The influence of culture and transparency on global research and development intensity: An overview across Europe

Culture and transparency can be described as a set of beliefs, norms, and actions, which drive the human action into innovativeness. Over the centuries, those pillars have driven individuals, groups, organizations, and nations, into the most complex networking schemes. It seems now unquestionable that those beliefs and policies, affect both private and public organizations, driving them across innovation wages in a more incremental or radical way. The dependent variable in this research (R&D) embodies the disbursements in research and development, carried out by business enterprise and public sector, and by education institutions. Thus, this research aims to mainly explore the effect of culture and transparency, as drivers of business attractiveness, on global R&D intensity. Using information from 31 European countries over the period 2010–2014, total R&D expenditures were regressed against several variables such as the Hofstede's cultural dimensions, the public sector transparency index, and other aggregated variables. Most of the theoretical assumptions are now supported by our empirical outcomes. Culture and transparency can act as attractiveness drivers, for business sector organizations and for other private and public institutions, toward the implementation of knowledge transformation mechanisms and intellectual capital achievements.     

Long-term effects of the asymmetry and persistence of the prediction of volatility: Evidence for the equity markets of Latin America

This article proposes an extension to the CGARCH model in order to capture the characteristics of short-run and long-run asymmetry and persistence, and examine their effects in modeling and forecasting the conditional volatility of the stock markets from the region of Latin America during the period from 2 January 1992 to 31 December 2014. In the sample analysis, the estimation results of the CGARCH-class model family reveal the presence of short-run and long-run significant asymmetric effects and long-run persistency in the structure of stock price return volatility. The empirical results also show that the use of symmetric and asymmetric loss functions and the statistical test of Hansen (2005) are sound alternatives for evaluating the predictive ability of the asymmetric CGARCH models. In addition, the inclusion of long-run asymmetry and long-run persistency in the variance equation improves significantly the out of sample volatility forecasts for emerging stock markets of Argentina and Mexico.     

Trade policy under firm-level heterogeneity in a small economy

We explore the effect of trade policy on productivity and welfare in the now standard model of firm-level heterogeneity and product differentiation with monopolistic competition. To obtain sharp results, we restrict attention to an economy that takes as given the price of imports and the demand schedules for its exports (a “small economy”). We first establish that welfare can be decomposed into four terms: productivity, terms of trade, variety and curvature, where the last is a term that captures heterogeneity across varieties. We then show how a consumption subsidy, an export tax, or an import tariff allows our small economy to deal with two distortions that we identify and thereby reach its first-best allocation. We also show that an export subsidy generates an increase in productivity, but given the negative joint effect on the other three terms (terms of trade, variety, and curvature), welfare falls. In contrast, an import tariff improves welfare in spite of the fact that productivity falls.     

Maximizing votes under imperfect information

This paper presents an alternative, sympathy voting, to the usual public choice approaches. It deals with voters whose decision depends both on an economic component and a sympathy component. The politician is perfectly informed of the economic component, but not of the sympathy component. The paper compares vote maximization under sympathy voting to the maximization of votes which come from pure homines oeconomici. Sympathy voting is defined in such a way that pure economic voting is its limiting case. The latter property can be used to apply the classical Lagrangean technique to maximizing votes under economic voting. The approach is applied to two typical examples of political choice: the property tax/local public expenditure decision, and public pricing of local public utilities.     

Specification via model selection in vector error correction models

This paper proposes a model selection approach for the specification of the cointegrating rank in the VECM representation of VAR models. Asymptotic properties of estimates are derived and their features compared with the traditional likelihood ratio based approach.     

The socioeconomic feasibility of greening rail stations: a case study in lisbon

Green roofs and living walls are considered effective solutions for improving the environmental integrity of urbanized areas and the overall performance of buildings. Proposals are emerging not just for buildings but also for existing transport infrastructures that have needs/problems that can be met or addressed by such solutions. However, the economic feasibility of such sustainable solutions has not yet been clarified. This study presents a methodological approach to performing cost–benefit analyses of greening urban transport infrastructures at the separate financial, economic, and socioenvironmental levels. Infrastructure, user, and environmental dimensions are also assessed. Whole life cycle costs and socioenvironmental benefits are considered together. The methodology is applied to one of the main stations in Lisbon, Portugal: Entrecampos Railway Station. Five different case study alternatives for the station’s retrofit with green infrastructures are compared to its current situation. The cost–benefit analysis demonstrated that all five greening alternatives are economically feasible. For a 50-year life cycle and a 3.36% discount rate, the net present value ranged between EUR 734,700 and EUR 7,733,279. A sensitivity analysis was also performed, revealing a high degree of influence of discount and inflation rates, recreation, aesthetics improvement, well-being, and the station noise reduction on the net present value, ranging from 1.5 to 9%.     

区域差异呼唤差别化金融政策

我国幅员辽阔,由于经济总量、产业结构、金融机构分布、金融市场发展以及微观主体偏好等方面的差异,区域间的经济金融发展水平有着明显的差异性和不平衡性,导致了我国货币政策执行效果呈现出显著的区域差别,一定程度上影响了政策意图的实现.考虑到我国的经济金融发展现状,货币政策的制定和执行应适当考虑区域经济发展差异性这一因素,在坚持决策权统一的前提下,适当关注区域差异,有选择地进行区域差别化货币政策操作的探索,对不同区域在货币政策工具种类、力度上有所区分,以实现最佳的调控效果.     

Household size and residential water demand: an empirical approach*

The effectiveness of pricing policies depends on the price elasticity of consumption. It is well documented that residential demand for water is influenced by heterogeneity associated with differences in the size of the household and socioeconomic characteristics. In this paper, we focus on household size. Our initial hypothesis is that users’ sensitivity to changes in price is different depending on the number of household members. To this end, we carry out an empirical estimation of urban water demand in Zaragoza (Spain) distinguishing between households with different sizes using data at the individual level. As far as we are aware, this approach to urban residential water demand is new in the literature. The analysis suggests that all households are sensitive to prices regardless of size. A more relevant finding is that small households are more sensitive to price changes.     

Ownership structure and firm performance: Some empirical evidence from Spain

The ‘managerial’ and the ‘contractual’ theories of the firm imply different causes and consequences for the relationship between ownership and performance of firms. This paper provides a test of the two conflicting theories, using ownership and performance data from a sample of Spanish family- and non-family-controlled firms. We find evidence in support of the contractual theory of the firm, according to which firms choose their ownership structure maximizing economic value, net of contractual costs.