Strategic complementarity in multi-stage games

We provide sufficient conditions in finite-horizon multi-stage games for the value function of each player, associated to extremal Markov perfect equilibria, to display strategic complementarities and for the contemporaneous equilibrium to be increasing in the state variables. The author is grateful to Federico Echenique, Rabah Amir and one anonymous referee for useful comments, project SEJ2005-08263 at UPF and Project Consolider-Ingenio CSD2006-00016 of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA, for financial support.     

University patenting and technology commercialization – legal frameworks and the importance of local practice

The impact of national legislative frameworks on the higher education sector's contribution to technological innovation is heavily disputed. This paper argues that legislative frameworks may stimulate the development of local practices for the management and exploitation of intellectual property (IP), which in turn determine the level of academic patenting. We present case studies of two comparable universities in each of four selected European countries with different histories of national IP legislation. A within-country analysis shows that a wider range and earlier development of local IP management and exploitation practices are accompanied by higher levels of academic patenting, and that increasing similarity of IP practices is associated with decreasing differences in patenting outputs. A preliminary cross-country analysis reveals an expansion in and increasing similarity of practices for IP management and exploitation in countries with different national IP framework histories. We conclude that adopting Bayh-Dole-like legislation may trigger the development of local IP practices, which stimulate patenting. However, it is not always sufficient and definitely not always necessary. The study concludes with some policy recommendations.     

Competition Policy in Banking in the European Union

Review of Industrial Organization - We examine the evolution of competition in banking in the EU in its interaction with regulatory developments and the parallel evolution of the application of...     

Tourism as a right: a “frivolous claim” against degrowth?

Abstract

Social movements and academic sectors gather information on the negative consequences of tourism development. These consequences affect the rights of the local population, and favour global processes such as Climate Change. In light of this situation, numerous voices are calling for a slowdown in the growth of tourism. They are even calling for its degrowth. The strategy of the tourism sector has been to put forward discourses and actions aimed at preventing the application of limitations to its activity. This article focuses on an action promoted by the UNWTO: the aim to turn tourism into a human right. First, the text offers a critical analysis of what this idea is based on and the debate it has generated. It then investigates its motives. The work concludes that by legitimizing tourism as a supposed human right, it would allow the debate to centre on a conflict of rights (the right of the citizen as a tourist against the rights of the citizen as a resident of a territory or as a worker). Because a debate between rights always ends up in stalemate. This way, degrowth proposals in tourism would be neutralized.     

Upskilling y cambios distributivos en la cadena global de valor de la industria electrónica

La cadena global de valor de la industria electrónica es una de las más complejas de la economía internacional. Utilizando las tablas input‐output internacionales de 2000‐2014, se infieren las contribuciones individuales a dicha cadena para observar cómo la crisis de 2007–2008 afectó a su evolución y cartografiar las interacciones internacionales. Se observa un aumento de la deslocalización hasta el estallido de la crisis y después China y otras economías de Asia oriental se convierten en un epicentro de creación de valor. También se observa una profunda transformación de las tecnologías de producción, acompañada de un proceso de mejora del perfil de la cualificación (upskilling).     

Bucharest conversations: What would futurists say to this little girl?

At a round table discussion that took place in Bucharest during a mutual learning workshop, on 9th-11th of June 2010, around 15 futurists were asked to look at this picture of a little African girl. It appears on the cover of UNESCO's Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010, which has the specific title: ‘Reaching the Marginalized’. The futurists were asked: how would you justify the work you do to the girl in the photograph. Here are some of the answers.     

The Proposals for a European Tax on CO2 and Their Implications for Intercountry Distribution

This paper analyzes the advantages andimplications of the implementation of aEuropean tax on carbon dioxide emissions as anown resource of the EU and it focuses on itseffects on intercountry distribution. Incontrast to a harmonized tax, which would onlyhave distributive effects within each memberstate, a tax collected at European scale wouldalso have important distributive effects amongdifferent countries. These effects would alsodepend on the use of tax revenues. The paperinvestigates through a simple empiricalanalysis the distributive effects among themember states of three tax models: a pureCO₂ model; a 50%/50% energy-CO₂model and a CO₂ model with a burden onnuclear power.     

Leadership and overcoming coordination failure with asymmetric costs

We study how the heterogeneity of agents affects the extent to which changes in financial incentives can pull a group out of a situation of coordination failure. We focus on the connections between cost asymmetries and leadership. Experimental subjects interact in groups of four in a series of weak-link games. The treatment variable is the distribution of high and low effort cost across subjects. We present data for one, two and three low-cost subjects as well as control sessions with symmetric costs. The overall pattern of coordination improvement is common across treatments. Early coordination improvements depend on the distribution of high and low effort costs across subjects, but these differences disappear with time. We find that initial leadership in overcoming coordination failure is not driven by low-cost subjects but by subjects with the most common cost type. This conformity effect may be due to a kind of group identity or to the cognitive simplicity of acting with identical others.      

Income growth and atmospheric pollution in Spain: An input-output approach

The relationships between economic growth and environmental pressures are complex. Since the early nineties, the debate on these relationships has been strongly influenced by the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis, which states that during the first stage of economic development environmental pressures increase as per capita income increases, but once a critical turning point has been reached these pressures diminish as income levels continue to increase. However, to date such a delinking between economic growth and emission levels has not happened for most atmospheric pollutants in Spain. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between income growth and nine atmospheric pollutants in Spain. In order to obtain empirical outcomes for this analysis, we adopt an input-output approach and use NAMEA data for the nine pollutants. First, we undertake a structural decomposition analysis for the period 1995-2000 to estimate the contribution of various factors to changes in the levels of atmospheric emissions. And second, we estimate the emissions associated with the consumption patterns of different groups of households classified according to their level of expenditure.     

The new role of tourists in destination image formation

The birth of Web 2.0 tools has created a new paradigm for word-of-mouth communication. Bearing in mind the relevance of tourists as agents in destination image-formation processes, this research discusses the new role they play in this paradigm, and how it affects and modifies the seminal typology of image-formation agents originally proposed by Gartner [1994. Image formation process. Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing, 2(2), 191–216. doi: 10.1300/J073v02n02_12]. The results focus on the effects of Web 2.0 tools on the credibility, market penetration and costs for the destination of tourists' actions as image-formation agents. Implications for destination marketing organisations are also considered and discussed.