What Europe Needs Is an Innovation‐Driven Entrepreneurship Ecosystem: Introducing EDIE

With entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems appearing in geographic pockets around the world in diverse places and pockets of growth, the call for an entrepreneur‐driven innovation ecosystem (EDIE) in Europe is long overdue. Change remains a constant, and traditional industries and mature markets in Europe have left a vacuum in the path to economic growth. The need for a new model is immediate. If Europe is to find itself providing competitive leadership in the global business environment, a new philosophy is necessary to move forward in the twenty‐first century. This is the thinking behind the imperative for an EDIE in Europe, which is presented in this article as a result of a long established effort to awaken a European response to an increasingly contracting environment. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Standard Oil and Predatory Pricing: Myth Paralleling Fact

The Supreme Court in 1911, on the occasion of the first major test of the Sherman Act, ordered the dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust. In his 1958 paper John McGee argued that predatory pricing is, in general, irrational and, relying solely on the information in the Trial Record related to that decision, concluded that Standard Oil did not engage in predatory pricing. His paper has had an extraordinary influence on both antitrust policy in the United States and economic lore. This paper documents the breadth and scope of the influence of McGee’s paper and offers several possible explanations for it. We suggest four reasons: (1) the lack of a theoretical challenge for 25 years, (2) the failure of scholars to replicate McGee’s empirical findings, (3) the unique status of the Standard Oil case in the history of American antitrust and (4) the influence of the Chicago School on economic and legal thinking.     

Fast‐Expanding Markets: The Revolution of the Microeconomy

Where will we find growth opportunities ? the kind that will take our businesses to the next level? The usual and popular choice of terms we use when looking at current markets and potential ones often include developed markets and emerging economies. These terms have inspired a new golden age of racing to the new treasure hidden in the capacities of these markets. Based on the seminal concept of “fast‐expanding markets,” this article discovers growth as residing at a new level, capable of redefining geographies and territories, often untapped or unnoticed by the most conventional macroeconomic analysis. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The sector bias of skill-biased technical change and the rising skill premium in transition economies

We test the hypothesis that the sector bias of skill biased technical change is important in explaining the rising relative wage of skilled workers in the manufacturing sector in three Central and Eastern European transition countries. The econometric results broadly confirm that the concentration of skill biased technical change in the skill intensive sectors had a significant effect on the skill premium in these transition countries.

Covariance versus component-based estimations of performance in green supply chain management

In this paper, we investigate the relationships between environmental management (EM) and performance to verify: whether the implementation of an effective internal environmental is a firm’s precondition to belong to a green supply chain; which type of environmental practices (either internal or external) contribute the most to increasing a firm’s performances; and whether performing the environment translates into higher economic performance. We use structural equation modeling for testing our research hypotheses on a large sample of Italian firms, and estimate the structural paths between constructs by means of both covariance- and component-based approaches. The use of both estimation methods allows us contributing to the recent debate about the specification of the “performance” construct as an emerging rather than as a latent variable, and then using formative rather than reflective indicators. Formative indicators are used whenever a construct does not exist without its measures, any change in one of the indicators causes a change in the construct, and the measures are ingredients of the construct rather than being caused by it. For instance, economic performance is an emerging construct since economic measures (e.g., profits and market share) contribute to forming the construct rather than reflecting the behavior of the latent variable. We show that the correct model specification changes the estimates of the path coefficients and leads to research findings aligned to the literature. Our results indicate that being green internally is a prerequisite for collaboration into a green supply chain, internal EM contributes to increasing performance more than external EM, while performing the environment does not lead to a higher economic performance.     

Banking on ELR: How Hyman Minsky’s Ideas Can Help Tackle Unemployment

This article suggests a way of building a comprehensive program that can effectively eliminate unemployment using the employer-of-last-resort (ELR) scheme, which comes from the Minskyan tradition. According to this scheme, the state offers a job to everyone who is willing to work. In response to the many critiques the ELR program has received, we show that it is the best alternative to eliminating unemployment, instituting sound public finance, ensuring social and financial stability, and achieving long-term growth and international economic balances. We also make suggestions with a view of ensuring the efficiency of the ELR institutional design. In this context, we highlight the accountability issue that is largely ignored in the relevant literature, but that is paramount given the state of public finances after the 2008 crisis. We argue that accountability and efficiency should be taken as the core of the ELR project if it is to be politically viable, and they can be addressed alongside the analogy of lending of last resort. In particular, ELR projects should be supervised by a state bank that is set up to ensure the cost-effectiveness of the scheme, along with controls from below. We conduct a simulation of how much such an ELR program would cost for Italy, showing that its gross cost would be less than 2.0 percent of Italian GDP and its net cost would be negative.