The moderating effects of economic development on innovation and shadow entrepreneurship: grey or pink?

There is currently a renewed surge of interest in informal entrepreneurship around the world. One of the motives stems from how such entrepreneurship shapes and influences a substantial part of the global workforce. However, we may also verify how a major proportion of the research in this field focuses on developing economies and thus justifying the application of such analytical approaches to countries with different levels of economic development as is the case with Europe. Our research objectives, on the one hand, involve analysing the impact of R&D investment on informal entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, the moderating effect of the level of economic development on their innovative capacities and informal entrepreneurship results. To this end, and in accordance with Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, we divide the countries of Europe into two stages of development and may report that the higher the level of economic development, the greater the innovative capacity and, furthermore, the lower informal entrepreneurship becomes. The same holds for R&D investment with its increase being inversely proportionate to informal entrepreneurship. We, therefore, seek to contribute toward a better understanding of the problematic framework of informal entrepreneurship, in particular in the European context.     

Educational quality as perceived by the actors involved: reflections based on a study in the Environmental Sciences course

Training professionals for the new 21st century requires universities to make major changes in their conception of teaching, which, through the active, committed participation of teachers and students, will lead to the building and developing of the competencies needed by students for them to perform efficiently, ethically and with social commitment in their future jobs. The participation of teachers and students and their commitment to quality in the teacher training process are essential elements in the search for alternative ways to enhance university teaching. This article discusses the teacher training experiences had by the author in the ICE of Madrid Polytechnic University with the inclusion of data from a study undertaken on the Environmental Sciences course of this university where teachers, students and postgraduates’ perception of the quality of their vocational training at university is an important starting point for the design of strategies aimed at enhancing the quality of teaching.     

Estimating the extensive margin of trade

Understanding and quantifying the determinants of the number of sectors or firms exporting in a given country is of relevance for the assessment of trade policies. Estimation of models for the number of exporting sectors, however, poses a challenge because the dependent variable has both a lower and an upper bound, implying that the partial effects of the explanatory variables on the conditional mean of the dependent variable cannot be constant. We argue that ignoring these bounds can lead to erroneous conclusions and propose a flexible specification that accounts for the doubly-bounded nature of the dependent variable. We empirically investigate the problem and the proposed solution, finding significant differences between estimates obtained with the proposed estimator and those obtained with standard approaches.     

Insuring Banks Against Liquidity Shocks: The Role of Deposit Insurance and Lending of Last Resort

Abstract.  It has long been recognized that banks' simultaneous provision of monitoring and liquidity services is advantageous but leaves them susceptible to liquidity shocks that may culminate in a system failure. Because a system failure is costly, this provides a rationale for adopting arrangements, including a lender of last resort and deposit insurance (DI), to insure banks against liquidity shocks. These arrangements have proven themselves very successful, but they have also been the source of problems. Researchers have identified some of the main sources of these problems and have suggested ways to improve the design of these arrangements, but there are still many issues that remain unaddressed. This paper reviews the literature on the two arrangements that most countries have adopted to insure banks against liquidity shocks, a lender of last resort and DI, and compares the design of these arrangements across countries. The paper ends with a brief summary of the key lessons learned about the design of these arrangements and the issues related to them that remain unaddressed.     

Keynesian theorising during hard times: stock-flow consistent models as an unexplored 'frontier' of Keynesian macroeconomics

This paper argues that the stock-flow consistent approach tomacroeconomic modelling (SFCA) is a natural outcome of the pathtaken by Keynesian macroeconomic thought in the 1960s and 1970s,a theoretical ‘frontier’ that remained largely unexploredwith the end of Keynesian academic hegemony. It does so in twosteps. First, it phrases the representative views of Davidson,Godley, Minsky and Tobin as different ‘closures’of the same (SFC) accounting framework, calling attention totheir similarities and logical implications. Second, it discussesunresolved issues within this approach and how it differs from‘modern’ theorising.