Distinctive Features of Environmental Innovators: An Econometric Analysis

This paper analyzes the main determinants influencing environmental innovators (i.e. firms developing or adopting environmental innovations) in Spain with respect to non‐environmental innovators. Similarly to other contributions in the literature, our results show that Spanish environmental innovators respond to regulatory stimulus in the form of demand‐pull and technology‐push instruments. They have a high internal technological capability and combine internal and external information sources, mostly in cooperation with knowledge institutions. Environmental innovators are more concentrated in mature, traditionally highly polluting sectors, but new firms are not more environmentally innovative than incumbents. Most importantly, in contrast to other environmental innovation studies, mostly carried out in a German context, we have not found evidence of a market pull from either the domestic or international markets. Furthermore, cost savings are not found to be a distinctive driver for environmental innovators. These differential results are possibly related to the special features of Spain regarding its national innovation system and the degree of stringency of environmental regulation and environmental consciousness of its consumers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

论用文化增加旅游商品的附加值

旅游的本质属性是文化属性。文化是旅游消费和旅游经营追求的核心因素。文章以上述观点为基础，探讨了旅游商品开发设计中文化因素的作用，提出文化可以创造旅游商品，文化可以增加旅游商品的附加值。     

Islamic Economics in the Late Ottoman Empire: Menâpirzâde Nuri Bey's Mebâhis-i İlm-i Servet

The existing literature on Islamic economics suggests that Islamic economics is a twentieth-century phenomenon with its roots in medieval Islamic intellectual and theological history, thereby leaving a centuries-long gap in the history of Islamic economic thinking. This study aims at taking a first step towards filling this gap by examining a nineteenth-century example of Islamic economics in late Ottoman economic literature. Suggesting a broader definition of Islamic economics, this article investigates a prominent Ottoman intellectual's efforts to define, reveal, and revive a tradition of Islamic economics in historical and intellectual context.     

Exploring sources and outcomes of trust and commitment to nonprofit organizations: The case of Amnesty International Portugal

The interactions between customers and organizations have been regarded as a core aspect in cocreating and developing new products and practices. The current study explores these interactions in the context of citizens and nonprofit organizations. The study comprises two parts: (a) a qualitative approach using interviews and the analysis of social networks to better understand the organization's social media marketing practices and corresponding outcomes and (b) a quantitative approach to analyze antecedents and outcomes of trust and being committed to participate in a nonprofit organization such as Amnesty International. From the qualitative approach, the findings highlight that Amnesty International uses social media (Facebook) to share information, and citizens tend to consider sharing posts, but they do not express new ideas or interact with the organization. These findings contribute to structure the model analyzed in the second stage of the research. Regarding the qualitative approach, the results show that organizational credibility is the most significant driver of trust followed by communicative ability. Affectively commitment to participation and relationship perception act as outcomes of overall commitment.     

EXPLICIT SOLUTIONS OF CONSUMPTION-INVESTMENT PROBLEMS IN FINANCIAL MARKETS WITH REGIME SWITCHING

We consider a consumption and investment problem where the market presents different regimes. An investor taking decisions continuously in time selects a consumption–investment policy to maximize his expected total discounted utility of consumption. The market coefficients and the investor's utility of consumption are dependent on the regime of the financial market, which is modeled by an observable finite-state continuous-time Markov chain. We obtain explicit optimal consumption and investment policies for specific HARA utility functions. We show that the optimal policy depends on the regime. We also make an economic analysis of the solutions, and show that for every investor the optimal proportion to allocate in the risky asset is greater in a "bull market" than in a "bear market." This behavior is not affected by the investor's risk preferences. On the other hand, the optimal consumption to wealth ratio depends not only on the regime, but also on the investor's risk tolerance: high risk-averse investors will consume relatively more in a "bull market" than in a "bear market," and the opposite is true for low risk-averse investors.     

