Measuring the Diffusion of Technologies Through International Trade

International Advances in Economic Research - Technological advancements affect economic growth, income distribution and levels of unemployment. However, quantifying the pace of technological...     

Institutional convergence: exit or voice?

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of economic freedom. This paper contributes to this literature in two ways. First, it is empirically shown that β-convergence in economic freedom occurred from 1980 to 2010. Countries with low levels of economic freedom in 1980 “catch up” at a rate of 0.7 percent a year on average, ceteris paribus. Second, the structural characteristics that contribute to this institutional convergence are documented. Conditional convergence estimates suggest democratic institutions do not con- tribute to conditional convergence. Exitability, a variable that captures how easy it is for citizens to “vote with their feet” is related to the change in economic freedom from 1980 to 2010 in a statistically significant manner across all specifications. This provides some preliminary evidence as to the importance of “exit” versus “voice” with respect to the question of institutional change.     

The resilience of formal and informal tourism enterprises to disasters: reef tourism in Phuket,Thailand

This paper explores the resilience of vulnerable tourism sectors to disasters in a period of global change and interdependence. The coral reef tourism industry is highly vulnerable to natural disasters and economic and political shocks. The paper also explains why enterprise resilience is central to sustainable tourism management, for economic, socio-cultural and environmental reasons. It extends the concepts of ecological and social resilience to that of enterprise resilience. Using scenarios and interviews with key enterprise staff, the study contrasts the levels of resilience of formal and informal reef tourism enterprises, and the factors associated with the enterprise resilience in Phuket, Thailand, following the 2004 tsunami and the 2008 political crisis. Informal enterprises reported better financial condition in a crisis scenario and higher levels of social capital in the form of government, family and community support than formal enterprises. Formal and informal enterprises both enjoy high lifestyle benefits from reef tourism, which supports resilience. Most formal enterprises had part foreign ownership/management (61%); no informal enterprise had any foreign ownership or management. Management policies supporting reef tourism should consider local nuances and the importance of lifestyle benefits for both formal and informal enterprises, and take steps to enable enterprise flexibility and cost-cutting during crises.     

An empirical model of attendance factors at major sporting events

Sports events represent a major category of event revenue contributing economic benefits to cities and regions. Whilst attendance at sports events is recognised as an important leisure and entertainment activity (Shamir and Ruskin, 1984), over the past 20 years sports event attendance expenditure has been declining as a percentage of total recreation expenditure (Ross, 2006). Consequently, an understanding of the factors that influence sports event attendance is crucial to the sustainability of these events. This study identifies the antecedents of sports event attendance among 460 respondents who were surveyed in Melbourne, a city that was recognised as the Ultimate Sports City in 2008 (Church-Sanders, 2008). Structural Equation Modelling was used to create an empirical model of attendance motivations. The model identifies constructs relating to emotional responses and facilities, as the predictors of event attendance and provides a discussion of the implications of this research for sporting event and hospitality managers.     

Organising migrant workers: the living wage campaign at the University of East London

This critical case study looks at the campaign led by Citizens UK and Unison to get the University of East London (UEL) to sign up to the London living wage (LLW). UEL agreed to pay the LLW after a brief campaign in November 2010 and it was subsequently implemented in August 2011. The study charts the course of the campaign and draws on mobilisation theory and new primary research to account for its success. What our findings suggest is that community organisers and union activists were able to organise and mobilise a largely apolitical group of migrant workers. This, we suggest, can be explained by the successful mobilisation of the community and augurs well for future broad‐based campaigns.     

The impact of stakeholder heterogeneity on risk perceptions in technological innovation

Managing risk has been widely acknowledged as a crucial managerial task in the development of new technology. More recently, the acceptance of new technologies has increasingly been influenced by secondary stakeholders, some of which are difficult to identify, or whose concerns are not easily reconciled. This paper develops a conceptual framework based on the management of technology and research & development literature, stakeholder theory, risk and social judgment to describe how traditional approaches based on reducing uncertainties through estimating probabilities may not work for social uncertainties; different heuristics are needed to understand and resolve such heterogeneous stakeholder perspectives. We contribute to the discourse by describing how risk perceptions among stakeholders vary, and how this may change over time. The framework suggests that the perception of primary stakeholder towards a specific innovation is ‘Standard’ when information is well known, but becomes riskier when information is unclear. For secondary stakeholders, when there is a low degree of imperfect information, the stakeholder relationship is an ‘Irritant’ but becomes increasingly ‘Dangerous’ when information becomes ambiguous. We conclude with implications for management and future research.     

Econometricians Have Their Moments: GMM at 32

The 2013 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Eugene Fama, Lars Hansen and Robert Shiller for their work on empirical asset pricing. Hansen's primary contribution to the cited work was the development of the generalised method of moments (GMM), a statistical method that has proved such a valuable tool for testing the validity of empirical asset pricing models. The public announcement of the award also acknowledges the wider impact of GMM on empirical analysis in economics and beyond, referring to the 1982 Econometrica paper in which Hansen introduced the method as ‘one of the most influential in econometrics’. In this paper, we reflect on how the GMM‐based inference framework has evolved since 1982, reviewing developments on four main issues: model diagnostic testing, moment selection, identification and inference in misspecified models. We also illustrate the broader influence of GMM on econometrics by briefly exploring the connections between GMM and three other estimation methods: indirect inference, moment inequality based techniques, and a group of techniques that can be presented equivalently within either the generalised empirical likelihood or info‐metric frameworks.     

Health, Health Care and Social Welfare

This paper reviews the conceptualisation of social welfare in the health economics literature, and the contribution of health and health care to social welfare.