Understanding the Strength of Gentleness: Soft-Skilled Leadership on the Rise

This paper focuses on the topic of “soft skills” as an intrinsic part of successful leadership. The first part of the paper presents a literature review about the shift in perspective in recent years on what matters in leadership, and the significant changes this prompted in some areas of education and corporate recruitment. In the second part, the findings of a year round study conducted among Los Angeles based workforce members in an MBA program are presented. By utilizing a multi-method approach, consisting of a survey model with three open ended, interview style questions, and data analysis in phenomenological trend, a number of interesting findings emerged, supporting the literature reviewed, that soft leadership skills, such as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills, are steadily on the rise, and that greater attention should be apportioned to strengthen these skills in future leaders.     

Measuring the influence of congestion on efficiency in worldwide airports

This short communication evaluates the influence of congestion on the technical efficiency of airports using three different approaches. To accomplish this aim a sample of 141 worldwide airports is used. The results show considerable signs of congestion inefficiency in some airports, highlighting the importance of studying this phenomenon.     

A systematic review of women's entrepreneurship and internationalization literature

There has been an increased interest in women's entrepreneurship research due to the changing sociocultural conditions in the global marketplace. Despite this trend, there is still a lack of understanding about the role women entrepreneurs play in the internationalization process of firms. The aim of this article is to systematically review the literature on women's entrepreneurship and internationalization by examining the trends in the research. A bibliometric analysis is conducted on articles in the Web of Science databases to understand which researchers are publishing the most and how they are related to other researchers in the field. In addition, a content analysis of the articles from the bibliometric analysis is conducted that reveals three main clusters from the research: (a) epistemological position and gender, (b) cultural and social reasons for the creation of businesses, and (c) motivations, business characteristics, and performance. From the bibliometric and content analysis, implications for policy makers and future research directions for women's entrepreneurship and internationalization patterns are stated.     

Together or separately? The efficiency and market structure of Portuguese airports

This paper analyses the market structure of Portuguese airports and the way that they have performed. It is found that the profits exceeded normal returns between 2001 and 2008, with productivity growing only slowly despite expansions in passenger numbers and aircraft movements. A particular problem that emerges is a loss of efficiency at airports dominated by the major airport operator.     

The dynamic effects of shocks to wages and prices in the United States and the Euro Area

This article investigates the dynamics of aggregate wages and prices in the United States (US) and the Euro Area (EA) with a special focus on persistence of real wages, wage and price inflation. The analysis is conducted within a structural vector error-correction model, where the structural shocks are identified using the long-run properties of the theoretical model, as well as the cointegrating properties of the estimated system. Overall, in the long run, wage and price inflation emerge as more persistent in the EA than in the US in the face of import price, unemployment, or permanent technology shocks. This finding is robust to the changes in the sample period and in the models’ specifications entertained in the article.     

A Tale of Two Sectors: Why is Misallocation Higher in Services than in Manufacturing?

Recent empirical studies document that the level of resource misallocation in the service sector is significantly higher than in the manufacturing sector. We quantify the importance of this difference and study its sources. Conservative estimates for Portugal in 2008 show that closing this gap, by reducing misallocation in the service sector to manufacturing levels, would boost aggregate gross output by around 12 percent and aggregate value added by around 31 percent. Differences in the effect and size of productivity shocks explain most of the gap in misallocation between manufacturing and services, while the remainder is explained by differences in firm productivity and age distributions. We interpret these results as stemming mainly from higher output-price rigidity, higher labor adjustment costs and higher informality in the service sector.     

The effect of crises on firm exit and the moderating effect of firm size

The liability of smallness assumption suggests that smaller firms face higher exit risks. However, does it apply during crises? We show that during downturns size reduces firms’ exit risk by less; the hazard rate increases more rapidly in size.     

Contribution to the study of PPP arrangements in airport development,management and operation

Following the liberalization wave in the airline sector, airports have been gradually taken out of the public sphere and open to the private initiative. This phenomenon is generally referred to as privatization, but not all the cases consist of, in fact, a full divestiture of assets. Although infrastructure management is undertaken by the private sector during a pre-defined period, usually 30 years or more, the property remains public or is transferred to the public domain after that period. This is a form of Public–Private Partnership (PPP) where two different models can be found: institutionalized PPP or a typical contractual regime, such as the concession arrangements. PPP options have been a “hot” topic over the last decade, but few studies can be found in the literature on the PPP projects development in airport systems, for example, as far as risk sharing is concerned. This paper looks at recent developments in airport “privatization”, distinguishing privatizations from PPP arrangements, through a case study approach, and establishing a comparative analysis of different PPP models used for airport management. Some comments are made about the Portuguese model and the announcement of future privatization.     

Is big better? On scale and scope economies in the Portuguese water sector

The ‘big is better’ idea has recently been challenged in network industries. Scale economies are considered finite so that for the individual utility an optimal scale of operations arises. A similar observation yields for scope economies as joint production is not predicted univocally anymore. In the water sector, scale economies and joint production are preferred. Nevertheless, several countries are restructuring the sector in order to improve the scale and scope of operations. This article intends to provide some insights into this matter. We analyze the Portuguese water market structure using non-parametric techniques with data from the year 2005. After surveying the literature on scale and scope economies, we discuss the peculiarities of the Portuguese water sector. The paper confirms the natural monopoly features. Although scope economies are absent, it highlights scale economies. The optimal scale of the utilities is located between 160,000 and 180,000 inhabitants. As such, the Portuguese water sector optimally counts 60 water utilities.