On Spatial Public Finance Empirics

This paper focuses on the empirical specification of theoretical models of strategic interaction that give rise to a spatial pattern in local government expenditures and revenues. It shows that estimation of a reduced form inter-jurisdictional reaction function might not by itself allow to discriminate among competing strategic interaction theories. A review of the recent empirical literature suggests that exploring in more depth the specific empirical implications of alternative theoretical models, as well as fully exploiting the institutional features of multi-tiered government structures and local electoral systems, can help identify the structural model generating the observed spatial auto-correlation in policy variables.JEL Code: H71, H72, H77     

Profit maximization and supermodular technology

A dataset is a list of observed factor inputs and prices for a technology; profits and production levels are unobserved. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a dataset to be consistent with profit maximization under a monotone and concave revenue based on the notion of cyclic monotonicity. Our result implies that monotonicity and concavity cannot be tested, and that one cannot decide if a firm is competitive based on factor demands. We also introduce a condition, cyclic supermodularity, which is both necessary and sufficient for data to be consistent with a supermodular technology. Cyclic supermodularity provides a test for complementarity of production factors. We are very grateful to two anonymous referees for suggestions, comments, and corrections. We also thank Kim Border for his suggestions on an earlier draft.     

Trade costs and the Home Market Effect

Most of the theoretical and empirical studies on the Home Market Effect (HME) assume the existence of an “outside good” that absorbs all trade imbalances and equalizes wages. We study the consequences on the HME of removing this assumption. The HME is attenuated and, more interestingly, it becomes non-linear. The non-linearity implies that the HME is more important for very large and very small countries than for medium size countries. The empirical investigation conducted on a database comprising 25 industries, 25 countries, and 7 years confirms the presence of the HME and of its non-linear shape.     

Aggressive leaders

I characterize the incentives to undertake strategic investments in markets with Nash competition and endogenous entry. Contrary to the case with an exogenous number of firms, when the investment increases marginal profitability, only a “top dog” strategy is optimal. For instance, under both quantity and price competition, a market leader overinvests in cost reductions and overproduces complement products. The purpose of the strategic investment is to allow the firm to be more aggressive in the market and to reduce its price below those of other firms. Contrary to the post‐Chicago approach, this shows that aggressive pricing strategies are not necessarily associated with exclusionary purposes.     

Persistent high-growth firms in China’s manufacturing

Small Business Economics - This article explores the association between persistence of high-growth and crucial dimensions of firm structure and performance (productivity, profits, investment...     

Individual Performance in Turbulent Environments: The Role of Organizational Learning Capability and Employee Flexibility

Organizational learning capability (OLC) and employee flexibility help firms navigate the challenges faced by organizations operating in turbulent environments. OLC includes dimensions such as experimentation, risk taking, openness, dialogue, and participative decision making. Employee flexibility is considered a crucial tool for strategic human resource management in tackling environmental turbulence. Accordingly, we pose the following research question: how, and to what extent, is individual performance enhanced by OLC and employee flexibility in turbulent environments? The major impact that environmental turbulence has on change and flexibility requirements suggests that employee flexibility plays an important role in the impact OLC has on individual performance. However, we found no prior studies that explicitly analyzed this mediating function of employee flexibility. In this study, we tested three hypotheses that link OLC and individual performance, OLC and employee flexibility, and employee flexibility and individual performance. We applied a structural equation methodology, using partial least squares path modeling, to a sample of 174 academics at a Latin American university (a highly turbulent context). Our results show employee flexibility fully mediates the relation between OLC and individual performance given the presence of environmental turbulence. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Mixed equilibria in games of strategic complementarities

Summary. The literature on games of strategic complementarities (GSC) has focused on pure strategies. I introduce mixed strategies and show that, when strategy spaces are one-dimensional, the complementarities framework extends to mixed strategies ordered by first-order stochastic dominance. In particular, the mixed extension of a GSC is a GSC, the full set of equilibria is a complete lattice and the extremal equilibria (smallest and largest) are in pure strategies. The framework does not extend when strategy spaces are multi-dimensional. I also update learning results for GSC using stochastic fictitious play. Received: October 16, 2000; revised version: March 7, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" I am very grateful to Robert Anderson, David Blackwell, Aaron Edlin, Peter De Marzo, Ted O'Donoghue, Matthew Rabin, Ilya Segal, Chris Shannon, Clara Wang and Federico Weinschelbaum for comments and advise.     

Relative demand for highly skilled workers and use of different ICT technologies

This study investigates the relationship between several indicators of ICT usage and digitalization and the relative demand for highly skilled workers. The data are based on two-digit industry-level information on seven European countries for the period 2001–2010. For manufacturing industries, static fixed-effects models show that the share of employees with internet broadband access, the diffusion of mobile internet access and the use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and automatic data exchange combined with electronic invoicing are all significantly and positively related to skill intensity in the industries observed. For service industries, only mobile internet usage intensity is significant. Specifically for manufacturing, a 10-point increase in the percentage of firms using ERP systems is associated with an increase in the share of highly skilled workers by 0.4 percentage points. These estimates indicate that the increase in ERP system usage during the period studied accounted for 30% of the increase in the share of workers with a tertiary degree across manufacturing industries and countries. The results are robust with respect to the estimation method and the potential endogeneity of ICT.