Promote or Perish? A brief note on academic social networking sites and academic reputation

ABSTRACT

This commentary explores some of the reputational issues of using academic social networking sites (ASNS) such as ResearchGate, ResearcherID, ORCID, Academia.edu, Google Scholar, and Mendeley for academic self-promotion and considers whether the adage of ‘Publish or Perish’ has been recently overshadowed by the new imperative of ‘Promote or Perish’?     

Mergers and acquisition trends in Europe

The research revises, in a first step, the different European waves of mergers and acquisitions and their differences with the American waves. Mergers and acquisitions are defined as an important corporate restructuring method with four main different ways to make them. The body of this paper analyzes the merger and acquisition situation in 1994 in Europe compared with the situation in previous years. Mergers and acquisitions activity in major European countries in 1993 and 1994, various volume transactions in mergers and acquisitions activity, cross-border deals in Europe between 1989 and 1994, and the big buyers in cross-border deals in 1994 are analyzed. The paper also emphasizes the different characteristics and their evolution.     

An evaluation of the life cycle effects of minimum pensions on retirement behavior

In this paper we explore the effects of the minimum pension program on welfare and retirement in Spain. This is done with a stylized life cycle model which provides a convenient analytical characterization of optimal behavior. We use data from the Spanish Social Security to estimate the behavioral parameters of the model and then simulate the changes induced by the minimum pension in aggregate retirement patterns. The impact is substantial: there is a threefold increase in retirement at 60 (the age of first entitlement) with respect to the economy without minimum pensions, and total early retirement (before or at 60) is almost 50% larger. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Group Affiliation and Ownership Concentration as Determinants of Capital Structure Decisions: Contextualizing the Facts for an Emerging Economy

This study considers the firm’s affiliation with business groups and the ownership structure as determinants of leverage decisions in Chilean firms. The major findings show that group-affiliated firms take advantage of internal capital markets and transactions with related parties (e.g., low transference price or loans at competitive interest rates) that reduces the demand for external debt. Majority shareholders in affiliated firms behave as controllers of managers, on the one hand, and avoid the supervisory role of debt, on the other hand. In stand-alone firms, supervision led by majority shareholders is complemented by the monitoring role of debt through higher levels of leverage. We conclude that further developments in capital structure theories adjusted to the particularities of the different institutional contexts are needed.     

Parametric estimation of inefficiency in cargo handling in Spanish ports

Port workers services have been usually heavily regulated and reserved exclusively for a special kind of workers, dockworkers, which seems to have been the cause of serious inefficiencies worldwide. During the eighties, law reforms have been introduced to solve this problem. In this paper we analyze and decompose efficiency in cargo handling operations in 19 Spanish ports from 1990 to 1998. The method chosen is that of the parametric estimation of both allocative and technical inefficiency using panel data and a quadratic cost function. Results show that although inefficiency has decreased overall, there has been over utilization of labor regarding capital, and technical inefficiency. This supports the need of further consideration of other aspects including competition.

Royalty licensing

Most patent licensing agreements observed empirically include either per-unit or ad valorem royalties. The theoretical literature generally focuses on per-unit royalties. We provide a simple justification for the presence of ad valorem royalties in licensing contracts.     

Some insights on conceptualizing and measuring service quality

We discuss past work in the conceptualization and measurement of perceived service quality and describe the most important models proposed in the last 25 years. We infer the general equations that can be derived from each conceptualization. Finally, we summarize the shortcomings and contradictions of each model as well as conclusions reached so far by a certain consensus of researchers using different models. In order to provide a framework for understanding service quality models, we discuss the service quality paradigm from the realist and constructivist perspective along with the multidimensional nature of service quality implicit in the reflective versus formative debate. We conclude by recommending the development of more creative models of service quality, proposing three different options for quantitative analysis that minimize the various limitations that characterize the most widely used models.     

Further empirical evidence on block transactions below the MBR: the Spanish market

There is a relatively unknown market for partial control or corporate influence in Spanish listed firms, where the control transaction size is below the legal threshold that triggers a mandatory tender offer, as this kind of deal looks for exercising some degree of control, but not a full control. The goal of this paper is to go further in its empirical analysis by exploring its distinguishing features, using as the criterion to define its transactions obtaining a seat in the board of directors. We find that these deals are mainly located in the segment of the market of large trades where the rules for private negotiations are easier to implement; the size of the block is relatively large and it is negotiated as a whole block. Besides, the most common buyer has no previous stake in the firm. We find no evidence that the buyers pay, in median, for a seat on the board of directors, but the variability of the premiums for those blocks is higher and shows that buyers that had no control position in the target firm pay more for being among largest shareholders (partial control) and less for not being among them (influence).     

The Political Economy of Real Exchange Rate Behavior: Theory and Empirical Evidence for Developed and Developing Countries, 1960–2010

Empirical results of testing the PPP hypothesis have constantly shown that relative prices do not converge to the same level, either in the short or the long run. Therefore, the PPP explanation of the real exchange rate does not provide a reasonable measure of competitiveness at the international level. This article puts forth a different approach based on the works of Ricardo, Marx, Harrod and Shaikh. It argues that the real relative unit labor cost is the main factor explaining the long-run behavior of the real exchange rate. The second section of the article explains the theoretical underpinnings of our approach. The third section analyzes the role of the real interest rate differential in explaining real exchange rate misalignments. In the fourth section, we present a graphical analysis of the interrelation among the real effective exchange rate, the real unit labor cost ratio, the short-run real interest rate differential and the trade balance for 16 OECD countries, Taiwan and three developing countries for the period 1960–2010. The fifth section investigates the long-run relationship between the latter three indexes through co-integrating and error correction models using the ARDL–ECM framework. The last section provides our conclusions.     

The speed of adjustment in working capital requirement

This paper analyzes the determinants of working capital requirement (WCR) and examines the speed with which firms adjust toward their target WCR. The findings indicate that firms adjust relatively quickly, which supports the hypothesis that current balance sheet items are easier to manipulate and could be changed quite easily, even in the short run. Moreover, we find that the speed of adjustment is not equal across all firms and varies according to their external finance constraints and their bargaining power. Firms with better access to external capital markets and greater bargaining power adjust faster due to their lower costs of adjustment.