Human resource management and innovation in the Canary Islands: an ultra-peripheral region of the European Union

This study attempts to answer the question about how firms in an ultra-peripheral region innovate to compete in a global market when they often seem not to have the basic conditions to innovate identified in the literature. On that line, and based on the notion that firms in ultra-peripheral regions must recognise the value of their human capital in order to overcome the limitations typical of their social and geographical context, this research aimed to analyse the relationship between the human resource (HR) policy and innovation in an ultra-peripheral region of the European Union, namely the Canary Islands. The objective of this study is to identify the HR-related internal factors that can affect the innovation capability of firms. In particular, this paper considers the HR management policy, the formalisation of that policy in an HR plan, and job stability. To achieve this goal, an empirical study of 157 Canarian firms was carried out and arrived at the conclusion that high commitment human resource management (HRM) has a positive influence on organisational innovation in processes. The results also show that the formalisation of the HR policy in a plan, and job stability also increases innovation in processes.     

Model uncertainty and policy evaluation: Some theory and empirics

This paper explores ways to integrate model uncertainty into policy evaluation. We describe a general framework that includes both model averaging methods as well as some measures that describe whether policies and their consequences are model dependent. These general ideas are then applied to assess simple monetary policy rules for some standard New Keynesian specifications. We conclude that the original Taylor rule has good robustness properties, but may reasonably be challenged in overall quality with respect to stabilization by alternative simple rules, even when these rules employ parameters that are set without accounting for model uncertainty.     

Economic Development and the Relative Price of Nontradables: Global Dynamics of the Krueger-Deardorff-Leamer Model*

This paper employs a three-factor model of economic development to model forward-looking nontraded investment as a determinant of the relative price of nontradables. A capital-intensity. reversal of nontraded output relative to manufactured output-arising from a switch toward a capital-intensive manufacturing technique from a labor-intensive technique-produces a bifurcation in the model's dynamics. the two resulting saddlepath trajectories are each consistent with optimizing behavior and transversality conditions at infinity. History, as embodied in the economy's capital stock, as well as forward-looking expectations determine whether the economy chooses the low-investment or high-investment trajectory.     

Using private management standard certification to reduce information asymmetries in corrupt environments

This paper investigates how corruption in the institutional environment influences firms' decisions to obtain third‐party certification to private management standards as signals of desirable conduct. We argue that policy‐specific corruption erodes trust in government efforts to regulate firms' conduct, thus increasing the signaling value of private certifications and the likelihood of certification. However, widespread corruption in the general environment can extend distrust to private certification systems, which reduces the credibility and signaling value of private certifications, thus decreasing the likelihood that firms obtain certification. Our empirical results based on ISO 14001 environmental management system certification among 433 automotive plants in Mexico confirm these relationships. We discuss the implications of our findings for transaction cost economics, institutional theory, research, and practice. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Discrete Choice with Social Interactions

This paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioural outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects. We study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behaviour of others in an environment of noncooperative decisionmaking. Laws of large numbers are generated in such environments. Multiplicity of equilibria in these models, which are equivalent to the existence of multiple self-consistent means for average choice behaviour, will exist when the social interactions exceed a particular threshold. Local stability of these multiple equilibria is also studied. The properties of the noncooperative economy are contrasted with the properties of an economy in which a social planner determines the set of individual choices. Finally, a likelihood function based on the theoretical model is given and conditions for the econometric identifiability of the model are established.     

Comparative analysis of global consumer behaviour in the context of different manual dishwashing methods

This laboratory study presents an overview of the global manual dishwashing behaviour. The focus of the investigation was to analyse individual attitudes towards manual dishwashing and to determine the amount of water and energy used, as well as the cleaning performance achieved. Additionally, manual dishwashing was compared with automatic dishwashers. Two hundred eighty-nine participants from 29 countries took part in this investigation. Each consumer had to wash up a complete soiled dishwasher load consisting of 12 place settings based on both international and local performance test standards for automatic dishwashers. Country-specific aspects such as tableware, food residues or washing up equipment were considered. In order to analyse individual consumer's behaviour, each participant was recorded on video and had to fill out a questionnaire. The resource consumption for washing up dishes was measured during the tests. At the end of each trial, the cleaning result of the washed up tableware was assessed. To compare manual with automatic dishwashing, country-specific dishwasher models were tested in parallel with three different programmes with the same soiled dish samples. The study provides comprehensive data about the average resource consumption for manual dishwashing for a specific load for each country. The average water consumption per country reached 34.7 l up to 160.1 l, and individual values ranged from 18.3 l to 472.8 l. The lowest used average heat quantity accounted for 0.9 kWh per country, while the highest amount was five times higher. The cleaning results did not differ much between the countries: the average test results were between 2.2 and 2.8 on a scale between 0 and 5. The automatic dishwasher tests showed differences between both the machines and the programmes. All machines achieved lower water consumption values than the average consumers with about 9.6 l to 26.7 l of water on average. The energy consumption ranged from 0.5 kWh on average up to 2.0 kWh. The cleaning results of the dishwasher tests varied highly ranging from 1.1 in a quick programme to 4.4 in an intensive programme. The study comes to the conclusion that automatic dishwashing is more superior as compared with manual dishwashing in terms of performance and resource consumption under the tested conditions. Furthermore, it points out that washing up dishes under running tap water is the most water-consuming manual dishwashing method of all investigated ones. A high lack of knowledge about the benefits of automatic dishwashing compared with manual dishwashing can still be identified among consumers.     

Modeling political change with a regime-switching model

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether legislators vote in two distinct regimes as suggested by the U.S. political system and whether these voting patterns can be explained by economic variables. The paper exploits U.S. Roll-Call votes from a rich unbalanced panel data set of 540 legislative positions over 104 Congressional sessions and Presidents since the Korean War. The paper employs a variant of the Hamilton Regime-Switching Model (1989) to uncover three major patterns in the data. There appear to be two distinct regimes closely related though not identical to the two-party system. Shifts in these regimes are most frequent in Presidential elections and are less frequent in the Senate and the House. Finally, since World War II, economic variables do not seem to influence the shifts implying that these political shocks are exogenous. However, over longer horizons, recessions do tend to force political change in the legislature.