Is the leadership style important in R&D departments in Spanish industrial companies? An empirical analysis

This paper aims to thoroughly look into the effects of the differences between the diverse leadership styles on innovative outputs (intensive, efficient and eco-efficient) in Spanish industrial companies. A questionnaire for the factories was sent and was received between the months of September 2013 and June 2014. A total of 142 valid questionnaires were received. Several regression models were used in the empirical analysis. The results show that charismatic leadership positively induces an intensive innovative output, at the same time as it improves firms’ eco-efficient innovative output. Likewise, the individualised consideration that characterises transformational leadership makes this leadership style produce positive results on the whole group of innovative outputs considered. At the other end of the leadership spectrum, the transactional style causes negative effects on the relationship between innovative activity and innovative outputs, and more specifically, on the efficient innovative output.     

The advertising performance of non-ideal female models as a function of viewers' body mass index: a moderated mediation analysis of two competing affective pathways

Advertisements often display ideal female bodies which create unattainable standards of beauty, generating body anxiety and disorders in female viewers. Accordingly, public health concerns would encourage the use of natural, unedited models in advertisements. However, the advertising performance of natural models remains contentious. We argue that previous inconsistent findings about this performance may result from a complex causal framework in which natural models impact performance through two affective mediators (body anxiety, and repulsion toward the model), while allowing moderation by the viewer's own body mass index (BMI). Data collected in a nationally representative sample of 400 young women largely (but not entirely) validate this causal framework. Natural models triggered repulsion in viewers with higher BMI, which hurt advertising performance. Body anxiety, however, was positively correlated with advertising performance, and did not mediate any effect of natural models.     

A critical overview of privacy-preserving approaches for collaborative forecasting

Cooperation between different data owners may lead to an improvement in forecast quality—for instance, by benefiting from spatiotemporal dependencies in geographically distributed time series. Due to business competitive factors and personal data protection concerns, however, said data owners might be unwilling to share their data. Interest in collaborative privacy-preserving forecasting is thus increasing. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art and unveils several shortcomings of existing methods in guaranteeing data privacy when employing vector autoregressive models. The methods are divided into three groups: data transformation, secure multi-party computations, and decomposition methods. The analysis shows that state-of-the-art techniques have limitations in preserving data privacy, such as (i) the necessary trade-off between privacy and forecasting accuracy, empirically evaluated through simulations and real-world experiments based on solar data; and (ii) iterative model fitting processes, which reveal data after a number of iterations.     

Lost in intervention. The Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson effect on the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998)

We have decomposed the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998) into its trend and cyclical components and used the former to proxy its time-varying equilibrium. Then, we have compared changes in the equilibrium with changes in the Spanish and the USA productivity differentials to identify years that do not fit with the Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis. The greatest maladjustment is found in the 1940s and 1950s, decades of strong exchange rate intervention in Spain. Conversely, the link between equilibrium and differentials adjusts to the hypothesis when using the non-intervened peseta/dollar exchange rate on the Tangier black market. These contrasting results back up the idea that exchange rate intervention, so common in developing countries, might explain their scanter evidence in favour of the HBS effect.     

Fractional integration and cointegration in merger and acquisitions in the US petroleum industry

This article employs methodologies based on fractional integration and cointegration to analyse the time-series properties of merger and acquisitions (M&A) activity and crude oil prices in the US from 1980 to 2012. Our results indicate that an increase in the crude oil price produces a significant increase in the M&A data between 2 and 3 months after the initial shock.     

The Effect of Explicit Communication on pricing: Evidence from the Collapse of a Gasoline Cartel

We study the collapse of collusion in Québec's retail gasoline market following a Competition Bureau investigation, and show that it involved two empirical regularities: high margins, and asymmetric price adjustments. Using weekly, station‐level prices we test whether collusion was successful, and whether asymmetric adjustments were part of the cartel's strategy. We do so in the markets targeted by the investigation, and in markets throughout the province with similar pre‐collapse pricing (cyclical markets). Our results suggest that stations in both target and cyclical markets adjusted pricing following the announcement: margins fell (by 30%/15% in target/cyclical markets), and adjustments became more symmetric.     

Healthcare costs of stroke and major bleeding in patients with atrial fibrillation treated with non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants

Objective: To assess long-term healthcare costs related to ischemic stroke and systemic embolism (stroke/SE) and major bleeding (MB) events in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) treated with non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs).

Materials and methods: Optum’s Clinformatics Data Mart database from 1/2009–12/2016 was analyzed. Adult patients with ≥1 stroke/SE hospitalization (index date) were matched 1:1 to patients without stroke/SE (random index date), based on propensity scores. Patients with an MB event were matched to patients without MB. All patients had an NOAC dispensing overlapping index date, ≥12?months of eligibility pre-index date, and ≥1 NVAF diagnosis. The observation period spanned from the index date until the earliest date of death, switch to warfarin, end of insurance coverage, or end of data availability. Mean costs were evaluated: (1) per-patient-per-year (PPPY) and (2) at 1, 2, 3, and 4?years using Lin's method.

Results: The cost differences were, respectively, $48,807 and $28,298 PPPY for NOAC users with stroke/SE (n?=?1,340) and those with MB (n?=?3,774) events compared to controls. Cost differences of patients with vs without stroke/SE were $49,876, $51,627, $57,822, and $60,691 at 1, 2, 3, and 4?years post-index, respectively (p?p?Limitations: Limitations include unobserved confounders, coding and/or billing inaccuracies, limited sample sizes over longer follow-up, and the under-reporting of mortality for deaths occurring after 2011.

Conclusions: The incremental healthcare costs incurred by patients with vs without stroke/SE was nearly twice as high as those of patients with vs without MB. Moreover, each additional year up to 4?years after the first event was associated with an incremental cost for patients with a stroke/SE or MB event compared to those without an event.     

Using templates and linguistic patterns to define process performance indicators

Process performance management (PPM) aims at measuring, monitoring and analysing the performance of business processes (BPs), in order to check the achievement of strategic and operational goals and to support decision-making for their optimisation. PPM is based on process performance indicators (PPIs), so having an appropriate definition of them is crucial. One of the main problems of PPIs definition is to express them in an unambiguous, complete, understandable, traceable and verifiable manner. In practice, PPIs are defined informally – usually in ad hoc, natural language, with its well-known problems – or they are defined from an implementation perspective, hardly understandable to non-technical people. In order to solve this problem, in this article we propose a novel approach to improve the definition of PPIs using templates and linguistic patterns. This approach promotes reuse, reduces both ambiguities and missing information, is understandable to all stakeholders and maintains traceability with the process model. Furthermore, it enables the automated processing of PPI definitions by its straightforward translation into the PPINOT metamodel, allowing the gathering of the required information for their computation as well as the analysis of the relationships between them and with BP elements.