Partnership Between Local Government and the Local Community In The Area of Social Policy

The article describes the background and history of one project aimed at developing a strategic social plan in the city of Eger. This initiative was based upon partnership between the municipal government, the local community and civil organizations in Eger. It offers an important perspective upon the potential, in the transitional nations of eastern and central Europe, for public-private partnership as an effective mechanism both to map social needs and to develop policies to address these needs. It also offers one particular approach to the development of such partnerships - the decision conferencing model. Such an approach takes public-private partnerships into an arena beyond that of policy implementation alone.     

The organization of expertise in the presence of communication

Principal decision-makers are sometimes obliged to rely on multiple sources of information when drawing conclusions about the desirability of given actions in response to decisions they face. They may hire specialized agents to inform their decisions. Principals have authority both to allow communication among agents of information and to prevent information-sharing. I assume that communication facilitates the emergence of some complementarities among agents, but it may also promote collusion. I study the optimal design of contracts focusing on how to sequence communication of expertise. I show that from a principal’s point of view, when the advantages of allowing communication dominate, communication is more effective before effort choices are made rather than after.     

Reemployment wages and UI liquidity effect: a regression discontinuity approach

This paper puts together the non-distortionary liquidity effect of unemployment insurance and job match quality. We identify a big impact on subsidized unemployment duration and a small impact on wages on the job that follows the unemployment spell. Wage gains are heterogeneous and concentrated on individuals at the bottom of the pre-unemployment income distribution. The non-distortionary nature of the liquidity effect reduces the pressure on low-income workers to accept lower productivity jobs.

The impact of different scenarios for intermittent bladder catheterization on health state utilities: results from an internet-based time trade-off survey

Aims: Intermittent catheterization (IC) is the gold standard for bladder management in patients with chronic urinary retention. Despite its medical benefits, IC users experience a negative impact on their quality of life (QoL). For health economics based decision making, this impact is normally measured using generic QoL measures (such as EQ-5D) that estimate a single utility score which can be used to calculate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). But these generic measures may not be sensitive to all relevant aspects of QoL affected by intermittent catheters. This study used alternative methods to estimate the health state utilities associated with different scenarios: using a multiple-use catheter, one-time-use catheter, pre-lubricated one-time-use catheter and pre-lubricated one-time-use catheter with one less urinary tract infection (UTI) per year.

Methods: Health state utilities were elicited through an internet-based time trade-off (TTO) survey in adult volunteers representing the general population in Canada and the UK. Health states were developed to represent the catheters based on the following four attributes: steps and time needed for IC process, pain and the frequency of UTIs.

Results: The survey was completed by 956 respondents. One-time-use catheters, pre-lubricated one-time-use catheters and ready-to-use catheters were preferred to multiple-use catheters. The utility gains were associated with the following features: one time use (Canada: +0.013, UK: +0.021), ready to use (all: +0.017) and one less UTI/year (all: +0.011).

Limitations: Internet-based survey responders may have valued health states differently from the rest of the population: this might be a source of bias.

Conclusion: Steps and time needed for the IC process, pain related to IC and the frequency of UTIs have a significant impact on IC related utilities. These values could be incorporated into a cost utility analysis.     

Cash Transfers to the Poor and the Labor Market: An Equilibrium Analysis

This paper studies the effects of cash transfers to the poor on the labor market. This is investigated in a matching model with endogenous labor market participation and job destruction. Depending on their productivity, workers might want to stay in the job, become unemployed, or leave the labor market; in addition, workers out of the labor force might decide to search for a job. Cash transfers are introduced to all agents with income below a given level. Two qualitative results are found: (i) The size of cash transfers has a negative effect on the employment rate, but an ambiguous effect on the unemployment rate; and (ii) the coverage of this welfare program has a positive effect on the employment rate, and an ambiguous effect on the unemployment rate. The numerical simulations also show that: (i) if the government target is to reduce inequality and poverty, the more efficient policy is to increase the level of benefits instead of increasing the eligibility of the program; (ii) compared with a welfare program that condition eligibility to labor market participation, the “unconditional” cash transfer program has a stronger impact on inequality and poverty, but with a reduction in labor market participation and output.     

