Patterns and determinants of international fragmentation of production: Evidence from outward processing trade between the EU and Central Eastern European countries

Patterns and Determinants of International Fragmentation of Production: Evidence from Outward Processing Trade between the EU and Central Eastern European Countries. — In this paper we investigate a specific form of international fragmentation of production, that is, the form giving rise to international trade for reasons of processing. Data on textile and apparel trade between EU countries and Central European countries show that the magnitude of trade for reasons of processing greatly overshadows that of final trade. The industry appears to be affected by a process of international fragmentation whose understanding requires a new definition of the concept of comparative advantage. Our analysis suggests that this fragmentation is activated by labor cost differentials as well as by reasons of geographic and cultural proximity.     

Efficiency of two sided investments in an equilibrium unemployment framework

This paper investigates the efficiency of investments by firms and workers in a matching model with high- and low-productivity jobs. Search is sector specific and random within sectors. Search frictions and ex-post bargaining imply that wage inequality arises as a result of the difference in investment costs between the sectors. The efficiency properties of the equilibrium are analyzed under the particular division in bargaining proposed by Hosios (1990). The conclusion is that the equilibrium is inefficient, with a too low fraction of workers and a too high vacancy-unemployment ratio in the high-productivity sector. The opposite happens in the low-productivity sector.     

Followers' entry timing: evidence from the Spanish banking sector after deregulation

Much of the literature dedicated to the analysis of entry timing decisions has been devoted to the study of their consequences in terms of performance. However, only a limited amount of effort has been dedicated to analyzing the factors that determine these decisions. In addition, previous papers have centered their efforts on the product dimension, paying no attention to entry into new geographical markets. This paper departs from previous works in this respect and extends the entry timing literature through a consideration of the geographical side of entry. Our analysis shows that organizational size, organizational competence, and organizational experience appear as key factors when explaining the pattern of geographic diversification. Our results also indicate that diversification takes place sequentially, first proceeding to closer locations, then occupying markets further from the origin. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An application of health-portals to improve electronic listening

Electronic listening (eListening) is an innovation that potentially provides patients and other users with the right answer in the right place at the right time. Thus, eListening can potentially improve service flexibility, adaptability and quality. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which new web-based service delivery channels, which we refer to as health-portals (he-portals), facilitate eListening in the Spanish public healthcare sector. In this paper, we investigate the relative importance and significance of hospital size and three different types of information and communications technologies (Internet, groupware and collective systems) on the use of eListening through an empirical investigation of 300 Spanish public he-portals. Our main conclusion is that the implementation of Internet systems alone does not guarantee the development of effective eListening. In addition, we demonstrate that hospital size does not affect the level of eListening achieved by hospitals.     

Deregulated Wholesale Electricity Prices in Italy: An Empirical Analysis

In this paper we analyze a time series of daily average prices in the Italian electricity market, which started to operate as a Pool in April 2004. Our objective is to model the high degree of autocorrelation and the multiple seasonalities in electricity prices. We use periodic time series models with GARCH disturbances and leptokurtic distributions and compare their performance with more classical ARMA-GARCH processes. The within-year seasonal variation is modelled using the low-frequency components of physical quantities, which are very regular throughout the sample. Our results reveal that much of the variability in the price series is explained by the interactions between deterministic multiple seasonalities. Periodic AR-GARCH models seem to perform quite well in mimicking the features of the stochastic part of the price process.