Productive efficiency of French grain producers: A latent variable model

In this article we propose to implement a covariance structure analysis to deal with the estimation of a stochastic frontier production function on panel data and the measurement of a time-varying technical efficiency. First, this method solves the potential problem of correlations between input quantities and individual effects. Second, individual effects and efficiency measures can be recovered as a byproduct of the analysis through the so-called factor scores. We implement this approach by fitting to a balanced panel of French grain producers, a parsimonious version of the Cornwell, Schmidt, and Sickles [1990]'s model where technical efficiencies are individual-specific linear functions of time. A specification search shows that this model is preferred to the traditional production function. Results shed light on the temporal pattern of efficiency in the French grain production sector.The authors thank Jacques Mairesse, Quang Vuong, two referees, the editor, and session participants at the Econometric Society European Meeting, Cambridge, September 1991, at the Second European Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis, Louvain-la-Neuve, October 1991, at the Conference on Current Issues in Productivity, Newark, December 1991, and at the ENSAE-EHESS seminar, Paris, March 1992, for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Why bad projects are so hard to kill

Even at the prototype stage, experts were saying the technology was obsolete. Yet, in the face of tepid consumer response, the company stubbornly kept increasing production capacity and developing new models. By the time it was finally killed, the initiative had cost the company an astounding $580 million and had tied up resources for 14 years. The product was RCA's SelectaVision videodisc recorder, and its story is hardly unique. Companies make similar mistakes--if on a somewhat smaller scale--all the time. But why? No one comes to work saying, "I'm going to pursue a project that will waste my company millions of dollars." Quite the opposite. They come to work full of excitement about a project they believe in. And that, surprisingly, can be the root of all the trouble--a fervent belief in the inevitability of a project's ultimate success. Starting, naturally enough, with a project's champion, this faith can spread throughout the organization, leading everyone to believe collectively in the product's viability and to view any signs of impending doom merely as temporary setbacks. This phenomenon is documented here in two chillingly detailed case studied, one involving Essilor, the world's largest maker of corrective lenses for eyeglasses, and the other involving Lafarge, the largest producer of building materials. By counterexample, they point the way toward avoiding such morasses: assembling project teams not entirely composed of like-minded people and putting in place--and sticking to--well-defined review processes. Both cases also show that if it takes a project champion to get a project up and running, it may take a new kind of organizational player--an "exit champion"--to push an irrationally exuberant organization to admit when enough is enough.     

Are family firms really superior performers?

Although international evidence suggests that families may be unhelpful to firm performance, recent analyses of U.S. public companies indicate that family firms outperform. This study probes these contrasting findings by investigating more fine-grained measures of family business in the U.S. Specifically, it makes a fundamental but neglected distinction between lone founder businesses in which no relatives of a founder are involved, and true family businesses that do include multiple family members as major owners or managers. The research also seeks to overcome issues of endogeneity and selection bias by examining both Fortune 1000 firms and a random sample of 100 much smaller public companies. The results show that findings are indeed highly sensitive both to the way in which family businesses are defined and to the nature of the sample. Fortune 1000 firms that include relatives as owners or managers never outperform in market valuation, even during the first generation. Only businesses with a lone founder outperform. Moreover neither lone founder nor family firms exhibited superior valuations within a randomly drawn sample of companies. Our results confirm the difficulty of attributing superior performance to a particular governance variable.     

Market Discipline and the Use of Stock Market Data to Predict Bank Financial Distress

We assess the extent to which stock market information can be used to estimate leading indicators of bank financial distress. We specify a logit early warning model, designed for European banks, which tests if market based indicators add predictive value to models relying on accounting data. We also study the robustness of the link between market information and financial downgrading in the light of the safety net and asymmetric information hypotheses. Some of our results support the use of market-related indicators. Other results show that the accuracy of the predictive power depends on the extent to which bank liabilities are market traded.      

European management: Steering the future towards the present

This article examines European management methods. While acknowledging that particular countries' cultural bedrock should be taken into account in attempting to change management style, the transformation of the economic, social and cultural contexts represented by the single European market may enable the future to be a guiding support in contributing to modifying firms' and public authorities' systems of relations and organization.     

Assessment of European Use tables at basic prices and valuation matrices in the absence of official data

Input–Output modellers are often faced with the task of estimating missing Use tables at basic prices and also valuation matrices of the individual countries. This paper examines a selection of estimation methods applied to the European context where the analysts are not in possession of superior data. The estimation methods are restricted to the use of automated methods that would require more than just the row and column sums of the tables (as in projections) but less than a combination of various conflicting information (as in compilation). The results are assessed against the official Supply, Use and Input–Output tables of Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Finland, Austria and Slovakia by using matrix difference metrics. The main conclusion is that using the structures of previous years usually performs better than any other approach.     

Trade Elasticities

Conventional aggregate trade elasticity estimates hardly vary across countries. We introduce an aggregate elasticity that is implied by theory: It is the value that equates the welfare gains from trade as implied by one‐ and multi‐sector versions of the model in Arkolakis et al. (American Economic Review, 102 (2012):94–130). These estimates are predicated on sector‐level values for trade elasticites, which we provide at three‐digit levels for 28 developed and developing countries. The values for this aggregate elasticity vary greatly across countries, and they do so because of countries' patterns of production and because a given sector‐level elasticity displays considerable cross‐country heterogeneity.     

农村金融与公共物品和服务:什么对小农户最重要

在发展中国家,对小农户最重要的是有一个稳定和有利的经济环境,这使他们能够将农业固有的不确定性转化为可以衡量的风险,减少和分散这些风险,降低经济活动的交易成本,进而通过提高获利能力来扩大其经营。政府持续地投资并提供公共物品及服务,对创造这样一种环境是至关重要的。因此,农村金融的重要性是显而易见的,因为它帮助小农户战胜贫苦的有效性很大程度上取决于小农户的经营是否是在这样的环境下进行。在中国农业经济和非农业经济快速转型的过程中,小农户大大地受益于政府持续地投资并提供公共物品及服务,以及增进的刺激。然而,尽管有这些重大成就,中国仍然存在着数百万的农村贫困人口,特别是在中西部地区。因此,中国政府面临的挑战是,要以一种穷人易于获得的方式,以及使他们更好地融入获利性的供应链,把他们与不断扩大的国内外市场联系在一起,持续投资并提供公共物品及服务。     

Grabbed Urban Landscapes: Socio‐spatial Tensions in Green Infrastructure Planning in Medellín

Cities confronted with unsustainable development and climatic changes are increasingly turning to green infrastructure as an approach for growth and climate risk management. In this context, recent scholarly attention has been paid to gentrification, real‐estate speculation and resident displacement in the context of sustainability and green planning in the global North. Yet we know little about the environmental‐justice implications of green infrastructure planning in the context of self‐built settlements of the global South. To what extent do green infrastructure interventions produce or exacerbate urban socio‐spatial inequities in self‐built settlements? Through the analysis of a greenbelt project, an emblematic case of green infrastructure planning in Medellín, we argue that, as the Municipality of Medellín is containing and beautifying low‐income neighborhoods through grabbing part of their territories and turning them into green landscapes of privilege and pleasure, communities are becoming dispossessed of their greatest assets—location, land and social capital. In the process, community land is transformed into a new form of aesthetically controlled and ordered nature for the middle and upper classes and for tourists. By contrast, communities’ planning alternatives reveal how green planning can better address growth and climate risks in tandem with equitable community development.