Economic geography and wages in Brazil: Evidence from micro-data

This paper estimates the impact of market and supplier access on wage disparities across Brazilian states, incorporating the control for individual characteristics into the new economic geography methodology. We estimate market and supplier access disaggregated by industry, and we compute access to local, national and international markets separately. We find a strong correlation between market access and wage differentials, even after controlling for individual characteristics, market access level (international, national or local), and using instrumental variables.     

Knowledge spillovers: cooperation between universities and KIBS

Knowledge is increasingly perceived as a fulcral factor to company competitiveness. As the transfer of knowledge is one of the key functions of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS), this research seeks to analyse how the transfer of knowledge takes place between the higher education sector and KIBS type firms. The empirical results show that cooperation between KIBS and universities occurs irrespective of the typology (whether professional or technological in focus). We also empirically establish how geographic proximity is the factor bearing greatest influence over cooperation while such cooperation proves to have a positive impact on the company capacity to innovate. We furthermore find that this innovation capacity also drives a positive company financial performance.     

Knowledge organisation in R&D alliances: its impact on product innovation

Based on the knowledge-based view of the firm, this paper analyses how alternative configurations of technological relatedness in interfirm research and development (R&D) alliances influence specific types of product innovation. A longitudinal study of pharmaceutical firms provides support for the argument that complementary alliances contribute to the development of both radical and incremental innovation. Collaborating with partners that have similar technologies only enhances incremental innovation, although its impact is curvilinear. These evidences highlight the importance of designing a suitable portfolio of R&D alliances in order to develop different innovative competences.     

Agrifood Safety Standards,Market Power,and Consumer Misperceptions

This article analyzes how the public regulation of food safety influences a firm's strategic behaviour in a food chain. In this context, we provide an original theoretical framework to show how, regardless of the level of standard, food safety regulation may have unexpected harmful effects. Namely, the level of compliance costs alone cannot explain the producer exclusion due to a high level of standard. We highlight how upstream producers' involvement in the market also depends on the strategic interest of the downstream firm to remunerate their compliance process. Finally, we show how the actual level of risk does not necessarily decrease when the standard is reinforced.     

Relational,Functional Benefits and Customer Value in Large Retailing: A Cross-Format Comparative Analysis

ABSTRACT

Based on the existing marketing concept on relational and functional benefits and on the retailing management of customer value, the present research empirically tests the influence of these customer benefits by providing a comparative analysis for different retailing formats, such as supermarkets and hypermarkets. Using questionnaire data for a sample of customers (N = 362), the authors developed structural equation modeling. This study identifies the factors influencing customer value, as well as the key to understand the relationships of customer benefits, customer value, loyalty, and purchase intention in the retailing service context. The contribution of the present research includes empirically testing a conceptual model, by developing a comparative analysis, along with providing some meaningful insights to retailing managers on how to strategically manage customer value variables to increase and enhance customer retention and purchase intent.     

Herding in the strategic allocations of Spanish pension plan managers

This paper empirically examines herding behavior in the strategic style allocations of Spanish pension plan managers. The study uses both the standard metric used in financial literature to capture institutional herding and a new approach to address some shortcomings of this traditional measure. Concretely, some authors have highlighted that the traditional measure does not take into account that the probability that a manager buys rather than sells a certain stock depends on both the initial holding in the stock and the asset flows. As a consequence, this study proposes a new approach, which can be applied to other financial markets and provides more accurate values of the probability to increase (or decrease) the style exposures bearing in mind the previous exposure of each portfolio. The study confirms the existence of herding behavior by using both methods. Although the strength of this behavior decreases using the new approach, the herding levels detected in this study of style herding of Spanish pension plans are higher than those of previous research analyzing portfolio holdings in other countries. Additionally, herding levels are higher in periods of low volatility while market returns does not seem to influence herding levels.     

The covariation for Banach space valued processes and applications

This article focuses on a recent concept of covariation for processes taking values in a separable Banach space $B$ and a corresponding quadratic variation. The latter is more general than the classical one of Métivier and Pellaumail. Those notions are associated with some subspace $\chi $ of the dual of the projective tensor product of $B$ with itself. We also introduce the notion of a convolution type process, which is a natural generalization of the Itô process and the concept of $\bar{\nu }_0$ -semimartingale, which is a natural extension of the classical notion of semimartingale. The framework is the stochastic calculus via regularization in Banach spaces. Two main applications are mentioned: one related to Clark–Ocone formula for finite quadratic variation processes; the second one concerns the probabilistic representation of a Hilbert valued partial differential equation of Kolmogorov type.     

Microeconometric Analysis of Residential Water Demand

This paper develops a structural model for obtaining price elasticities and evaluating consumer’s response to changes in nonlinear tariffs when only panel data on household consumption are available. The model and the empirical strategy address problems implied by nonlinear tariffs, existence of a fixed cost, and use of limited data, giving rise to a random effects model with a nonlinear individual effect. Results show that the estimated model does well at fitting data and demand is inelastic, although elasticity varies by initial consumption block. Then, I estimate welfare consequences of implementing several demand policies.