EU After COVID-19: An Opportunity for Policy Coordination

Intereconomics - Despite all the difficulties inherent to our political organisation, the European Union has taken a bold step by doubling the EU budget for the next six years with the NGEU fund.     

Innovation orientation and long-term performance: The mediating role of market perception capability

This paper examines the relationship between the orientation towards innovation of SMEs and long-term performance, considering market perception capability as a mediating variable. This research topic is important because it can provide a better understanding of the relationship between innovation orientation and performance, since most of the previous papers that have analyzed this relationship have done so from a short-term perspective. But the effect of innovation orientation on performance may not be immediate and short-term, but long-term, and may be influenced by the company’s ability to develop marketing capabilities. A sample of 77 independent hotels is taken for empirical contrast and a system of structural equations is modelled using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. The results show that the company’s capacity to understand the market in which it operates functions as a mechanism that intervenes in the relationship between innovation orientation and long-term result, with a mediating effect that explains the positive effect of innovation orientation on the long-term results.

     

The moderating effect of innovative capacity on the relationship between real options and strategic flexibility

In dynamic sectors, organizations should be capable of adapting to unpredictable environmental conditions. Strategic flexibility grants organizations the capacity to respond to the changes in their environment in the direction required, renewing their strategies and making the required organizational changes. The goal of this study is to analyze how the use of real options relates to strategic flexibility from a managerial capacity perspective. Through an empirical study performed on European firms, we confirm that innovative capacity exercises a moderating role between real options and strategic flexibility. The fact that a firm's management has foreseen and contemplated real options does not necessarily lead to their execution; they must also be accompanied by some innovative capacity.     

Input–output evidence on the relative price effects of total productivity shift

This paper provides empirical evidence on the relative price effects of a notional shift in total productivity using data from ten Symmetric Input–Output Tables of five European economies. The results suggest that the direction of the price-movements is, more often than not, governed by the (traditional) labour cost condition and this could be connected to the effective ranks of the matrices of the relative shares of the capital goods.