Determinants of the demand for imports of Venezuela

In this study we use disaggregated annual data to estimate real income and relative price elasticities of demand for imports of Venezuela. After comparing our estimates with those of previous studies, we conclude that (1) Venezuela has made progress in developing domestic substitutes for imports, and (2) the degree of ‘openness’ in Venezuela increased after 1961. We also find evidence that during the period 1974–1979, the increase in the market value of Venezuela's oil reserves led to an increase in all categories of imports.     

Input,Output, and Environmental Management Productivity: Effects on Firm Performance

Firms invest considerable resources to control any of their operations that may have environmental impacts in an attempt to reduce such impacts but also generate economic value. Various studies of the basic creation or destruction of monetary value through environmental performance offer contradictory evidence. Therefore, the present study proposes a new definition of environmental management as the transformation of inputs (resources assigned) into outputs (valuable results). Both inputs and outputs should be taken into account to explain financial outcomes; further consideration should also include a third aspect, namely, ‘environmental management productivity’, which describes the relationship between the outputs and inputs of environmental management. Empirical analyses of Spanish firms with a certified environmental management system subject to the European Union's CO₂ emissions trading system provide evidence that all three aspects must be considered in combination to achieve a more comprehensive view of the impact of environmental management on financial performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

An axiomatic characterization of the Theil inequality ordering

We axiomatically characterize the Theil ordering of income inequality. In addition to the uncontroversial axioms of anonymity, homogeneity, replication invariance, strong directedness, and a standard continuity property, we appeal to both an independence and a decomposability axioms. These two axioms are ordinal implications of Theil decomposability, the central axiom in previous characterizations of the Theil index. To the best of our knowledge, the present is the first fully ordinal characterization of this index.     

The role of institutional investors in public-to-private transactions

In Italy, as in many other European countries, listed firms will normally go dark through controlling owner-initiated tender offers. We find that institutional investors play a central role in the bid process and can protect minority shareholders from being frozen out in the bid. Specifically, tender offers are less likely to succeed when a firm has institutional investors in its ownership structure. When public-to-private offers are accepted, bid premiums are significantly greater if a financial institution (particularly when it is foreign, independent or activist) has a stake in the firm. We explore the effect of a number of hitherto unexplored factors on the takeover premium and find that shareholder agreements facilitate public-to-private acquisitions. Other factors, such as a threat to merge the target if the bid fails, or external validation of the offer price, have no impact on either the likelihood of delisting or the premium paid by the bidder.     

Location and the theory of production: A review,summary and critique of recent contributions

This paper has two main objectives. First, a generalized version of the Moses-type production- location model is developed where both the input variables and the location variables are allowed to adjust simultaneously. Secondly, the results of the recent articles relating to the Moses framework are discussed in the context of our generalized structure. We conclude that - unless one is willing to assume either the transport rate of output is zero or the location is constrained to be on the Moses arc - if transport rates do not depend on quantities shipped then location is independent of output when the production function is homogeneous of degree one. If transport rates depend on quantities shipped (e.g. quantity discounts), then a production function which is linearly homogeneous is not sufficient to insure that location is independent of output unless the transport rate functions have constant elasticities.     

“Surfeiting,the appetite may sicken”: entrepreneurship and happiness

Do the presence and nature of entrepreneurship impact on national happiness, and are nations with happy citizens better for entrepreneurs to start new businesses? To provide tentative answers we survey the literature on entrepreneurship and subjective well-being and use various data sources to uncover the first evidence of the relationship between entrepreneurship and happiness at the country level. We find that opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship may contribute to a nation’s happiness but only to a certain point, at which the effects of happiness begin to decline. Moreover, our results suggest that a nation’s happiness affects early-stage opportunity-driven entrepreneurial activity.     

Measuring Productivity from Vertically Integrated Sectors

There are many ways to measure productivity. The choice will depend on the suitability of each index to the main purpose the researcher has in mind. Whenever we are interested in 'competitiveness', the proper measure will be the inverse of the total labour embodied in one unit of final product; or, what amounts to the same, the labour employed in the vertically integrated sector corresponding to each final good. A weighted mean of these yields an index of aggregate productivity suitable for measuring social welfare. Another index of aggregate productivity (this one related to the profit rate and potential growth) coincides with the inverse of the maximum eigenvalue of the 'socio-technical matrix'. These indices are computed for the Spanish economy and compared with more conventional ones.     

Walkability and the built environment: validation of the Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) for urban areas in Mexico

The article gives the results of adjusting an abbreviated version of the Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale to the situation in Mexico. The results were obtained through the application of 156 instruments to individuals selected through a probability sampling in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo León, Mexico. The validation process was done over four stages; in the first stage, the questions were analyzed and the sampling was adjusted. In the second stage, a factor analysis was carried out; as the questions were Likert-scale type, we use principal components with a matrix of polychoric correlations. In the third stage, the ordinal and non-ordinal Cronbach Alpha coefficients were determined, as were the ordinal and non-ordinal McDonald Omega coefficients, showing that the non-ordinal ones tend to underestimate the level of reliability, as they assume that it is a continuous scale when in this case it is not; however, the literature shows that these coefficients have been the most used in the validation of this scale. Finally, the intervals of trust were calculated with the bootstrap method, with the goal of incorporating the sensitivity that the coefficients could imply in aspects such as the number of questions, intercorrelations between the questions, and the size of the sample. The results show that the ordinal Alpha and Omega coefficients for the three factors, as well as for the entire scale, will have robust values 95% of the time that the questionnaire is used.