EU‐10 and EU‐15 intensified after 2004, the impact of integration was much more significant to the EU‐10 group.     

International diversification gains and home bias in banking

This paper studies international diversification in banking, exploiting a bank-level dataset that covers the operations of 38 global banks and their subsidiaries overseas during 1995–2004. The paper finds that banks with a larger share of assets allocated to subsidiaries in emerging market countries were able to attain higher risk-adjusted returns. These gains were somewhat reduced by the concentration of bank subsidiaries in specific geographical regions, which is typical of the observed international expansion strategies. The paper also finds a substantial home bias in the international allocation of bank assets relative to the results of a mean–variance portfolio optimization model.     

Estimating liquidity premia in the Spanish government securities market

This paper investigates the presence of liquidity premia in the relative pricing of assets traded on the Spanish government securities market. First, a classification of bonds into four different categories based on their degree of liquidity is proposed. Second, liquidity premia are estimated introducing liquidity parameters in the estimation of the zero-coupon yield curve. Results suggest the existence of a liquidity premium for post-benchmark bonds (both strippable and non-strippable). The size of this premium is relatively small. In the case of pre-benchmark bonds, the lack of liquidity does not seem to be priced. It is also shown that these pricing discrepancies are robust to the impact of taxes on bonds.