The Outlook for European Grocery Retailing: Competition and Format Development

This article analyses retail trends in the main European countries, and particularly format evolution and competition amongst retailing firms. On the basis of the existence of European retailing landscapes that are sometimes similar without ever being identical, the article analyses the impact of the main factors of change on different national markets. Whilst retail internationalisation and new entrants, commercial policy, legislative environments, technological innovations, consumers and buying behaviour will have a convergence effect on different countries' retail structures, substantial differences will still exist. European retailing in the coming years will probably be characterized by increasingly less marked differences between countries than one finds today, but market segmentation, variety and differentiation of retailing formats and brand names will be stronger within each country.     

Autonomy,responsibility and accountability in the Italian school system

The attention on education and the management of the schools represent important elements of the overall public sector management reforms in many OECD countries. The Italian school system has been characterised, in the last decade, by a process of granting schools a degree of autonomy in terms of educational, managerial and financial functions. Autonomy goes hand by hand with responsibility and accountability systems of schools. This paper delivers a critical analysis of the accountability system designed intentionally or not by the reform. The reform is based on the assumption that more local managed schools will improve the overall performance, through more autonomy, responsibility and accountability. In doing so, the concept of accountability web and the role of cultural traits in developing forms of accountability are used in order to analyse the context of three case studies. The findings suggest that the reform created a dual-based accountability on schools causing higher level of stress in the organisation, and a misalignment on the accountability web between school manager and teachers.     

Confidence building on Euro convergence: Evidence from currency options

We study the evolution of investor confidence in 1992-1998 over the chance of individual currencies to converge to the Euro, using data on currency option prices. Convergence risk, which may reflect uncertainty over policy commitment as well as exogenous fundamentals, induces a level of implied volatility in excess of actual volatility. This volatility wedge should gradually decrease as confidence grows over time as convergence policy is maintained, and the risk of a reversal is progressively resolved. Empirically, we indeed find a positive volatility wedge which declines over time only for currencies involved in the Euro convergence process. The wedge and other convergence risk measures are correlated with both exogenous fundamentals and proxies for policy commitment uncertainty. We also find that the wedge responds to policy shocks in an asymmetric fashion, suggesting that policy risk is resolved at different rates after negative and positive shocks. Finally, we estimate a regime-switching model of convergence uncertainty, using data on interest rates, currency rates, and currency option prices. The results confirm the time-varying and asymmetric nature of convergence risk, and indicate that investors demand a risk premium for convergence risk.     

On the Evaluation of Economic Mobility

This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of "reversal" and "origin independence" as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal fluctuations, and aversion to future risk. We construct "extended Atkinson indices" that allow us to quantify the relative impact of reversal and origin independence on welfare. We apply our approach to the comparison of income mobility in Germany and in the U.S.. When aversion to inequality is the only consideration, the U.S. gains more from mobility than Germany. This reflects similar gains from reversal in the two countries but greater gains in the U.S. from origin independence. The introduction of aversion to intertemporal fluctuations and aversion to future risk makes the impact of mobility in the two countries more similar.     

Does Gibrat's Law hold among young,small firms?

According to Gibrat's Law of Proportionate Effect, the growth rate of a given firm is independent of its size at the beginning of the examined period. Aimed at extending this line of investigation, the present paper uses quantile regression techniques to test whether Gibrat's Law holds for new entrants in a given industry: that is for new small firms in the early stage of their life cycle. The main finding is that for some selected industries in Italian manufacturing Gibrat's Law fails to hold in the years immediately following start-up, when smaller firms have to rush in order to achieve a size large enough to enhance their likelihood of survival. Conversely, in subsequent years the patterns of growth of new smaller firms do not differ significantly from those of larger entrants, and the Law therefore cannot be rejected.JEL Classification: L11, L60Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 27th Annual EARIE Conference (Lausanne, 7-10 September 2000) and at seminars held between 2000 and 2003 at the Economics Department of Harvard University, the Catholic University of Milan, the University of Ferrara, the University of Bologna, the Bank of Italy, and Athens University of Economics & Business. We would like to thank Carlo Bianchi, Giuseppe Colangelo, Giovanni Dosi, Steven Klepper (Editor), Stephen Martin, Ariel Pakes, Aman Ullah and, in particular, Helen Louri and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on earlier drafts. Financial support from MIUR (Year 2000; protocol #MM13038538_001; project leader: E. Santarelli) is gratefully acknowledged.Correspondence to: E. Santarelly     

Integrating sustainability and resilience in the supply chain: A systematic literature review and a research agenda

Sustainability has emerged as an important industrial strategic outlook expanding beyond organizational boundaries to include the supply chain. Simultaneously, the industry has also been faced with supply chain resilience concerns. Research on the intersection of supply chain sustainability and resilience is nascent and is a consequence of their observed mutual influences. However, confusion about concepts, implementation methods, and measurements of sustainable and resilient supply chains remains. This study completes a systematic literature review that critically examines several major observations and directions. We find the concept of sustainable supply chains is more established, and general agreement on its theoretical foundations exists. Supply chain resilience is relatively less mature. The nexus and relationships between the two topics are often incoherent: there is confusion on sustainable and resilient supply chains establishment; there is no clarity on what practices could jointly advance both areas. A major conflict exists since sustainability generally focuses on efficiency, while resilience seeks effectiveness. We recommend studies to analyze implementation relationships and impact. We also observe that performance measurement systems should be developed to assess supply chain sustainability and resilience performance taking with explicit consideration time horizons considered in these measures.     

Resource interaction in inter-organizational networks: Introduction to the special issue

This article introduces the special issue of Journal of Business Research on the topic of resource interaction in inter-organizational networks. Both networks and resources receive considerable attention in the field of business studies. As companies specialize further and rely on cooperative agreements with external parties, the importance of networks is gaining increasing recognition. Resources are typically a key factor for identifying a company's competencies, or its sources of growth, profitability, and sustained competitive advantage. This special issue takes a novel approach by directing attention toward the processes of interaction in which companies combine and recombine resources at the network level. This approach provides new insights into the development, production, exchange, and use of resources. The introductory article also reviews the 13 articles in this special issue and concludes by discussing their contributions to the fields of marketing, innovation, entrepreneurship, and logistics.