Designing business models in circular economy: A systematic literature review and research agenda

The concept of circular economy is increasingly receiving attention in different domains, including strategic management, operations management, and technology management. It requires companies to design their business model (i.e., the value network, the relationships with the supply chain partners, and the value propositions towards customers) around a new concept of sustainable development that reduces consumption of natural resources and preserves the environment. However, extant research falls short in terms of explaining how companies design their business model according to the circular economy principles. Starting from this premise, the present paper provides a systematic review of the literature on the design of business models in the context of circular economy, aiming to offer an overview of the state of research and outline a promising research agenda.     

Honesty in Environmental Regulation

This paper analyzes the determination of the optimal environmental regulatory policy under imperfect competition when the firms differ in their polluting technologies and degree of honesty. We show that more honesty does not necessarily imply lower social losses. The effect of honesty in social welfare depends not only on the degree of honesty measured by the proportion of honest firms and their particular cost features but also on the industry structure.     

A new necessary condition for implementation in iteratively undominated strategies

We uncover a new necessary condition for implementation in iteratively undominated strategies by mechanisms that satisfy the “best element property” where for each agent, there exists a strategy profile that gives him the highest payoff in the mechanism. This class includes finite and regular mechanisms. We conclude that either the quasilinearity-like assumptions of available sufficiency results cannot be completely dispensed with or some mechanisms that do not satisfy the best element property must be employed. We term the condition “restricted deception-proofness.” It requires that, in environments with identical preferences, the social choice function be immune to all deceptions, making it then stronger than incentive compatibility. In some environments the conditions for (exact or approximate) implementation by mechanisms satisfying the best element property are more restrictive than previously thought.     

Trade Openness and Spatial Inequality in Emerging Countries

Abstract

Emerging world countries have experienced over the last two decades a significant change in their trade patterns. Bold trade reforms have been followed by rapid rises in international trade levels. However, despite these radical changes, we know remarkably little about how changes in trade patterns are affecting the evolution of regional inequality in the developing world. This paper addresses the link between trade openness and spatial inequality across 22 emerging countries over the period between 1990 and 2006. Our findings show that changes in international trade bring about a significant rise in within-country inequality across the developing world and that this impact is greatest in the poorest countries. This result is robust to the inclusion of a number of control variables, and to changes in the specification of the sample and in the measure used to quantify the level of regional disparities. Consequently, the increase in trade exposure across the emerging world, while possibly benefiting the countries involved in the process in aggregate terms, is generating winning and losing regions.     

Anchoring Measurement of the Middle-Income Class to Subjective Evaluation

What constitutes the middle class is hotly debated. Following an income-based approach, a main issue concerns how to fix the income boundaries that define the middle-income tier. This paper offers a novel model-based approach to the use of self-reported class evaluation for identifying those boundaries. The self-declared status responses are modeled using a non-conventional parametrization of an ordered logistic model. In this parametrization, the cut-points of the model are directly interpretable as income boundaries, and the variance of the errors captures the idiosyncratic heterogeneity of the outcome variable. The use of subjective data is exemplified in the estimation of the middle class in Kazakhstan over the period 2003–2015.     

Outside and inside the regression “black box” from exploratory to interior data analysis

Good data analysis consists of three phases: (1) preliminary analysis, (2) confirmatory analysis (model testing), and (3) interior analysis (model checking). Social scientists doing quantitative research usually concentrate on only one of the three: confirmatory analysis. I argue that there is much to be learned from careful preliminary and interior analyses. I present an extensive example of data analysis for each of the three phases using the same data set in each phase. Rather than surveying all the possible tools available in each phase of data analysis, I concentrate on Exploratory Data Analysis techniques (stem-and-leaf plot, letter-value display, box plot, and power transformations) for the preliminary phase, on OLS for the confirmatory phase, and on residuals, leverage and single-case influence measures for interior analysis.     

Unemployment as an Adverse Trigger Event for Mortgage Default

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - There is limited evidence of the role of household-level adverse trigger events in driving mortgage default, and the evidence based on proxies,...     

Flypaper Effect and Sluggishness: Evidence from Regional Health Expenditure in Italy

In Italy, public expenditure reduction is achieved through a revision of social security and health care programs. In particular, public health expenditure control has been implemented through a reform that imposes more stringent budget rules to local governments and a considerable reduction in grants-in-aid from the central government. This paper investigates empirically whether the response to this decrease in categorical lump-sum grants from the central to local governments results in an asymmetric response to intergovernmental grants. Hard budget and soft budget constraint hypotheses are estimated by using a sample of cross-sectional and time observations covering the 20 Italian regions over the period 1989–1993. The main finding is the existence of a standard and a super flypaper effect in both models. The introduction of the soft-budget constraint hypothesis results in a stronger effect of grants and a lower response of own resources which shows that local governments prefer to incur some deficit instead of reducing health care expenditure.     

Leveraging on systemic learning to manage the early phases of product innovation projects

A number of studies have pointed out the importance of the early phases of new product development projects. In fact, these phases (addressed in the literature with different names, such as pre-project activities, concept generation, product planning, idea generation, investigation, product definition) are concerned with a number of critical decisions that have great impact on the performance of product development. Any fault occurring in these early phases in understanding the market needs, in choosing the product architecture and technology and in defining the product specifications would eventually deteriorate the innovation process, since adjustments in later stages imply reworks that are costly and time consuming. Although the relevance of early project phases has been empirically verified in the literature, the mechanisms that allow these phases to be properly managed are still largely unexplored. This paper investigates the articulated and coherent set of methods, organizational mechanisms and behavioural patterns that successful companies adopt to manage concept generation and product planning. Inferences are based on a field research concerning 19 in-depth case studies of Italian and Swedish companies in the vehicles, helicopters and white goods industries. The paper supports findings of other studies concerning the importance of teamworking and communication. However, teamworking emerges as a necessary, but not a sufficient mechanism. Systemic learning from past experiences is the real keystone toward an effective management of the early phases of product development processes.