Can common risk factors explain infrastructure equity returns? Evidence from European capital markets

This is the first paper to test the ability of conventional asset pricing models to explain the excess returns of European infrastructure stocks. Specifically, we firstly run the well-known Fama and French three-factor model, including three common stock market factors (market risk, size risk and value risk), and subsequently augment the model with two common bond risk factors (term and default risk), as infrastructure firms should be closely related to bond markets. The times-series regressions span the period from July 1992 to June 2014 and are conducted using an individually created infrastructure equity data-set. With the help of an intensive screening process, we only include those infrastructure stocks that in fact own and/or operate physical infrastructure. The results reveal that the three-factor model is unable to capture most of the variation in infrastructure returns. Therefore, bond risk factors should be included in asset pricing models in order increase the goodness of fit, as infrastructure stocks prove to be sensitive to interest rate changes. Nevertheless, even the augmented asset pricing model leaves a substantial part of the variance unexplained, thus indicating that infrastructure firms exhibit a high level of idiosyncratic risk. In addition, the results suggest that there may be further risk factors which should be investigated in future studies.     

Driving Trucks and Driving Sales? The Impact of Delivery Personnel on Customer Purchase Behavior

This study investigates how and under what conditions delivery persons, specifically truck drivers of a supplier firm, affect customers’ purchase behavior in industrial customer–supplier relationships. Drawing on service quality and customer contact literature, we test a proposed theoretical model that suggests a positive direct effect of personal contact quality (provided by a delivery person) on sales as well as three situational constraints that determine the occurrence and strength of the direct effect.     

The interactive effects of human capital and quality of life on economic growth

To bridge the gap in the quality of life (QOL) and economic growth literature and understand the reinforcing effects of QOL and human capital on economic development, we examine the interactive effects of these two factors on wage growth from 2000 to 2007 at the county level across the United States. First, a Rosen–Roback model is employed to estimate implicit values of amenities including climate, clean air and other natural attributes, which are used to generate QOL indices. Second, QOL, human capital represented by the share of college graduates, and their interaction serve as key variables in the wage growth model. An instrumental variable approach and location fixed effects are used to address endogeneity of human capital and control for location-specific unobservable characteristics. Results suggest that human capital and QOL significantly contribute to economic growth and the growth effects are even larger in nonmetropolitan counties. Importantly, we find that the effect of human capital on growth is larger in high-QOL counties and QOL enhances the effect of human capital on growth. Our results provide empirical support for community development strategies through providing utility-enhancing amenities that improve QOL and retain human capital.     

Supplier relationship-specific investments and the role of safeguards for supplier innovation sharing

The vast majority of the supplier innovation literature has focused on how buying firms can effectively “pull” innovations from their suppliers. Yet, we know remarkably little about the factors that contribute to a supplier voluntarily “pushing” innovations to its customers. The present study addresses this research gap in the context of industrial buyer–supplier relationships and with a specific focus on relationship-specific investments. Drawing on theory from the relationship-marketing literature and on transaction cost theory, we devise and test a proposed theoretical model that links the level of a supplier's relationship-specific investments to its sharing of innovative ideas regarding products and processes with customers. The model also considers the role of contract length, relationship age, and buyer–supplier cooperation as possible safeguards. The empirical results suggest that a supplier's relationship-specific investments encourage a supplier to suggest ideas of process innovations but to refrain from suggestions about product innovations. The latter effect, however, can be attenuated by appropriate formal and informal safeguards.     

Organizing for Radical Innovation: Exploring Novel Insights

While radical innovation brings extensive economic rewards to firms, it is an activity fraught with risk. Prior research has shown that such risks mainly stem from organizational arrangements (at the level of individuals, teams, firms, and inter firm collaborations), which are inadequate or inefficient to support radical innovation. The papers in this special issue on “Organizing for Radical Innovation: Exploring Novel Insights” take stock of past work and provide novel insights about how to organize for radical innovation. The overarching idea linking them is that radical innovation hinges on the creation of fundamentally new knowledge and the continuous stimulation of creativity. Thus, organizational arrangements that support such processes play a crucial role in explaining and predicting the successful commercialization of breakthrough ideas, radically new technologies, and solutions. In particular, the field of science, which in essence aims for the systematic production of new knowledge, can be a valid source of inspiration for how individuals, teams, firms, and interfirm collaborations should organize for radical innovation. Moving from these premises, in this introductory paper, we offer an overview of the topic of organizing for radical innovation and highlight possible linkages with the organizing principles. Then, we summarize the main insights from the papers in this special issue and use their core ideas to sketch a novel research agenda for scholars working at the intersection of organization theory, economics of science, and management of innovation.     

Tax and spend or spend and tax? An empirical investigation for Austria

The aim of this contribution is to discriminate between the rivallingspend and tax andtax and spend hypotheses in order to check empirically the relationship between government spending and taxation decisions in Austria. For that purpose, the authors estimate a tri-variate structural VAR Model of Austria's public sector that, besides expenditures and revenues, includes aggregate income as an additional variable. They implement impulse-response functions and frequency domain techniques in order to identify the causal relation between government outlays and receipts. The budget making process is interpreted as an error correction model which allows to estimate to what extent revenues and expenditures are adjusted whenever the government sees its long run budget constraint violate. The empirical findings strongly support the spend and tax view that budget decision-making is significantly dominated by the expenditure side in Austria.We are gratefully indebted to Peter Weiss and three anonymous referees for many valuable comments and suggestion.     

The “sugar rush” from innovation subsidies: a robust political economy perspective

The governments of most advanced countries offer some type of financial subsidy to encourage firm innovation and productivity. This paper analyzes the effects of innovation subsidies using a unique Swedish database that contains firm level data for the period 1997–2011, specifically informa tion on firm subsidies over a broad range of programs. Applying causal treatment effect analysis based on matching and a diff-in-diff approach combined with a qualitative case study of Swedish innovation subsidy programs, we test whether such subsidies have positive effects on firm performance. Our results indicate a lack of positive performance effects in the long run for the majority of firms, albeit there are positive short-run effects on human capital investments and also positive short-term productivity effects for the smallest firms. These findings are interpreted from a robust political economy perspective that reveals that the problems of acquiring correct information and designing appropriate incentives are so complex that the absence of significant positive long-run effects on firm performance for the majority of firms is not surprising.