Developing Sustainable New Products in the Textile and Upholstered Furniture Industries: Role of External Integrative Capabilities

Environmental sustainability has become one of the key issues for strategy, marketing, and innovation. In particular, significant attention is being paid by companies, customers, media, and regulators to development and consumption of green products. It is argued that through the efficient use of resources, low carbon impacts, and risks to the environment, green products can be essential to help society toward the environmental sustainability targets. The number of green product introductions is rapidly increasing, as demonstrated by the growing number of companies obtaining eco‐labels or third party certifications for their environmentally friendly products. Hundreds of companies representing most of the industries, such as Intel, SC Johnson, Clorox, Wal‐Mart, and Hewlett–Packard, have recently introduced new green products, underlining the need to develop products that create both economic and environmental values for the firm and customers. A review of the literature shows that academic research on green product development has grown in interest. However, to date, only a few empirical studies have addressed the challenge of integrating environmental issues into new product development (NPD). Previous empirical works have mainly focused on a set of activities for the green product development process at the project level. After years of paying no or marginal attention to environmental sustainability issues, most of the companies now generally realize that it would require knowledge and competencies to develop green products on a regular basis. These knowledge and competencies can be varied, such as R&D, environmental know‐how, clean technology/manufacturing process, building knowledge on measuring environmental performance of products, etc., that may be developed internally or can be integrated through external networks. Adopting a resource‐based view of the firm, this article aims at (1) investigating the role of capabilities useful for companies to integrate knowledge and competencies from outside of the firm on green product development in terms of both manufacturing process and product design and (2) understanding whether green product development opens new product, market, and technology opportunities, as well as leads to better financial performance of NPD programs. To this end, a survey was conducted in two Italian manufacturing industries in which environmental issues are becoming increasingly important, namely textiles and upholstered furniture. A questionnaire was sent to 700 firms, and 102 useable questionnaires were returned. Results show that (1) companies engage in developing external integrative capabilities through the creation of collaborative networks with actors along the supply chain, the acquisition of technical know‐how, and the creation of external knowledge links with actors outside the supply chain; (2) external knowledge links play a key role in the integration of environmental sustainability issues into the manufacturing process, whereas capabilities such as the acquisition of technical know‐how and the creation of collaborative networks prove to be more important for integrating environmental issues into product design; and (3) the integration of environmental sustainability issues into NPD programs in terms of product design leads to the creation of new opportunities for firms, such as opening new markets, technologies, and product arenas, though not necessarily leading to improved financial performance of the NPD programs.     

Optimal monetary policy in a currency area

This paper investigates how monetary policy should be conducted in a two-region general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and price stickiness. This framework delivers a simple welfare criterion based on the utility of the consumers that can be used to evaluate monetary policy in a currency area. If the two regions share the same degree of nominal rigidity, the terms of trade are completely insulated from monetary policy and the optimal outcome is obtained by targeting a weighted average of the regional inflation rates. These weights coincide with the economic sizes of the region. If the degrees of rigidity are different, the optimal plan implies a high degree of inertia in the inflation rate. But an inflation targeting policy in which higher weight is given to the inflation in the region with higher degree of nominal rigidity is nearly optimal.     

Price Stability in Open Economies

This paper studies the theoretical conditions under which price stability is the optimal policy in a two-country open-economy model with imperfect competition and price stickiness. Special conditions on the levels of country-specific distortionary taxation and the intratemporal and intertemporal elasticities of substitution need to be satisfied. These restrictions apply to both cooperative and non-cooperative settings. Importantly, we show that cooperative and non-cooperative solutions do not coincide despite market completeness and producer currency pricing. We study the conditions under which quadratic approximations of single countries' welfare can be correctly evaluated by relying only on log-linear approximations of the equilibrium conditions.     

Labor market rigidity and productivity growth in a model of innovation-driven growth

Empirical studies investigating the relationship between productivity performance and labor market rigidity have generated a negative result. In this paper we try to provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical result. In doing so, we construct a no-shirking model of innovation-based growth and investigate the steady-state impact of a set of active labor market policies aimed at reducing labor market rigidity and knowledge mismatch generated by innovations. We find that, while enhancing job finding activity definitively improves the equilibrium growth-unemployment mix of the economy, reducing the knowledge mismatch of innovation through active measures is less effective in reducing the equilibrium unemployment and improving growth.     

