Innovation in the bioeconomy – dynamics of biorefinery innovation networks

The bioeconomy has become a central concept in many strategies for future economic development, emphasising an increasing need for collaboration across industries and sectors for innovation. This paper unpacks aspects of collaboration in the bioeconomy by looking at the development of innovation networks for biorefinery technologies from 2004 to 2014 based on innovation project data from Swedish public funding agencies using a stochastic actor-oriented model for network analysis. The analysis shows that although the network grew significantly during the time period, indicating an increasing interest in biorefinery technology innovation, inter-sectoral collaboration is not favoured over intra-sectoral collaboration. As is known from previous work on social networks trust-building is a key driver for collaboration, as actors tend to form collaborations with previous partners or indirectly connected partners, creating clustered networks.     

The monetary origins of asymmetric information in international equity markets

Existing studies using low-frequency data have found that macroeconomic shocks contribute little to international stock market covariation. However, these papers have not accounted for the presence of asymmetric information where sophisticated investors generate private information about the fundamentals that drive returns in many countries. In this paper, we use a new microstructure data set to better identify the effects of private and public information shocks about U.S. interest rates and equity returns. High-frequency private and public information shocks help forecast domestic money and equity returns over daily and weekly intervals. In addition, these shocks are components of factors that are priced in a model of the cross-section of international returns. Linking private information to U.S. macroeconomic factors is useful for many domestic and international asset-pricing tests.     

The Effect of Pricing on Demand and Revenue in Federal Reserve ACH Payment Processing

Because the automated clearinghouse (ACH) has been found to have lower social costs than paper checks, the Federal Reserve has been promoting more widespread use of ACH by lowering ACH processing fees. In this paper, we have obtained the first numerical estimates of ACH demand elasticities, a measure of the responsiveness of ACH demand to price changes. Various methods are employed to estimate the demand elasticities to determine how robust the estimates are. During the period 1985–1996, the Federal Reserve lowered the per-item price of interregional ACH, while the per-item price of intraregional ACH stayed constant. We take advantage of this unique pattern of historical price changes implemented by the Federal Reserve to estimate the effect of price changes on demand for ACH.We find that the volume of ACH processed by the Federal Reserve responds to changes in per-item fees, but the increase in volume that results from a price decline is very small and not statistically significantly different from 0, except in the case of debit origination. The results suggest that the Federal Reserve cannot expect to generate substantial additional volume by lowering its prices further. However, commercial banks may be able to increase the volume demanded by lowering their own ACH fees. We also examine how volume growth initiated by a price cut affects unit costs. Given the relatively large-scale economies found for ACH, volume growth leads to lower unit costs. However, to outweigh the revenues lost as a result of a price decline, ACH volume would have to increase by an amount much greater than our estimates indicate is likely. Consequently, a decline in per-item ACH fees likely would lead to lower net revenues.     

Global private information in international equity markets

This paper studies international equity markets when some investors have private information that is valuable for trading in many countries simultaneously. We use a dynamic model of equity trading to show that global private information helps explain US investors’ trading behavior and performance. In particular, the model predicts global return chasing (positive co-movement of US investors’ net purchases with returns in many countries) which we show to be present in the data. Return chasing in our model can be due to superior performance of US investors, not inferior knowledge or naive trend-following. We also show that trades due to private information are strongly correlated across countries. A common (global) factor accounts for about half their variation.     

Does unemployment lead to a less healthy lifestyle?

In this article, we use 22 years of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and information on plant closures to investigate the effects of unemployment on four indicators of unhealthy lifestyles: diet, alcohol consumption, smoking and (a lack of) physical activity. In contrast to much of the existing literature, which unlike our analysis is unable to assess causality, our results provide little evidence that unemployment gives rise to unhealthy lifestyles.     

Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition for Tobit models

In this article, a decomposition method for Tobit models is derived, which allows the differences in observed outcome variables between two groups to be decomposed into a part that is explained by differences in observed characteristics and a part attributable to differences in the estimated coefficients. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that in the case of censored dependent variables this decomposition method produces more reliable results than the conventional Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition for linear regression models. Finally, our method is applied to a decomposition of the gender wage gap using German data.     

Social capital as a distinctive feature of Social Economy firms

In recent years, the growing importance in developed countries of the Social Economy sector and the contribution of social capital to regional economic development are being studied in depth. Linking these two fields of research, the aim of the present work is to analyse the social capital endowments of Social Economy firms in comparison to those in traditional profit-maximizing firms. To do so, a literature review will be firstly carried out to clarify both the concept of social capital and, more specifically, its relation with entrepreneurship and social enterprises. In the empirical section, the social capital endowments both of social firms (cooperatives and owned-worker enterprises) and traditional firms are compared using data from two surveys conducted in Andalusia, a lagged Spanish region with long tradition in the Social Economy sector. Results show that social capital endowments measured through cooperation agreements and company links with local suppliers and costumers are higher in cooperatives and worker-owned companies. Therefore, Andalusian authorities must continue with its support policy to these enterprises as a mean to reinforce the regional economic development.