How Do Start-up Acquisitions Affect the Direction of Innovation?*

A start-up engages in an investment portfolio problem by choosing how much to invest in a “non-rival” project and a “rival” project that threatens an incumbent. Anticipating its acquisition, the start-up distorts its investment portfolio in order to raise acquisition rents. This may improve or worsen the direction of innovation and consumer surplus. The bigger the difference in social surplus appropriability across the two projects, the more likely it is that the direction of innovation improves and consumers benefit from an acquisition. These results also hold if the acquirer takes over the research facilities of the start-up.     

Children’s interaction with the Internet: time dedicated to communications and games

In the context of growing interest of individuals in the Internet, the literature has not paid attention to the uses of time for children, given the scarcity of appropriate data bases that provide accurate information. To partially cover this gap, we now provide here evidence of the time that children aged between 10 and 12 years dedicate to two online activities: computer communication and computer gaming. To that end, we estimate a simultaneous seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) model with data from the Spanish Time Use Survey for 2009–2010. Results indicate that being female generates a positive influence on the time devoted to computer communication, and being male generates a positive influence on the time devoted to computer gaming. We also find that a greater number of family members with secondary studies generates a positive influence on the time spent on computer gaming. Children with better health spend more time on both of these activities and, finally, living in a larger city produces a positive effect on the time dedicated to computer gaming.     

What can we learn from the distribution of trade patterns?

This paper proposes an empirical framework for analyzing the dynamics of trade specialization, using a symmetric transformation of the standard Balassa (Manch Sch Econ Soc Stud 33(2):99–123, 1965) index and the conditional density estimation methods suggested by Hyndman et al. (J Comput Graph Stat 5(4):315–336, 1996). The framework is implemented using data on the cross-sector export and import specialization of the four initial EU Cohesion countries over the last 40 years. We discuss the importance of studying both the distribution’s external shape and the intra-distribution dynamics and why it is interesting to include imports in the analysis. We find a reduction of the overall degree of export specialization in Portugal, Greece and Spain. Conversely, Ireland has the strongest export specialization and there is evidence of an increase over time. The export intra-distribution dynamics reveal persistence of the specialization status in the four countries, especially for high values of the index. In all countries, the degree of specialization is higher for exports than for imports and intra-distribution dynamics reveal more mobility of import specialization than that of exports.     

Assessing the impact of organizational learning and innovation on performance in cultural organizations

• Product innovation, technological innovation and organizational innovations are the key to helping cultural organizations achieve their social mission and achieve efficiency. This innovation strategy and the outcomes depend on introducing learning orientation into the organization. The current work analyses the relationship between learning orientation, innovativeness and performance for the case of 386 British, French and Spanish museums. Findings indicate that learning orientation significantly influences both innovativeness and performance. Further, whereas technological and organizational innovations are related to economic performance, product innovations have a greater impact on social performance.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Production externalities: internalization by voting

We study internalization of production externalities in perfectly competitive markets where production plans are decided by majority voting. Since shareholders want firms to maximize dividends of portfolios rather than profits, they are interested in some internalization. Two governances, namely the shareholder governance (one share, one vote) and the stakeholder democracy (one stakeholder, one vote), are compared. We argue that perfect internalization is more likely to be the outcome of the stakeholder democracy than the shareholder governance.     

Town size and the consumer behaviour of Spanish households: a panel data approach

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of town size on the Spanish demand for food. The methodological approach followed in the study is to use panel data built from the Spanish Quarterly National Expenditure Survey to estimate a demand system. The use of this type of data allows control for unobserved time invariant heterogeneity as well as to take into account the time and the cross-section dimension of data. Four locations are distinguished: (1) less than 10000 inhabitants; (2) between 10000 and 100000 inhabitants; (3) between 100000 and 500000 inhabitants; and (4) more than 500000 inhabitants. Eight broad food categories are considered: (1) cereals and potatoes; (2) meat; (3) fish; (4) dairy products; (5) fats and oils; (6) fruits; (7) vegetables; and (8) other food. Income and price elasticities are calculated for each location. In general terms, two general conclusions can be drawn. First, results indicate that only slight changes in tastes have taken place during the analysed period; second, income and price elasticities use to decrease as town size increases.     

Property,Power, and Public Choice: An Inquiry into Law and Economics

This article briefly describes the evolution of the recent economic crisis based on different theories toward my own interpretation of it. The deregulation wave of the last decades has created new profit opportunities in various contexts — from labor flexibility to privatization and from financialization to globalization — so promoting a renewed process of capitalist accumulation after the stagflation of the 1970s. This has taken place at the cost of a wide-ranging increase in inequality and instability, thus bringing a cascade of crises, including the latest one of 2008.     

Does the Single Currency Affect Foreign Direct Investment?*

Does the creation of the euro partly explain the sharp increase in European investments? To address this question, we derive a simple gravity‐like model for bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI). Using this model, we find that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has increased intra‐EMU FDI stocks on average by around 30 percent. This effect varies over time and across EMU members. It is found to be larger for the outward investments of the less‐developed EMU members. Moreover, contrary to early expectations of FDI diversion effects, EMU countries have invested more in non‐EMU countries since the launch of the euro.