The Dynamics of Labour Flexibility: Relationships between Employment Type and Innovativeness

This paper investigates the relationship between flexible human resource (HR) practices and innovativeness. Testing the research model in a sample of first‐tier automotive suppliers indicates that internal flexibility practices are positively related to innovativeness. Regarding external flexibility, the association depends on the type of contingent employee: negative association for ‘short‐term hires’ and positive association for ‘consulting/contracting firms’. The relationships to innovativeness for practices associated with knowledge transfer are moderated by environmental dynamism, but the non‐knowledge related practices are not. Firms in highly dynamic environments can benefit more from flexible HR practices than firms in less dynamic environments.     

FASHION AND THE GOVERNANCE OF KNOWLEDGE IN A TRADITIONAL INDUSTRY: THE CASE OF THE FOOTWEAR SECTORAL INNOVATION SYSTEM IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF PORTUGAL

Abstract

The paper deals with the footwear industry as a sectoral innovation system. It particularly focuses on the incidental role of fashion in restructuring and innovation within the footwear production. The importance taken by fashion leads towards a more complicated reading of the recent changes of this industry, regarding its organization, innovation processes, and its mode of technological knowledge governance. More especially, within the traditional footwear industry, low levels of knowledge appropriability were combined with low cumulativeness in firms with low-innovative activity. However, as fashion was incorporated in the footwear industry, technological knowledge governance evolves towards higher cumulativeness at least at the industry level. This contribution discusses in detail the pervasiveness of fashion onto the footwear industry. It especially shows how the numerous agents involved in the fashion knowledge production and their geographical concentration allow for increasing returns when they align well with knowledge cumulativeness at the industry level. It also reveals that the renewed knowledge base of fashion exhibits a higher degree of tacitness and typically develops along an external localized knowledge base.     

Climate Change and Financial Performance in Times of Crisis

Over the past years there has been a debate on the relationship between the environmental and financial performance of businesses, but researchers have not reached any agreement. This research attempts to explore this relationship, especially as in recent years there has been controversy about how this relationship has been affected by the global economic crisis. Taking into account that successfully limiting global climate change to safe levels in the long term is likely to require connecting climate change policies to sustainable development strategies, this paper focuses on the performance of environmental policies. We used a sample of 855 international companies in sectors of intensive greenhouse gas/CO₂ emissions. Specifically, we used data from the Forbes Global 2000 Index and Carbon Disclosure Project data from 2006 to 2009. The data analysis was performed using panel data methodology. The results obtained show that in times of economic crisis, the synergy between environmental and financial performance is higher, meaning that companies must continue to invest in sustainable projects in order to enhance relations with their stakeholders, leading to higher economic profits. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

A model of innovation and learning with involuntary spillovers and absorptive capacity

We develop a model of innovation and learning that incorporates explicitly the need for a firm to conduct its own research and development (R&D) in order to realize involuntary spillovers from other firms’ R&D activity and the development of absorptive capacity of research firms over time. The conclusions of the model follow directly from the functional forms that are used to describe the generation and absorption of technological knowledge. The first proposition formally characterizes the steady-state rate of growth of technology for the model. The analysis also shows how some of the key features of two distinct, pure modes of organization of the production of new knowledge, the R&D model and the new localized knowledge model, are implied by our model by simply drastically changing the relative magnitude of two exogenous parameters: the ease of learning and the pace of knowledge advance. The second proposition formally characterizes the connections implied by the model between involuntary spillovers and absorptive capacity. Analysis of the long-term interactions between involuntary spillovers of knowledge and absorptive capacity provides the essential insights into an understanding of the elements of a self-sustained process of endogenous growth. The third and last formal proposition of this paper accommodates firm-level arguments and the crucial role of a firm's absorptive capacity in taking advantage of its location in clusters, as implied by the theoretical model.