Research technology organisations as leaders of R&D collaboration with SMEs: role,barriers and facilitators

Research technology organisations or RTOs have attracted academic interest in the last decade due to their role as technology transfer agents and R&D collaborative leaders for firms and especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Although their role within the diversity of specialised structures in generating R&D for industry in National Innovation Systems is recognised, there are scarce publications in relation to their strategies, performance or characteristic, as leaders of R&D collaboration with SMEs. The aim of this work is to identify the role, barriers and facilitators for RTOs performance as well as to develop a contingency relationship between industry environment, strategy, organisational structure and other factors for successful technology transfer from technology organisations to SMEs. This research is based on a field study conducted on 14 technology organisations based in the Valencia region, working with various industry sectors.     

Human capital and sustainable competitive advantage: an analysis of the relationship between training and performance

This article analyses the importance of training as a creator of human capital, which enables a company to obtain competitive advantages that are sustainable in the long-term that result in greater profitability. The study is based on the general theoretical framework of resource and capacity theory. The study not only analyses the impact of the influence of training on performance; it also attempts to analyse the nature of such a relationship in greater depth. This being the case, an attempt has been made to measure explanatory capacity from two different perspectives: the universalistic approach and the contingent approach. At the outset, two hypotheses are formulated that attempt to quantify the relationship from a universalistic perspective to later, in two more hypotheses, incorporate the potential moderating effect of the strategy into the model, in order to verify whether or not this strategy improves the explanatory power of our model of analysis.

The State in Court: the economic effects of fee-shifting rules in Spain when suing the government

Following the recent public debate concerning the situation of the Judicial system in Spain, the paper analyses the special position of the State in Court, essentially with reference to suits brought by individuals against the State before Spanish first instance Courts, although international Courts are touched as well. The analysis focuses on the incentives to litigate and to settle in a dispute with the State, focusing on the State’s special procedural rules and the fee-shifting rules applied in the Spanish Justice system. The asymmetries in favor of the State reduce the incentives to litigate against the State, but also reduce the settlement range in order to achieve out-of-Court settlements.     

Determinants of domestic and cross-border bank acquisitions in the European Union

This paper analyzes the determinants of bank acquisitions both within and across countries in the EU-25 over the period 1997–2004. Our results suggest poorly managed banks (high cost to income) and larger banks are more likely to be acquired by other banks in the same country. The probability of being a target in a cross-border deal is larger for banks that are quoted in the stock market. Finally, banks operating in more concentrated markets are less likely to be acquired by other banks in the same country but are more likely to be acquired by banks in other EU-25 countries.     

Robust implementation under alternative information structures

In this paper we consider a model in which agents have complete information about their neighbors and, possibly, incomplete information about the rest of the environment. We consider two different informational frameworks. In the first, agents do not have priors about the relevant characteristics in the rest of the environment. In the second, agents are supposed to have priors about the unknown characteristics. We present a mechanism which implements any social choice correspondence satisfying monotonicity and no veto power in both informational settings for every possible prior thus requiring little knowledge from the point of view of the designer of the information possessed by agents about the environment. The authors wish to thank J. Canals, B. Chakravorty, P. Chander, C. Herrero, G. Orosel, D. Schmeidler, W. Thomson, W. Trockel, F. Vega, A. Villar, T. Yamato and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies. The first author acknowledges financial support from the Institució Valenciana d’Estudies i Investigació; L.V.I.E. and DGICYT under projects PB/88-0289 and PB/91-0756. The second author acknowledges financial support from DGICYT under project PB/90-0156. A previous version of the paper was written when authors visited (May 1991) the Institute of Mathematical Economics (Bielefeld) to which authors are grateful.     

The global economic costs of the need to treat polluted water

We estimate the global costs and other implications of the need to treat wastewater before it can be re-used. We extend the World Trade Model by creating water treatment sectors and provide alternative sources of water for satisfying users’ quantity and quality requirements. The database distinguishes qualities and quantities of water endowments, sectoral water requirements, and wastewater discharges. We estimate that global water treatment costs could be reduced by several trillion dollars if water endowments were maintained at higher quality than currently is the case. Under scenarios where water quality degrades further, the treatment costs more than double even without taking account of likely increases in quality requirements. This modeling framework provides a starting point not only for more detailed empirical investigations of water management strategies, but also for examining prospects and associated costs for recovering other resources, such as metals, which can be reused multiple times.     

Does the source of debt financing affect default risk?

We examine whether the source of debt financing is important for assessments of firms’ default risk. This study reveals that during the 2007–2010 financial crisis, firms that depend mainly on financing from banks suffer higher increases in default risk than do firms with no such dependence. Conversely, firms that rely solely on financing from public debt markets do not experience significant increases in default risk. These findings suggest that the bank supply shock theory explains the transmission of financial shocks to the real economy. Finally, firms that depend on bank financing cannot offset the adverse impacts of bank lending shocks by substituting bank loans with publicly traded debt.     

Gender matters most. The impact on short‐term risk aversion following a financial crash

This paper examines how investors in an emerging market react to a domestic financial crisis. We conjecture that risk aversion increases following such events and that the effect is more pronounced among specific groups of investors. Our study makes use of a unique dataset of mutual fund investors from one of Colombia's largest stock brokers. Our results reveal that women and self‐employed individuals make the largest withdrawals from risky funds after financial crises.     

Combining Probability Distributions by Multiplication in Metrology: A Viable Method?

In measurement science quite often the value of a so‐called ‘output quantity’ is inferred from information about ‘input quantities’ with the help of the ‘mathematical model of measurement’. The latter represents the functional relation through which outputs and inputs depend on one another. However, subsets of functionally independent quantities can always be so defined that they suffice to express the entire information available. Reporting information in terms of such a subset may in certain circumstances require aggregating probability distributions whose arguments are interrelated quantities. The option of aggregating by multiplication of distributions is shown to be susceptible of yielding inconsistent results when the roles of inputs and outputs are assigned differently to the quantities. Two alternatives to this practice that do not give rise to such discrepancies are discussed, namely (i) logarithmic pooling with weights summing to one and (ii) linear pooling, of which the former appears to be slightly more favourable for applications in metrology. An example illustrates the inconsistency of results obtained by distinct ways of multiplying distributions and the manner in which these results differ from a logarithmically pooled distribution.     

Systemic risk measures: The simpler the better?

This paper estimates and compares two groups of high-frequency market-based systemic risk measures using European and US interbank rates, stock prices and credit derivatives data from 2004 to 2009. Measures belonging to the macro group gauge the overall tension in the financial sector and micro group measures rely on individual institution information to extract joint distress. We rank the measures using three criteria: (i) Granger causality tests, (ii) Gonzalo and Granger metric, and (iii) correlation with an index of systemic events and policy actions. We find that the best systemic measure in the macro group is the first principal component of a portfolio of Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads whereas the best measure in the micro group is the multivariate densities computed from CDS spreads. These results suggest that the measures based on CDSs outperform measures based on interbank rates or stock market prices.