Towards ��An Intellectual Capital-Based View of the Firm��: Origins and Nature

Economic and social activities are undergoing radical changes, which can be labelled as ??knowledge economy and/or society??. In this sense, intellectual capital (IC), or knowledge assets, as the fourth factor of production, is replacing the other ones ?C job, land and capital. This article tries to offer the origins and nature of the firm??s IC that can be labelled as ??An Intellectual Capital-Based View of the Firm Competition??. This framework tries to highlight the strategic role of different intangible assets like talented and committed workers, cultural values, or long-term relationships among the firm and its stakeholders ?C customers, allies, suppliers and society in general ?C in gaining and sustaining competitive advantages, being the management of IC a key issue in the management agenda.     

Managing internal stakeholders’ views of corporate reputation

The aims of this paper are to determine what constitutes internal reputation from the perspectives of both senior managers and employees and to use this understanding to create and assess measures of internal reputation. We also hypothesise and test the relationships between the views of each group and performance, using data from a survey of auditing firms. Manager views of reputation are found to co-vary with performance and to have a significant influence over employee views of reputation. We use these findings to illustrate how employee views of reputation can be managed.     

HOW IMPORTANT ARE TERMS‐OF‐TRADE SHOCKS?

According to conventional wisdom, terms‐of‐trade shocks represent a major source of business cycles in emerging and poor countries. This view is largely based on the analysis of calibrated business‐cycle models. We argue that the view that emerges from empirical structural vector autoregression (SVAR) models is strikingly different. We estimate country‐specific SVARs using data from 38 countries and find that terms‐of‐trade shocks explain less than 10% of movements in aggregate activity. We then estimate key structural parameters of a three‐sector business‐cycle model country by country and find a disconnect between the importance assigned to terms‐of‐trade shocks by theoretical and SVAR models.     

Economic and Geographical Distance: Explaining Mercosur Sectoral Exports to the EU

The objective of this paper is to apply a modified gravity model to annual exports disaggregated by sector, from MERCOSUR + Chile to the 15 current members of the EU. In doing so, we aimed to classify sectors according to their sensitivity to geographical and economic distance and to identify which commodities enjoy export strength even without further progress in trade liberalisation with the EU. In the estimation we made use of two additional explanatory variables which are found to be relevant when explaining trade, namely, infrastructure and exchange rates. An exchange rate index is built that takes into account protection. Our results support the view that different sectors have a different sensitivity to distance and highlight the importance of using disaggregated data when analysing international trade flows.     

Pricing to market at firm level

This paper analyzes the influence of exchange rate variations on prices in foreign and home markets using firm data. The theoretical benchmark, based on the literature of pricing to market, also takes into account some hypotheses about the effects of demand variations and market power on prices. The empirical analysis for the Spanish economy points out the positive impact of the devaluations of the domestic currency on the relative evolution of prices, though smaller than obtained in previous evidence using aggregated data. The results also suggest a procyclical behavior of prices, which is positively affected by the degree of competition. JEL no. F12, L60, L13 This research has been partially funded by the projects SEC2003-00516, and SEC2000-0723