Aspects of profitability that influence smallholder cash-crop preferences in northern Mozambique

This study analyses profitability in terms of relationships between various aspects, indicators and cash-crop cultivation preferences. Both financial and pragmatic aspects of profitability were found to be related to cash-crop preferences. Apart from the need to promote a crop with a good farm gate price and to reduce production and marketing costs, promoters need to strengthen the wider system by supporting profitability as well as household consumption requirements. The correlation between indicators of expected profitability improved as more financial and pragmatic aspects were incorporated. Smallholder farmers' rankings of profitability correlated better with cash-crop preferences when the analysis incorporated more aspects of profitability. In addition, the results indicated the institutional support needed to improve the profitability of cash crops. This simple method of identifying smallholder preferences for one cash crop among many is of paramount importance in the design of strategies for improving agricultural market participation.     

A learning methodology using Matlab/Simulink for undergraduate electrical engineering courses attending to learner satisfaction outcomes

Learner-centred approaches follow the prevailing tendency in modern University reforms which are primarily concerned about “how people learn”. The methodologies can be learner-centred in the sense of placing the student as the main actor of the teaching–learning process by increasing his interactivity and participation, but also considering what is relevant for the student by measuring the learner satisfaction. In order to promote both aspects, this paper proposes a synchronous software-based active methodology that makes use of the simulations to show a virtual scenario to the students and challenge them to predict and discuss the evolution of the scenario. The proposed methodology improves the visual interface, promotes discussion both among students and with the teacher in a brainstorming stage and shows real-world examples. This software-based methodology has been implemented into an Electric Machinery course at the University of Seville (Spain), and the evaluation has been carried out considering both the affective and cognitive domains. Principal components analysis proves to be useful to highlight the dimensions with a higher influence on learner satisfaction and the affective and cognitive results confirm the successful implementation of the proposal.     

Access pricing: A comparison between full deregulation and two alternative instruments of access price regulation,cost-based and retail-minus

In this paper, two instruments of access price regulation, cost-based and retail-minus, are compared with the full deregulation hypothesis. For this purpose, a model that considers an upstream monopolist firm that sells a vital input to an independent firm and to a subsidiary firm in the downstream market is developed. The main conclusion of the paper is that retail-minus regulation avoids foreclosure and leads to better results than cost-based regulation in terms of investment level and consumer surplus. Moreover, retail-minus regulation allows a higher consumer surplus than deregulation of access price as long as the regulator carefully defines the retail-minus instrument.     

Networks of Value‐added Trade

Global value chains (GVCs) require new methods for evaluating interconnections among countries, which can no longer be accurately appraised by standard bilateral gross trade flows. This paper uses tools of network analysis to examine the evolution of value‐added trade from 1995 to 2011. GVCs are very centralised and asymmetric networks, with a few large economies acting as hubs, which exposes them to the propagation of idiosyncratic shocks. As GVCs expanded, the networks of foreign value added in exports became denser, more complex and intensively connected. The regional dimension of GVCs is still dominant but is progressively giving place to a more global network. Networks of foreign value added in goods exports outpace those of services exports. However, foreign inputs of services are important for exports of both goods and services. There is a striking rise of China as a supplier of value added, while Germany and the United States maintain a central role in GVCs over the whole period.     

Feature selection methods involving support vector machines for prediction of insolvency in non‐life insurance companies

We propose two novel approaches for feature selection and ranking tasks based on simulated annealing (SA) and Walsh analysis, which use a support vector machine as an underlying classifier. These approaches are inspired by one of the key problems in the insurance sector: predicting the insolvency of a non‐life insurance company. This prediction is based on accounting ratios, which measure the health of the companies. The approaches proposed provide a set of ratios (the SA approach) and a ranking of the ratios (the Walsh analysis ranking) that would allow a decision about the financial state of each company studied. The proposed feature selection methods are applied to the prediction the insolvency of several Spanish non‐life insurance companies, yielding state‐of‐the‐art results in the tests performed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.