What Can We Learn From Great Business Leaders?

There are many leadership lessons that can be extracted from the lives of great business leaders like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, Sam Walton, Jack Welch, A. G. Lafley, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. Although different in personality and style, these leaders showed talent at a very young age, persevered in achieving their goals, surrounded themselves with the best people they could, worked hard and with great discipline, had great confidence in themselves, and were creative and innovative in managing their businesses.     

Bundling of Basic Public Services and Household Welfare in Developing Countries: An Empirical Exploration for the Case of Peru

Using panel data for Peru for the period 1994–2000, we found that increases in household welfare, as measured by changes in consumption, are larger when households receive two or more services jointly than when services are provided separately. Such increases appear to be more than proportional, as F-tests on the coefficients of the corresponding regressors confirm. Thus, we found that bundling of services may help realize welfare effects. This finding is particularly robust in the case of urban areas.     

Assessing the impact of domestic outsourcing and offshoring on productivity at the firm level

The purpose of this article is to investigate the effects of domestic and foreign sourcing on firm-level productivity. We develop a simple framework that permits the introduction of both domestic outsourcing and offshoring in a conventional production function. We find that the decision to outsource has a positive impact on the level of productivity as it permits the relocation of parts of the production process to external suppliers. Furthermore, there is a positive impact on output resulting from domestic outsourcing and offshoring like any other input.     

Economic integration and regional convergence: effects of NAFTA on local convergence in Mexico, 1980–2008

Continental integration processes can alter traditional development axes. Paelinck and Polèse´s work in 1999 explains that in the case of Mexico there is a tension between the U.S. border and the rest of the country: Mexico´s integration in the NAFTA should have reduced the U.S. border attraction, extending the growth to territories located between this border and Mexico City. To test this hypothesis, we propose a spatial conditional β-convergence model that uses as regressors both the distances to the U.S. border and to Mexico City, together with other control variables. This model is applied to the period from 1980 to 2008 using GVA at the municipality level. Working with municipal-level data allows to observe convergence patterns across space and identify the effects of location. The time-span studied distinguishes between before and after NAFTA. Estimates based on Mundlak´s approach were obtained for time-invariant regressors. Results show that during the pre-NAFTA period there was a general process of convergence, but it is mainly explained by the faster growth of municipalities located near to the U.S. border. However, post-NAFTA, convergence in municipalities disappeared and the effect of distance to the U.S. border reversed its sign, as predicted in Paelinck and Polèse´s model.     

A note on the difference between human and non-human productive factors: Comments on ‘Love, war, and culture: An institutional approach to human evolution’

In this article, Professor Pagano views human relations as generally ‘(…) influenced by the prevailing features of the goods (private, public and positional) that have characterized production in different stages of the history.’ In my comment, I focus on the distinction between human and non-human productive factors. Because of their obvious relationship, some of the considerations that follow from such a distinction are already—explicitly or otherwise—in the target article’s argument; those that are not, especially with regard to the cultural determinant of value, could be easily integrated into it.     

Nominal term structure and term premia: evidence from Chile

The downwards trend exhibited in Chile’s nominal term structure since 2003 has been a common pattern shared by other developed and developing economies. To understand the behaviour of the nominal yield curve in Chile, we rely on an affine dynamic term structure model which allows the term structure to decompose into the expected short-term interest rate (related to the monetary policy expectation) and the term premium. We show that most of the fall of long-term interest rates as well as its dynamics are related to the term premium rather than the expected short-term interest rate. Moreover, we find evidence that term premium is driven primarily by the US term premium and domestic nominal uncertainty derived from expected inflation.     

What do you prefer for a relaxing time at home: reading,watching TV or listening to the radio?

This article studies the determinants of time spent by Spanish consumers on reading, watching TV and listening to the radio. To that end, we estimate a SUR (seemingly unrelated regressions) model with data from the Spanish Time Use Survey for 2009–2010. Our results show that being self-employed has a negative and significant effect on the time dedicated to reading and to watching TV; older individuals spend more time reading, and being male influences the time spent watching TV and listening to the radio, all in a statistically significant and positive way. Additionally, those with a higher level of education spend more time reading, while those with lower levels of education prefer to watch TV. Adults with better health spend less time on both reading and watching TV, and families with larger numbers of children up to age 5 tend to spend less time on all three of our at-home leisure activities. Finally, living in a larger city has a positive effect on the time dedicated to all three options.     

Birthplace diversity and economic prosperity

We propose an index of population diversity based on people’s birthplaces and decompose it into a size (share of immigrants) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component. We show that birthplace diversity is largely uncorrelated with ethnic, linguistic or genetic diversity and that the diversity of immigrants relates positively to measures of economic prosperity. This holds especially for skilled immigrants in richer countries at intermediate levels of cultural proximity. We address endogeneity by specifying a pseudo-gravity model predicting the size and diversity of immigration. The results are robust across specifications and suggestive of skill-complementarities between immigrants and native workers.     

Tourist satisfaction and the souvenir shopping of domestic tourists: extended weekends in Spain

The satisfaction dimensions of domestic tourists when buying souvenirs are studied in relation to the overall satisfaction of the same tourists, a theme that has received little attention in the prior scientific literature. The research data were gathered from interviews with domestic tourists visiting Seville over an extended weekend. The results show that souvenir shopping satisfaction consists of four factors: internal attraction, service differentiation, service provision and external attraction. The last two, moreover, influence the overall tourist satisfaction rates. A discussion of these results and their implications help contribute to a better understanding among both scholars and practitioners of tourist satisfaction.