López de Peñalver's Reflexiones : an economic and mathematical approach

Juan López de Peñalver was an engineer and mathematician who trained in Spain, Central Europe and Paris. His Reflexiones sobre la variación del precio del trigo (1812) contained three models of: (1) wages, wheat prices and mortality; (2) transport costs and location; and (3) constant relative prices, which were brought to an international readership in 1961. His complete works were published in 1992. An advocate of political arithmetic and mathematical economics, he was influenced by Canard, Condorcet and Steuart and the economic writings of Lavoisier and Lagrange; a considerable distance separated him from both Adam Smith and J.-B. Say.     

A Comparative Study of Web-Based Technology Applications in Corporations

Due to the complexity of international trade and intense global competition, businesses today are facing challenges that were unthinkable a decade ago. To effectively respond to these challenges, companies continue to explore new ways to measure and extend value to their existing and new customer base. In the past, business practices have used expensive and time consuming tools to manage day-to-day operations. However, with technology advancing at a rapid speed, companies are forced to incorporate new technologies into their organizational decision processes to remain competitive and to maintain or expand market share. One technological tool that has become increasingly valuable to business firms is the internet. The evolution of the internet has resulted in numerous web-based tools that have proven to be flexible and data rich enhancements in a wide variety of business applications. This research examines how corporations utilize the internet in their internal and external business decision processes. The study highlights the benefits, similarities, and differences between SMEs and large firms with regard to the applications of these technologies.     

Ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability

The assessment of sustainability at farm level has been growing in popularity over the last few years. This article contributes to this line of research by building up composite indicators for different facets—social, economic, environmental, and global—of farm sustainability using a methodological approach that combines data envelopment analysis (DEA) and multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods, and assigns common weights to each individual sustainability indicator. This approach is applied to a database of 163 farms located in the Campos County, a region belonging to the dry lands of the Spanish Northern Plateau, using 12 individual indicators of sustainability. Our findings show that both economic and environmental composite sustainability indicators are positively correlated, but that this is not the case for the social indicator. We also check the influence of a set of variables on farm sustainability using bootstrapping statistical techniques, and showing that increasing farm size, membership in agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ medium and upper agricultural‐specific technical education, all exert a significant positive influence on sustainability. These results provide clues for policy makers that intend to design sustainability‐increasing structural agricultural policies.     

The Effects of a Dutch High School Curriculum Reform on Performance in and After Higher Education

This paper investigates the effect of a major reform in the final years of the two highest levels of Dutch secondary education. The reform focused on increasing active and independent learning and aimed to improve the match between secondary and higher education. We use data from six graduation cohorts from Dutch higher education and exploit the fact that two recent graduation cohorts contain both students that were treated with the new curriculum and students that were treated with the old curriculum. The effects of the curriculum change have been estimated by using a difference-in-differences approach for matched samples of treated and untreated graduates. We find that the reform had no effect on student performance and labour market outcomes.     

Asymmetric stock price and liquidity responses to changes in the FTSE SmallCap index

We examine market reactions to changes in the FTSE SmallCap index membership, which are determined quarterly based on market capitalization and are free of information effects. Our main results are asymmetric price and liquidity responses between the firms that are shifted between FTSE indexes and the firms that are new to FTSE indexes. Firms promoted from a smaller-cap to a larger-cap FTSE index experience a permanent increase in stock price accompanied by improvements in liquidity. Similarly, firms demoted from a larger-cap to a smaller-cap FTSE index experience a permanent decrease in stock price accompanied by declines in liquidity. In contrast, firms added to the FTSE SmallCap index that were not previously in FTSE indexes show a transitory price gain and declines in liquidity. The results support the liquidity and price pressure hypotheses.