Voluntary Provision of Public Goods and Technology

This paper highlights issues in the theory of voluntary provision of public goods, building on the investigation by Peacock in connection with the contributions by Coase and Buchanan. Our goal is twofold. We first draw attention to the early literature investigating the provision of public goods and to the successive theoretical analysis. We then focus on the impact of technology on supply and demand. Examples of different types of public goods are provided, with special attention to the cultural sector, to investigate whether and how technology affects the efficiency and the effectiveness of the related public goods provision. The implementation and exploitation of technological advancements are investigated in view of the role of different actors (public, private) at different levels of government.     

Forecasting dynamically asymmetric fluctuations of the U.S. business cycle

The generalized smooth transition autoregression (GSTAR) parametrizes the joint asymmetry in the duration and length of cycles in macroeconomic time series by using particular generalizations of the logistic function. The symmetric smooth transition and linear autoregressions are nested in the GSTAR. A test for the null hypothesis of dynamic symmetry is presented. Two case studies indicate that dynamic asymmetry is a key feature of the U.S. economy. The GSTAR model beats its competitors for point forecasting, but this superiority becomes less evident for density forecasting and in uncertain forecasting environments.     

Environmental spillover effects on firm productivity and efficiency: An analysis of agri-food business in Southeast Spain

Spillover effects are treated as the influence of knowledge and innovation diffusion on an economic activity, but their analysis related to environmental practices within firms is still quite scarce. This study investigates the effect of environmental practices and related spillovers on productivity and efficiency in agri-food firms located in Southeast Spain. The low investment in research and development actions in comparison with the industrial sector, together with the relatively recent application of environmental requirements and the heterogeneity of environmental controls within firms have led to important changes in the organisation and management of their productive activity. These features are especially related to the implications that location and clustering factors have on environmental knowledge and innovation diffusion. Taking environmental management practices as knowledge of capital, we propose a specific analysis that evaluates the impacts of both environmental investment and spillover on the production function. The results indicate the relationship between productivity improvement and environmental practices, also showing the presence of positive spillovers. In a second-stage analysis, the incidence of environmental variables on the individual technical efficiency of firms is also determined. On the whole, the empirical analysis provides evidence of the links between environmental practices spillovers and economic performance.     

Self-employment and job generation in metropolitan areas, 1969–2009

Many regional development policy initiatives assume that entrepreneurial activities promote economic growth. Empirical research has presented rationale for this argument showing that small firms create proportionally more new jobs than large firms. However, little research has been performed on the issue of net job generation at the urban level, particularly when self-employment is considered as an indicator of entrepreneurial activities. This paper investigates to what extent US metropolitan areas in the 1969–2009 period characterized by relatively high rates of self-employment also have shown relatively high rates of subsequent total employment growth. The analysis corrects for the influence of sectoral composition, wage level, educational attainment, presence of research universities and size of the metropolitan area to measure the extent to which the number and quality of self-employed in a region contribute to total employment growth. It finds the relationship between self-employment rates and subsequent total employment growth to be positive on average during the 40-year period but to weaken over time.     

Economic impacts of developing a biofuel industry in Mozambique

ABSTRACT

Mozambique is one of the most promising African countries for producing biofuels and the national biofuel policy of 2009 identifies measures to incentivize biofuel production. Demand for biofuels in the Southern African Development Community is expected to increase over the next few years as 7 of its 15 member states have implemented or proposed the implementation of blending mandates by 2020. South Africa is one of these countries. Using a dynamic recursive computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, we estimate the impacts of expanding biofuel production in Mozambique under both commercial and smallholder-type farming models, including and excluding bagasse cogeneration.     

Spread component costs and stock trading characteristics in the Spanish Stock Exchange. Two flexible fractional response models

This paper investigates relationships between the spread component costs (adverse selection, order processing and inventory costs) and stock trading characteristics in the Spanish Stock Exchange (SSE), taking into account the random nature of these costs. First, we analyse the statistical properties of estimated spread components in the market, which are obtained by using two statistical models to decompose the bid–ask spread. We then propose a fractional response regression model based on two flexible cross-sectional probability density functions with covariates which accommodate certain aspects of the empirical estimates, such as skewness and bounded distribution. Our model has two main advantages: (i) it can be implemented easily in a maximum likelihood framework; (ii) in contrast to linear regression models, it provides a useful estimate of the statistical significance of the parameters, and predicts costs not only at the conditional mean but also by using quantiles of the estimated conditional distribution. The empirical results corroborate the presence of statistically significant large order processing costs and smaller adverse selection and inventory costs in the SSE. These spread components have a skewed empirical distribution and the proposed fractional regression models represent the behaviour of these costs reasonably well, surpassing the linear regression model in various specification tests.     

Asymmetric Margins in Prices and Retail Supply Chain Integration: The Spanish Vegetable Case

Several studies have observed asymmetric behavior between sale prices in the supermarket and the price paid to the farmer. This article presents the consequences derived from a simplified framework considering a scenario in which the retailer wishes to maintain balanced profits due to external pressures or because the retailers' strategy to differentiate themselves from the competition requires greater integration in the supply chain. It is shown that the price-fixing decision of the distributor may depend on the risk, measured by the relationship between demand elasticity and variable costs, as a result of uncertainty in consumer response to price variations. This risk arises from the existence of supply that is highly changeable in the short term and demand that is unpredictable.     

Start-up incentives: Entrepreneurship policy or active labour market programme?

As several European governments develop new start-up programmes during recessions, the appropriateness of these policies recently has become a hot policy issue. This study suggests that the contribution of these incentives is dubious, if aimed to combat economic and jobs crises as part of the entrepreneurship policy, and can be shaped by various country-specific factors, such as the economic situation and the stringency of labour laws. To provide support for these claims, this paper investigates the underlying determinants of an individual's decision to switch from unemployment to self-employment in Europe and stresses the need to devote special attention to the role of three essential dimensions: (i) the existing heterogeneity within self-employment, by considering self-employed individuals who hire employees (employers) and self-employed individuals without personnel (own-account workers) as separated groups; (ii) the effects of different measures of social capital and network contacts, as forms of micro level institutional factors; and (iii) the explanatory power of cross-country differences in the state of the economy, expenditure on start-up incentives, and the stringency of labour laws, as forms of macro level institutional factors. This study has useful theory and policy implications for entrepreneurship development.