Market reaction to second-hand news: inside the attention-grabbing hypothesis

This article investigates whether the market reaction to second-hand information is due to price pressure or information dissemination. We use the perspective of attention grabbing to analyse the market reaction to the dissemination of analysts’ recommendations published in print media. This perspective is able to explain the asymmetric market reaction to ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ advice, which is difficult to rationalize within the price pressure hypothesis. We base our empirical analysis on the content of a weekly column in the most important Italian financial newspaper, which publishes past information and analysts’ recommendations on listed companies. Our findings show asymmetric price and volume reactions on the publication day. Contrary to previous evidence, we document a positive relationship between the number of analysts quoted in the column and the price (volume) increase associated with positive recommendations. Because the weekly columns seem to simply attract investors’ attention, with no additional new information, observing a reaction positively related to the column’s salience (proxied by the number of quoted analysts) is natural. In addition, we find that the market reaction is higher when the order size is lower, i.e., when individual investors’ trades constitute a higher fraction of the total trading activity in the market.     

Why so Few Women on Boards of Directors? Empirical Evidence from Danish Companies in 1998–2010

This paper analyzes the determinants of women’s representation on boards of directors based on a panel of all privately owned or listed Danish firms with at least 50 employees observed during the period 1998–2010. We focus on the directors who are not elected by the employees and test three hypotheses on female board representation that we denote the female-led hypothesis, the tokenism hypothesis, and the pipeline hypothesis, respectively. We find evidence rejecting the female-led hypothesis. Firms with a female chairperson on the board of directors tend to have significantly fewer other non-employee-elected female board members. We also find clear evidence of a tokenism behavior in Danish companies. The likelihood of enlarging the share of non-employee-elected female board members is significantly smaller if one, two, or more women have sat on the board of directors. Finally, the pipeline hypothesis is partly confirmed. The relation between the female pipeline of potentially qualified directors and female directors is weaker than the similar relation for males. Our findings offer insights to policy makers interested in promoting gender diversity within boardrooms. Our empirical evidence suggests that an important way to increase the female proportion of non-employee-elected board members is that more women reach top executive positions.     

Green Product Innovation in Manufacturing Firms: A Sustainability‐Oriented Dynamic Capability Perspective

Despite environmental sustainability being identified as one of the key drivers of innovation, extant literature lacks a theoretically sound and empirically testable framework that can provide specific insights into green product innovation from a capability perspective. This study develops a theoretical framework from a sustainability‐oriented dynamic capability (SODC) perspective. We conceive SODCs as consisting of three underlying processes (external resource integration, internal resource integration, and resource building and reconfiguration) that influence the change/renewal of sustainability‐oriented ordinary capabilities (SOOCs) (green innovation capability and eco‐design capability). This study answers two key questions: which SODCs are needed to develop green innovation and eco‐design capabilities? Which of these capabilities lead to better market performance of green products? We test a structural model linking SODCs to market performance in 189 Italian manufacturing firms. First, we find that the nature of the SODC–performance link (direct or indirect) depends on the SODC type. Specifically, resource building and reconfiguration is the only SODC with a direct effect on market performance. Second, all three types of SODC affect the eco‐design capability, which mediates the link between SODCs and market performance. Third, we find that external resource integration is the only SODC affecting the green innovation capability, which mediates the link between external resource integration and market performance. Resource building and reconfiguration is the SODC with the overall (direct and indirect) highest impact on market performance. This study, among the first to consider capabilities for green product innovation under a dynamic capability perspective, provides implications for scholars, managers and policy makers. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Strategic Rationality Orderings and the Best Rationalization Principle

In a finite game fix a space of extended probabilities over strategies and a profile of best response correspondences. A profile ofrationality orderingsis then given by an ordered partition of the set of strategies of each player, representing different degrees of rationality, where at-leastk+1-rational strategies are best responses against extended probabilities reflecting at leastkdegrees of rationality. This solution can be constructed inductively, providing a Bayesian foundation for controversial deletion procedures such as extensive form rationalizability and iterated weak dominance. Focusing on extensive games, this approach formalizes the best rationalization principle.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C72.     

A SCHUMPETERIAN GROWTH MODEL WITH EQUILIBRIUM UNEMPLOYMENT

We introduce efficiency‐wage unemployment in a model of growth with endogenous technical change. Our research aim is twofold. First, we try to provide an analytically tractable model of growth with efficiency‐wage unemployment that can be viewed as alternative to the standard models of growth and search unemployment. Second, we try to analyze the steady‐state effects of some labor market policies on unemployment and growth. We find that a positive relationship between growth and unemployment exists and that the effectiveness of any labor market policy aimed at improving the performance of the labor market crucially depends on how individuals discount future income.