Customer satisfaction and service domains: a further development of PROSERV

Quality & Quantity - This paper aims to represent that levels of customer satisfaction of tourist accommodation are an important prerequisite when the goal is building a loyal relationship with...     

Approaching rainfall-based weather derivatives pricing and operational challenges

Review of Derivatives Research - This article approaches some of the current rainfall derivatives pricing and operational challenges through an empirical application to Comunidad Valenciana, Spain....     

Evaluating the efficiency of municipalities in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity

Journal of Productivity Analysis - The paper applies some of the latest advances of probabilistic approach to account directly for unobserved heterogeneity in the estimation of efficiency measures...     

Designing business models in circular economy: A systematic literature review and research agenda

The concept of circular economy is increasingly receiving attention in different domains, including strategic management, operations management, and technology management. It requires companies to design their business model (i.e., the value network, the relationships with the supply chain partners, and the value propositions towards customers) around a new concept of sustainable development that reduces consumption of natural resources and preserves the environment. However, extant research falls short in terms of explaining how companies design their business model according to the circular economy principles. Starting from this premise, the present paper provides a systematic review of the literature on the design of business models in the context of circular economy, aiming to offer an overview of the state of research and outline a promising research agenda.     

The interaction effect of gender and ethnicity in loan approval: A Bayesian estimation with data from a laboratory field experiment

Microfinance targets women and uses loan provision as a tool for empowerment, which translates into better household nutrition, improved education, and a scale down of domestic violence. However, ethnic discrimination in microfinance may exist in countries with a segregated indigenous population. We assessed this possibility with a field experiment in Bolivia. The controlled laboratory experiment evaluated whether credit officers rejected microloan applications based on the interaction effect of ethnicity and gender of potential borrowers. Point estimates of a Bayesian mixed‐effects logistic regression, estimated with the experimental data, indicate that nonindigenous women have double the chance of loan approval, but indigenous women have only 1.5 times the chance of loan approval when compared with men. While the findings about gender are limited, the evidence for the interaction of gender and ethnicity is more robust and suggests the existence of positive taste‐based discrimination favorable for nonethnic women in Bolivia. We conclude that the affirmative actions towards women promoted by development agencies and microfinance institutions must not overlook ethnicity as an important factor for financial policies of sustainable development. In practice, these policies should be aimed at identifying and reducing both social desirability bias and the structural barriers to financial inclusion that indigenous women may face when trying to obtain access to a loan.     

Trade shocks,product mix adjustment and productivity growth in Italian manufacturing

In this paper, we use firm-level data on the universe of Italian manufacturing multi-product exporters to test whether demand shocks in export markets lead multi-product exporters to increase their productivity. The main mechanism behind the documented productivity gains is the reallocation of resources across products within firms (American Economic Review, 104, 2014 and 495; National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series No. 22433, 2016). Intuitively, the increased demand stemming from foreign markets will induce firms to adjust their product mix by moving inputs from low to high productive/profitable uses. We find that these productivity gains are significant and can explain between 1/10 and 1/2 of aggregate productivity growth in the manufacturing sector.     

Farm size,land yields and the agricultural production function: An analysis for fifteen developing countries

The paper analyzes the relationship between factor inputs, land yields and labor productivity for farms of different size on the basis of FAO farm management data for 15 developing countries. For all but three countries a strong negative correlation is found between farm size on the one side, and factor inputs and yields per hectare on the other. The fitting of unconstrained production functions to the above data suggests that in only few cases the decline in yields for increasing farm size can be attributed to decreasing returns to scale. The higher yields observed in small farms are mainly to be ascribed to higher factor inputs and to a more intensive use of land. Therefore, where conspicuous labor surpluses exist, the superiority of small farming provides solid arguments in favor of land redistribution. Such an agrarian reform would determine higher output, higher labor absorption and a more equitable income distribution, thus contributing in a decisive manner to the alleviation of rural poverty. The paper also provides estimates of cross-sectional production functions for the 15 countries analyzed. Empirical relations are found between the output elasticities of land, labor and intermediate inputs and physical indicators of their scarcity. The paper concludes by proposing a simple method for deriving a long-term production function for agriculture.     

Prudence or Profligacy: Deficits, Debt, and Fiscal Consolidation

Over the last quarter century, public finances have been underpressure in most OECD countries as deficits and debts rose underthe pressure of relatively slow growth and high interest rates.This, in turn, has affected the welfare state, since effortsat containing deficits have often been concentrated on publicexpenditure. Much of the literature argues that this is desirable,since curbing deficits via tax increases seldom succeeds. Amedium-term survey of OECD country experience suggests a lessclear-cut conclusion. In a number of countries which were ableto curb debt/GDP ratios, the bulk of the adjustment did, indeed,come from spending cuts (but was, also, in some cases helpedby rapid growth and/or currency depreciation). In several, however,tax increases also appear to have succeeded in reducing deficitsand debt. Footnotes ¹ E-mail addresses: andrea.boltho{at}magd.ox.ac.uk; andrew.glyn{at}economics.oxford.ac.uk     

When imperfect collusion is profitable

This paper studies cartel stability under the assumption that member firms can choose intermediate degrees of collusion as well as the joint-profit-maximizing solution in determining the quota to be produced by each firm. After showing that firms can increase the number of participants by decreasing the degree of collusion, I prove that individual members' profits are maximized when firms choose a (possibly low) degree of collusion such that all firms in the industry want to take part in the cartel. More precisely, if the number of firms in the industry is four or less, then all of them want to take part in the cartel even if the maximum degree of collusion is chosen (i.e., the monopoly output is produced); if the number of firms is greater than four, firms will still create an industry-wide cartel but they will produce a higher quantity than the monopoly output.     

Telia—a Swedish‐Finnish marriage after a failed Norwegian courtship

In 2002, the Swedish telecommunications company Telia merged with the Finnish telecommunications company Sonera. Prior to this merger, Telia had already attempted to ally with the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor. This effort had resulted in a disaster; the “marriage” of the two companies was “divorced” after only two months in 1999. In the first part, the case study will feature an introduction to the telecommunications industry. In the second part, the unsuccessful merger between Telia and Telenor will be examined. Particular emphasis will be placed on national conflicts of interest and the power games played by politicians and leading managers. In the third part, the merger between Telia and Sonera will be described. This will be interpreted as another example of a politically and culturally difficult, but to this day successful merger. Finally, both merger episodes will be analyzed with reference to international mergerand‐acquisition (M&A) literature. The focus will be on motivations and objectives, environmental influences on the two mergers, and internal issues of the merging companies. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.