Market segmentation variables as moderators in the prediction of business tourist retention

Service Business - This study explores whether five market segmentation variables moderate the relationship between the business tourist service quality scorecard (SQSC) and business tourist...     

Mapping the impact of home‐ and host‐country institutions on human resource management in emerging market multinational companies: A conceptual framework

While there is a growing literature concerned with multinational companies from emerging markets (EMNCs), it does not contain a robust conception of how institutions shape human resource (HR) practices in such firms. We contribute to filling this gap through developing a framework of how institutions create a range of constraints and opportunities for EMNCs. Specifically, our framework contains three key elements of how MNCs from emerging markets interact with institutions: EMNCs develop approaches that to some extent reflect the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the institutions in the home country (institutional conditioning); the strategies of actors in EMNCs can overcome the weaknesses of the home country by drawing on institutions in other countries (institutional arbitrage); and the actions of EMNCs can reinforce, or create pressures for change in, the institutional context in the countries in which they operate (institutional change/consolidation). By mapping this set of strategies of EMNCs, we contribute to a fuller understanding of the relationship between institutions and HR practices, and we outline how the rise of EMNCs reshapes the global landscape by adding new kinds of firm behavior to capitalist diversity.     

Does Firm Size make a Difference? Analysing the Effectiveness of R&D Subsidies in East Germany

We analyse the impact of public subsidies on private sector research and development (R&D) activity for a sample of East German firms. Using propensity score matching, our empirical results indicate that subsidized firms indeed show a higher level of R&D intensity (R&D expenditures relative to total turnover) and a higher probability for patent application compared with non‐subsidized firms. We find that, on average, the R&D intensity increases from 1.5% to 3.9%. The probability of patent application rises from 20% to 40%. These results closely match earlier empirical findings for East Germany. Given the fact that the East German innovation system is particularly driven by small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), we draw special attention to the effectiveness of R&D subsidies for this latter subgroup. Here, no specific empirical evidence is available so far. Our findings indicate that policy effectiveness also holds for private R&D activity of SMEs, with the highest increase in terms of R&D intensity being estimated for microbusinesses with up to ten employees.     

Eco-Labeling and Horizontal Product Differentiation

This paper investigates the impact of eco-labels on the abatement of emissions in a market with horizontal product differentiation. A distinction is made between an end-of-pipe abatement method and a clean technology approach. In the former case underinvestment is likely to occur even if the marginal willingness to pay for abatement of consumers is equal to the social marginal benefit of abatement. The level of abatement depends on the number of firms and on the number of consumers. For a large market with few firms overinvestment in abatement is also possible. Clean technology abatement achieves a first best level regardless of market size if all consumers have a marginal willingness to pay for abatement equal to its social benefit.     

Some notes on discount factor restrictions for dynamic optimization problems

We consider dynamic optimization problems on one-dimensional state spaces. Under standard smoothness and convexity assumptions, the optimal solutions are characterized by an optimal policy function h mapping the state space into itself. There exists an extensive literature on the relation between the size of the discount factor of the dynamic optimization problem on the one hand and the properties of the dynamical system x_t+1=h(x_t) on the other hand. The purpose of this paper is to survey some of the most important contributions of this literature and to modify or improve them in various directions. We deal in particular with the topological entropy of the dynamical system, with its Lyapunov exponents, and with its periodic orbits.     

Distributional Effects of Public Education in an Economy with Public Pensions*

We study how the allocation of government expenditures between two major outlays—education and pay‐as‐you‐go social security—affects human capital distribution in an economy with heterogeneous agents. We consider an overlapping generations economy where the government maintains both programs, and allocates tax revenues to finance them. In our model, human capital is one of the factors of production. It is itself produced as a combined result of public inputs and private inputs. Parents' decisions to invest time and material resources in education of their children are motivated by altruism, heterogeneous in its strength across the population, which leads to heterogeneity of incomes. We investigate the effect of an increase in public funding for education on the human capital distribution. We show that in this framework, contrary to some earlier results, increased spending on public education may lead to higher inequality. Our results depend crucially on the interaction of education funding with the social security budget and on the elasticity of substitution in the learning technology.