Effects of coordinated strategies on product and process R&;D

Using a game theoretical model on firms’ simultaneous investments in product and process R&D, we advance and empirically test hypotheses on the role of externalities on the optimal R&D portfolio of cooperating firms and independently competing firms. We use Community Innovation Survey data on 3,696 Italian manufacturing firms. In line with our model we find that members of a group of firms invest significantly more into product, process, and aggregate R&D than independent firms. Further, their R&D portfolios tend to show a higher product versus process ratio. However, with regard to R&D performance and efficiency we find that independent firms are superior.      

Information technology and economic performance in U.S industries

Abstract .  We study the relationship between information technology (IT) and economic performance, to explore whether IT-capital promotes productivity growth. We use a data set similar to that of previous researchers, but employ non-parametric estimation techniques in order to directly estimate the output elasticities of IT for each industry and time period. We find that IT has a positive effect on productivity, which varies among industries and time. Moreover, adjustment costs are important when identifying this effect. Finally, IT-capital growth appears to be raising income in all industries used in our sample, even those that experienced output reduction.     

Modelling bullying propagation in Spain: a quantitative and qualitative approach

Bullying in schools can be defined as a category of aggressive behaviour with an imbalance of power, and aggression event is repeated over time. Bullying occurs as a social process in nature, and takes place in groups. Attacks are mostly unprovoked, and can be physical or verbal, direct or indirect. This paper focuses on modelling the propagation of bullying in the Spanish school population aged [12, 18] during the period July 2015–January 2020, and on identifying and quantifying its main drivers. Thus, a population dynamics model is built to forecast and quantify the magnitude of the bullying problem in Spain over the July 2015–January 2020 period by taking into account qualitative and quantitative factors; e.g., demography, economy, socio-cultural behaviour, consumption of drugs and alcohol, social contagion and technology. The study provides recommendations to reduce and prevent the growth of this social problem, but to also mitigate a correlated problem, such as intimate partner violence among adults. In fact one of the main utilities of the built model is that new policies can be simulated and allow their effects to be seen.     

The Impact of Middle Manager Training on Productivity: A Test on Italian Companies

This paper presents panel evidence on the productivity effects of middle managers’ off‐the‐job formal training in Italy. It is based on a rich and reliable panel dataset covering all sectors of the Italian economy over the period 2006–2011. We employ panel data techniques and self‐selection models to show that off‐the‐job formal training for middle management has a significant nonlinear exogenous effect on total factor productivity. Moreover, results indicate that middle managers’ off‐the‐job formal training is more effective in larger firms and that different training methods have heterogeneous effects on productivity.     

The Current State of the Russian Agricultural Sector

Russia's agriculture produces around 3.7 per cent of the country's GDP, employs 9.2 per cent of the national workforce and contributes around 6 per cent of the country's exports. The sector has shown remarkable resilience in the face of wider economic turbulence. Self‐sufficiency rates for the main agricultural commodities are relatively high. Agricultural exports have grown very significantly since 2000 especially for wheat and meslin (wheat and rye mixture). Meat production has been growing steadily, particularly in the poultry and pork sectors. Whilst the agri‐food sector has great potential to play an even more prominent role in Russia's economy, it suffers from relatively low productivity and an outdated technological base. The main drive for efficiency has come mainly from the relatively large‐scale agricultural firms, who generated more than half of the total value of agricultural output in 2016. Foreign policy instability, including economic sanctions, the devaluation of the national currency and declining economic growth have weakened the sector and caused an increase in the prices of imported goods and equipment. At the same time Russian products have replaced high value‐added imports and Russia's agricultural producers are expanding into new markets.     

Projecting supply and use tables: new variants and fair comparisons

ABSTRACT

We have introduced in this paper new variants of two methods for projecting Supply and Use Tables that are based on a distance minimisation approach (SUT-RAS) and the Leontief model (SUT-EURO). We have also compared them under similar and comparable exogenous information, i.e.: with and without exogenous industry output, and with explicit consideration of taxes less subsidies on products. We have conducted an empirical assessment of all of these methods against a set of annual tables between 2000 and 2005 for Austria, Belgium, Spain and Italy. From the empirical assessment, we obtained three main conclusions: (a) the use of extra information (i.e. industry output) generally improves projected estimates in both methods; (b) whenever industry output is available, the SUT-RAS method should be used and otherwise the SUT-EURO should be used instead; and (c) the total industry output is best estimated by the SUT-EURO method when this is not available.     

Chronicles of a democracy postponed

We explain a lack of civic culture in today's Russia, closely related to a democratic deficit in the country, by a path dependency which has originated at the critical juncture of transition to market economy. Suppression of democracy in the early 1990s to expedite unpopular reform exposed the new institutional order to oligarchic capture and set in motion a vicious circle of extractive economic and political institutions. The latter have been shaping views and attitudes in the society via institutional learning, continuously suppressing civic culture and solidifying social foundations for extractive institutions. We present evidence from the World Values Survey supporting the above conclusions.     

Gains from resistance: rejection of a new digital technology in a healthcare sector workplace

The issue of spaces for non-organised employee resistance has attracted renewed attention due to the diffusion of new digital technologies in the workplace. The ability of new technologies to measure and restrict employee behaviour in new ways requires explanations of resistance that account for both technology’s material characteristics and employee agency, without descending into technological determinism. This article is based on a case of effective resistance to a new data reporting technology introduced in home nursing in Denmark and explores the causes, forms and outcomes of the resistance. In this study, labour process theory is complemented with Edwards and Ramirez’s classification of dimensions of technological change. The study argues that two dimensions are important for effective employee resistance to technology: contestation of the unintended rather than the intended effects of the technology and the non-immanence of the effects in the technology, which allows the employees to reconstitute it in use.     

Missing Data: A Unified Taxonomy Guided by Conditional Independence

Recent work (Seaman et al., 2013 ; Mealli & Rubin, 2015 ) attempts to clarify the not always well‐understood difference between realised and everywhere definitions of missing at random (MAR) and missing completely at random. Another branch of the literature (Mohan et al., 2013 ; Pearl & Mohan, 2013 ) exploits always‐observed covariates to give variable‐based definitions of MAR and missing completely at random. In this paper, we develop a unified taxonomy encompassing all approaches. In this taxonomy, the new concept of ‘complementary MAR’ is introduced, and its relationship with the concept of data observed at random is discussed. All relationships among these definitions are analysed and represented graphically. Conditional independence, both at the random variable and at the event level, is the formal language we adopt to connect all these definitions. Our paper covers both the univariate and the multivariate case, where attention is paid to monotone missingness and to the concept of sequential MAR. Specifically, for monotone missingness, we propose a sequential MAR definition that might be more appropriate than both everywhere and variable‐based MAR to model dropout in certain contexts.     

Three Decades of Research in Health and Food Marketing: A Systematic Review

With multiple approaches, methodologies and theoretical traditions involved, the body of marketing research focused on health and food has grown particularly extensive, fragmented, and difficult to navigate. Driven by the goal of synthesizing three decades of research and reflecting on its development over time, this study provides a broad bibliographic, theoretical, methodological, and thematic assessment of a selection of 190 articles published between 1988 and 2015, using systematic review and content analysis methods. The results reveal that knowledge in the field is predominantly driven by US-authored, experiment-based studies with statistical scope that often fail to articulate a discernible theoretical anchor. Despite a plethora of themes, the concept of health is primarily operationalized in the context of isolated, often dichotomous, product evaluations rather than in the context of everyday consumption experiences. By looking into “what,” “where,” and “how” of food and health-related research, this study contributes to the debate about the current state and the future of this research domain.