„Grüne“ Konjunkturprogramme — Chance für die deutsche Umweltindustrie?

Im Zuge der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise haben viele Staaten Konjunkturpakete verabschiedet, die auch umweltpolitische Ziele verfolgen sollen. Daraus resultierende Zielkonfl ikte k?nnen die Wirkung der Ma?nahmen deutlich schm?lern. Die deutsche Umweltindustrie kann von den internationalen Programmen profi tieren, wenn mit ihnen keine Handelsbeschr?nkungen verbunden sind.     

European aid for China’s economy?

The fact that increasing importance is being attached to foreign trade under the new Chinese leadership must not be mistaken for automatic expansion of the importation of foreign goods. Foreign trade will, as before, have only a complementary function in the economic development of China. For the time being there is no chance of doing really big business with China.

     

European aid for China’s economy?

The fact that increasing importance is being attached to foreign trade under the new Chinese leadership must not be mistaken for automatic expansion of the importation of foreign goods. Foreign trade will, as before, have only a complementary function in the economic development of China. For the time being there is no chance of doing really big business with China.     

Taxes,Competition and Finance for Albanian Enterprises: Evidence from a Field Study

This paper analyses the results from a survey, carried out in 1999, of more than 100 enterprises in Albania. The main finding of the survey is that registered businesses regard competition from the informal sector as the most important problem they face in doing business. Unregistered firms have a significant advantage because they are able to evade the relatively high tax burden. Poor access to loans is also a significant obstacle. Enterprises tend to rely on own sources of funds for business start-up expansion. Larger enterprises are more likely to apply for loans than smaller ones, but having applied, are no more likely to be successful.     

Religiosity and income: a panel cointegration and causality analysis

In this article, we examine the long-run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1930 to 1990. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test for the direction of causality. We show that there exists a negative long-run relationship between the level of religiosity, measured by church attendance, and the level of income, measured by the log of GDP per capita. The result is robust to alternative estimation methods, potential outliers, different samples, different measures of church attendance and alternative specifications of the income variable. Long-run causality runs in both directions, higher income leads to declining religiosity and declining religiosity leads to higher income.     

Leaning Against the Wind: Debt Financing in the Face of Adversity

We offer evidence of a new stylized feature of corporate financing decisions: the tendency of managers to rely more on debt financing when earnings prospects are poor. We term this “leaning against the wind” and consider three possible explanations: market timing, precautionary financing, and “making the numbers.” We find no evidence in favor of the first two hypotheses, and provisionally accept the making the numbers hypothesis that managers who are under pressure due to unrealistically optimistic earnings expectations by analysts and deteriorating real opportunities will rely more heavily on debt financing to boost earnings per share and return on equity.     

Multinational companies and indigenous development: An empirical analysis

This paper presents an empirical study of the effect of foreign multinational companies on the development of indigenous firms in the host country. Our starting point is a recent paper by Markusen and Venables (European Economic Review 43 (1999) 335-356) that shows formally that multinationals, through the creation of linkages with indigenous suppliers, can exert positive effects on the development of indigenous firms. Based on the literature on entry in industrial organisation, we estimate empirically a model describing the entry of indigenous firms using data for the Irish manufacturing sector. Our results indicate that there is a positive effect of multinational companies on the entry of indigenous firms for a variety of alternative specifications.     

Productivity effects of international outsourcing: evidence from plant-level data

Abstract.  We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant-level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being more embedded in international markets through exporting or being part of a multinational. Our results show robust evidence for positive effects from outsourcing of services inputs for exporters, either domestic or foreign owned. By contrast, we find no statistically significant evidence of an impact of international outsourcing of services on productivity for firms not operating on the export market.     

RETRACTED: Integrated knowledge exploitation: The complementarity of product development and technology licensing

In light of increasing licensing, we challenge the common assumption that product development and technology licensing are substitutes. We develop a resource‐based framework, which distinguishes a firm's technological resource base and technology exploitation processes. We further combine survey, patent, and financial data of 228 medium‐sized and large industrial companies to examine the interactions of firms' product development processes and technology licensing processes in order to explain heterogeneity in new product revenues, licensing performance, and firm performance. The results underscore that product development, which indicates innovative capacity, and technology licensing, which indicates desorptive capacity, are complements rather than substitutes in integrated knowledge exploitation in medium‐sized and large firms. This complementarity is particularly pronounced in firms with an emphasis on cross‐licensing and with a strong patent portfolio. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Who wins and who loses from state subsidies?

China is perceived to rely on subsidizing firms in targeted industries to improve their performance and stay competitive. We implement an approach that allows for the joint estimation of direct and indirect effects of subsidies on subsidized and non-subsidized firms. We find that firms that receive subsidies experience a boost in productivity. However, our approach highlights the importance of indirect effects, which are generally neglected in the literature. We find that, in general but not always, non-subsidized firms experience reductions in their productivity growth if they operate in a cluster where other firms are subsidized. These negative externalities depend on the share of firms that receive subsidies in the cluster. Aggregating direct and indirect effects into a (weighted) total effect shows that this negative indirect effect tends to dominate. We interpret our results in light of a simple heterogenous firm model, which highlights that subsidization in a competitive environment of firms may potentially harm non-subsidized firms.