Assessment of innovative software technology: developing an end-user-initiated interface design strategy

Knowledge intensive services and, in particular, R&D services contribute significantly to innovation in firms. The objective of this paper is to find out which characteristics of firms explain the acquisition of R&D services and to analyse whether there are differences depending on the typology of the supplier (universities, technology centres and consulting firms). Three main conclusions emerge from the econometric estimations carried out with information from a survey of innovative firms in the region of Valencia in Spain. First, the results show that firm size and age matter in the decision to buy R&D services. Second, our results are consistent with the relevance that the literature gives to human capital in absorbing external knowledge. Third, innovation policy has a significant influence on the decision to acquire R&D services, particularly from universities and technology centres.     

Inequality of Opportunity in Brazil: A Corrigendum

This note acknowledges and corrects a programming error in our paper “Inequality of Opportunity in Brazil” (Review of Income and Wealth, 53(4), 585–618, 2007). Once the error is corrected, our bounds approach to the identification of individual model parameters in the presence of omitted variable biases is much less useful than indicated in the original paper. In the specific context of the measurement of inequality of opportunity, this implies that the decomposition of overall inequality of opportunity into direct and indirect effects is not reliable. However, the parametric approach introduced in our paper remains useful for obtaining a lower‐bound estimate of overall ex‐ante inequality of opportunity, as proposed by Ferreira and Gignoux (2011).     

Licensing policies for a new product

This paper studies licensing policies for the owner of a new product and addresses their welfare impact in the assessment of market failures. We show that the best licensing policy for the patent holder is fixed fee licensing with an exclusive territory clause. Consumers are also better off with fixed fees but do not prefer the exclusive territory clause. Social welfare is higher under exclusive territories when fixed costs are not too large. As for efficiency, the number of licences in the private market equilibrium falls short of the socially optimal solution. Our analysis discloses that (i) any policy measures aimed at enhancing the diffusion of technology, in terms of the number of licences, would be welcomed and, (ii) the permissive treatment received by licensing agreements with exclusive territories is justified.     

Interest rates,expectations and the credibility of the Bank of Spain

The purpose of the paper is to pinpoint the date of the change of monetary policy regime which occurred in Spain during the year 1984, when it moved away from controlling monetary aggregates towards interest rate targeting. The most likely date for the change is estimated and, surprisingly, there is evidence that agents learned about the new intermediate target quite rapidly.A week after the change, the term structure of interest rates showed how market agents attributed much more informational content to interest rate changes than they had previously. Two types of transitions are tried: a one-step and a gradual logistic swithing function.     

The introduction of seasonal unit roots and cointegration to test index aggregation optimality: An application to a Spanish farm price index

In this paper we present a methodological proposal of the way integration and cointegration analysis can best be used to test if the level of aggregation of an index is adequate. Using this proposal, we enquire the extent to which a Spanish aggregate farm price index captures the behavior of its components. First version received: October 1994/final version received: September 1998     

Incentives for budget discipline in the presence of elections

This paper presents a mechanism to mitigate the adverse consequences of the political budget cycle on social welfare. We use a simplified two-period version of Rogoff's [Rogoff, K., 1990. Equilibrium political budget cycles. American Economic Review 80, 21–36.] rational budget cycle model to address the normative issue of reducing the budget deficit in pre-electoral periods. A regulation consisting of a sanction scheme contingent on fiscal policy joint with a fixed transfer is shown to provide the appropriate incentives for budget discipline in the presence of elections.     

Value at Risk and Economic Growth

The improvement of data statistics as well as the econometrician methods have facilitated the introduction the new variables and factors I the economic growth analysis. In this sense, real variables have mainly been considered in the economic growth studies, but not financial or risk management aspects. In this sense, it is interesting to analyze the relationship between economic growth and value at risk and the feed-back process. The goal of the paper is to analyze the relationship between economic growth and risk management and the feed-back process. We will consider economic variables, including economic growth, rule of law, human capital, fiscal policy and monetary policy, among others, in our analysis. We will analyze the theoretical relationships between these variables and risk and the effects of risk on economic growth. We will also develop an empirical analysis considering the case of 15 European Union countries.

Sudden stops, financial frictions, and labor market flows: Evidence from Latin America

While the aggregate effects of sudden stops and international financial crises are well known, the disaggregated channels through which they work are not well explored yet. In this paper, using job flows from a sectoral panel dataset for four Latin American countries, we find that sudden stops are characterized as periods of lower job creation and increased job destruction. Moreover, these effects are heterogeneous across sectors: we find that when a sudden stop occurs, sectors with higher dependence on external financing experience lower job creation. In turn, sectors with higher liquidity needs experience significantly larger job destruction. This evidence is consistent with the idea that dependence on external financing affects mainly the creation margin and that exposure to liquidity conditions affects mainly the destruction margin. Overall, our results provide evidence of financial frictions being an important transmission channel of sudden stops and in the restructuring process in general.     

The cost effect in third-degree price discrimination

In the presence of a non-constant marginal cost and demand uncertainty, we show that an output increase is no longer a necessary condition for welfare to increase following the introduction of third-degree price discrimination. We thus highlight the existence of an effect that might offset the well known output and misallocation effects of price discrimination. We propose a specific example where this is indeed the case.     

Spanning tests in return and stochastic discount factor mean–variance frontiers: A unifying approach

We propose new spanning tests that assess if the initial and additional assets share the economically meaningful cost and mean representing portfolios. We prove their asymptotic equivalence to existing tests under local alternatives. We also show that unlike two-step or iterated procedures, single-step methods such as continuously updated GMM yield numerically identical overidentifying restrictions test, so there is arguably a single spanning test. To prove these results, we extend optimal GMM inference to deal with singularities in the long run second moment matrix of the influence functions. Finally, we test for spanning using size and book-to-market sorted US stock portfolios.