Size,R&D productivity and Decision Styles

We extend the size–innovation debate by incorporating decision-making style as a relevant factor in the innovation process. We propose that the size of firms affects the scale and quality of product innovation through the adoption of different decision-making styles. Using the literature on cognition, we conceptualize decision-making style as the degree to which firms rely on analytical information for decision making during the R&D process. Using longitudinal data of Spanish firms, we show that, as firms increase in size, they rely more extensively on analytical decision tools for the innovation activity. Additionally, we show that the size of firms is negatively related to product innovation productivity in terms of scale and positively related to the quality, and that these relationships are mediated by firms’ reliance on analytical decision-making style. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications for innovation research and practice.     

Is there a slowdown in agricultural productivity growth in South America?

This article estimates agricultural productivity growth in 10 South American countries in 1969–2009 with the objective of investigating if the slowdown being measured in other countries is present in the region. Results show that productivity growth accounts for half of the three‐fold increase in agricultural output during this period and that performance is sensitive to R&D investments in the sector. The slowdown found for the 1990s to 2000s in the U.S. and some European economies does not seem to be present yet in South America. The region's total factor productivity (TFP) growth rate increased steadily from 1.07% during the 1970s to 2.29% during the 2000s. Given lags in adoption and the adaptive nature of innovations in these economies, we have yet to see the potential effects in South American agriculture of decreases in R&D in advanced economies.     

Output gap in Brazil: a real-time data analysis

Recent literature for developed economies has shown that output gap estimates go through important revisions over time, impairing their reliability in real time. We organize a real-time data set for Brazil’s GDP and assess the revisions of the output gap estimated by four different methods. Similar to the findings of studies for developed economies, the output gap revisions in Brazil are substantial in all methods, with frequent changes in the output gap sign. In general, both the GDP data revision and the effect of adding new observations to the sample are relevant sources of output gap revisions. However, differently from those studies, we cannot assert that the latter source is preponderant.     

An empirical analysis on the determinants of CEE government bond spreads

This paper studies the spread between 10 year Euro denominated Central and Eastern European (CEE) government bonds and their German counterpart. With newly available time series, regressions are run for each country separately in order to deliver a first insight into the underlying determinants. While higher ECB reference rate and market volatility increase bond spreads and turn out to be the main driving factors, there is no common pattern of macroeconomic fundamentals, pointing to strong heterogeneity within the CEE region. Overall, market variables are more significant than fundamentals during 1999 to 2007.     

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.     

Competency Training for Managing International Cooperation Engineering Projects

Organizations are becoming more and more aware of how important it is to strengthen the competences of their project managers. This fact acquires greater relevance in the development and international cooperation sector because of the need to have qualified professionals who can take up the challenges and address the specific demands of an ever more demanding and constantly evolving sector. This article provides the results of research that more than 100 experts in project management and administration participated in to detect which competences are the most relevant in this context.     

Efficiency tests with overlapping data: an application to the currency options market

This paper presents the results of an empirical study into the efficiency of the currency options market. The methodology derives from a simple model often applied to the spot and forward markets for foreign exchange. It relates the historic volatility of the underlying asset to the implied volatility of an option on the underlying at a specified prior time and then proceeds to test obvious hypotheses about the values of the coefficients. The study uses panel regression to address the problem of overlapping data which leads to dependence between observations. It also uses volatility data directly quoted on the market in order to avoid the biases which may occur when ‘backing out’ volatility from specific option pricing models. In general, the evidence rejects the hypothesis that the currency option market is efficient. This suggests that implied volatility is not the best predictor of future exchange rate volatility and should not be used without modification: the models presented in this paper could be a way of producing revised forecasts.     

What Can Acreage Allocations Say about Crop Supply Elasticities? A Convex Programming Approach to Supply Response Disaggregation

This article has two goals. The first is to extend previous results regarding calibration of land‐constrained programming models of agricultural supply against supply elasticities to the general case of multiple constraints. The second goal is to demonstrate how the resulting calibration conditions can be used as a source of identification to disaggregate crop supply elasticities down to the level at which static information on acreage allocations is available. We propose an information‐based disaggregation algorithm to systematically generate regionalised elasticities from a single prior, and provide an empirical illustration.