The externalisation of R&D activities and the growing market of product development services

Several authors in recent years have discussed the observed trend towards the externalisation of (part of) a firm's R&D activities. As a consequence, several companies have been created that provide innovators with technical and scientific services such as R&D contracts, laboratory testing services, technology consulting, industrial design, engineering.
The paper is based upon an empirical study which consists of (i) an extensive analysis, in which information has been collected (for about two hundred companies) on size, location and type of services offered; (ii) an intensive analysis, in which one case is studied in depth of a company providing product development services. Some conclusions have been drawn regarding the characteristics of the market of product development services and the management and organisation of companies operating in that market.     

帮助贫困人口

在贫困国家，用于教育与卫生保健的支出能促进人力资本的发展，并帮助它们实现千年发展目标，不过政府必须敢于承担责任。     

Corporate Culture in the Nonprofit Sector: A Comparison of Fringe Benefits with the For-profit Sector

One explanation that may be given for why nonprofit organizations pay lower wages than do other organizations is that nonprofits are more pleasant places to work. Indeed, some authors have proposed that nonprofit organizations should make an effort to promote a working environment that reflects the beliefs of the organization. This paper uses several proxies for whether an organization is a pleasant place in which to work, and tests for whether nonprofits are more likely to offer such pleasant working conditions. Analysis shows that nonprofits are not more likely to offer these conditions in many instances.     

International crises,instability periods and contagion: the case of the ERM

In this article we propose a two step procedure for modeling the propagation of financial shocks. The first step consists in the estimation, by means of SWARCH models, of the conditional probability of being in a period of high volatility, while in the second step such indicators are included in a structural simultaneous equations models for interdependences among different countries. The results show that episodes of financial crisis effectively happened during periods of high volatility and that such measures of instability are important in explaining the propagation of devaluation expectations between six European Countries during the ERM period.

The role of a municipality’s financial health in a firm’s siting decision

When deciding where to locate a new facility, a firm needs to consider the financial health of the municipality where its activities will take place. Unless it sites its facility in a financially viable community, a firm is putting a substantial investment at risk. Despite the importance of this issue, many firms pay insufficient attention to a municipality’s financial condition. Instead, they focus on matters such as the tax rate, the quality of the school system, or the absence of regulatory constraints. All of these features are important, but unless a municipality is financially healthy, they can evaporate before a company has attained its expected return on investment. There are 5 financial statements and 10 financial ratios that can be used to create a financial health template, which can help a firm to assess a municipality’s financial strength, or its counterpart financial weakness. The template goes beyond the debt-repayment focus of credit rating agencies to matters such as financial autonomy, cash flows, and borrowing capacity. We use data from three cities—Barcelona, Dublin, and Detroit (pre- and post-bankruptcy)—to demonstrate the template’s ability to facilitate comparisons among cities that are in different countries and that use different accounting systems.     

The Economic Significance of the Film Business: An Empirical Analysis of the Italian Market

Most studies indicate Hollywood's economic and financial leadership in the movie markets from the 1910s onward. There is a shortfall in the literature concerning the analysis of the efficacy of other minor film industries. This article examines the Italian film industry in the 1990s and beginning of the twenty‐first century. The research suggests that the Italian film industry is very risky and unpredictable, but while the extreme uncertainty surrounding the business is offset by the considerable economic success that Hollywood movies achieve at the box office, as indicated by previous literature contributions, a different business scenario emerges in Italy. The value of this article is first represented by the data used—provided by the Osservatorio of Cinecittà—which is unique and has not been published before. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Conversation with secrets

We analyze the sustainability of a conversation when one agent might be endowed with a piece of private information that affects the payoff distribution to its benefit. Such a secret can compromise the sustainability of conversation. Even without an obligation, the secret holder will disclose its secret if it prevents preemptive termination of the conversation. The nonsecret holder lacks this possibility and stops the conversation. Competition and limited effectiveness of the conversation amplify this result of early disclosure and render the conversation process less sustainable. We discuss policy and managerial implications for industry standard development and joint ventures.     

Persistency of window dressing practices in the U.S. repo markets after the GFC: The unexplored role of the deposit insurance premium

We investigate whether the regulatory improvements made in the aftermath of the global financial crisis have been effective in limiting bank downward window dressing by means of repos in the United States. We find that a strict application of the Basel III regulation wipes out incentives to engage in window dressing to bolster the level of leverage Tier 1 ratio at quarter-end. We also show that the persistency of window dressing is related to the computation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation assessment base, which motivates banks to engage in window dressing to reduce the deposit insurance premium.     

The financial and green effects of cultural values on mission drifts in European social enterprises

The sustainable social enterprises (SEs) literature shows that SEs have to simultaneously pursue economic, social, and environmental aims. However, tensions between these objectives can make this a challenging task and lead towards mission drift. This work investigates if the cultural dimension can forecast the mission drift. We empirically analyze this relationship in three stages. In the first stage, we identify a homogeneous dataset of 287 sustainable SEs from seven EU countries from 2011 to 2020. Then, in the second stage, we apply the data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology to calculate the efficiency of the SEs. An efficient SE has to simultaneously achieve social, environmental, and economic aims. We calculate a proxy of the mission drift and generate a dichotomous category variable that assigns value 1 to the SE not affected by mission drift, 0 otherwise. In the last stage, we implement the 2SLS logistic regression between the variable that identifies the SEs affected by mission drift and three cultural dimensions: avoidance of uncertainty, masculinity, and short-term orientation.