Value co-creation among retailers and consumers: New insights into the furniture market

This paper aims to examine the applicability of a value co-creation framework that integrates the process view (customer, supplier and encounter value-creating processes), the actors’ view (the value facilitator and the value co-creator) and the role of customer knowledge in furniture retail stores using service-dominant (S-D) logic.We conducted multiple case studies to analyse retailers’ points of view and in-depth interviews to explore customers’ perspectives. Our research findings suggest that the proposed model can be effectively used to analyse value co-creation management in furniture firms, allowing researchers to identify the actions of retailers and customers and evaluate their matching. Even more importantly, this framework helps to foster value co-creation to increase the benefits for each participant during each stage of the relationship.     

Comparing Investments in New Transport Infrastructure: Roads versus Railways?

This paper contributes to the debate on investment in transport infrastructure and the allocation of public funds between road and railway projects. We model the two options and provide a consistent framework to appraise investment in typical new inter–urban road and rail projects. Our results suggest that road improvements have substantially higher returns than railway schemes. These findings cast doubt on the rationale of the new transport policy for the UK, which proposes to allocate more public funds to the (private) railways than total new investment in strategic roads.     

Altruism, incomplete markets, and tax reform

We compute the welfare effects of different revenue-neutral tax reforms that eliminate capital income taxation in two general equilibrium models calibrated to the U.S. economy. In our dynastic model, the reform with the largest welfare gain is the one that eliminates all income taxation and increases the consumption tax to 35%; 75% of the population alive at the time of the reform benefit from it. Individuals use intervivos transfers and bequests to redistribute the long-run benefits. In a pure life-cycle economy that lacks this redistribution technology, we find that the same reform would benefit only 9% of the population.     

The valuation of American barrier options using the decomposition technique

In this paper, we propose an alternative approach for pricing and hedging American barrier options. Specifically, we obtain an analytic representation for the value and hedge parameters of barrier options, using the decomposition technique of separating the European option value from the early exercise premium. This allows us to identify some new put-call ‘symmetry’ relations and the homogeneity in price parameters of the optimal exercise boundary. These properties can be utilized to increase the computational efficiency of our method in pricing and hedging American options. Our implementation of the obtained solution indicates that the proposed approach is both efficient and accurate in computing option values and option hedge parameters. Our numerical results also demonstrate that the approach dominates the existing lattice methods in both accuracy and efficiency. In particular, the method is free of the difficulty that existing numerical methods have in dealing with spot prices in the proximity of the barrier, the case where the barrier options are most problematic.     

The Value of Relationship Lending: Small Banks in an Era of Consolidation

Consolidation in the banking industry has caused concern about the survival of small banks. Empirical evidence, however, shows that small banks are performing better than larger banks in terms of loan growth and profitability. This paper investigates the determinants of such unexpected superior performance; in particular we posit that peculiarities of small banks, like their ability to lever on relationship lending, are good explanatory variables of their recent loan growth .     

Latent liquidity: A new measure of liquidity,with an application to corporate bonds

We present a new measure of liquidity known as “latent liquidity” and apply it to a unique corporate bond database. Latent liquidity is defined as the weighted average turnover of investors who hold a bond, in which the weights are the fractional investor holdings. It can be used to measure liquidity in markets with sparse transactions data. For bonds that trade frequently, our measure has predictive power for both transaction costs and the price impact of trading, over and above trading activity and bond-specific characteristics thought to be related to liquidity. Additionally, this measure exhibits relationships with bond characteristics similar to those of other trade-based measures.     

Estimation of an Extended SAM with household production for Spain 1995

This paper implements the conceptual framework sketched by Pyatt (1990) to construct an extended Social Accounting Matrix for Spain in 1995 (ESAM-95) to consider, in addition to the market economy, the production of services provided by households through unpaid work. In doing so, the ESAM-95 integrates the accounts related to market activities (ESA accounts) with non-market activities (non-ESA accounts) in a consistent way. Additional classifications are introduced in both ESA and non-ESA accounts in order to disaggregate the institutional accounts by household type and those of production factors by educational level and gender. The extended SAM is useful to calibrate CGE models in which the distribution of time between paid and unpaid work is a relevant variable.     

Formal and informal learning in the workplace: a research review

The radical economic, social and cultural changes experienced by the labour market within recent decades have helped to highlight the central role played by the learning process in individual career development and organizational success. In such fast‐moving working contexts, skills and competencies rapidly become outdated and need to be continuously implemented and empowered as a strategic factor for global competitiveness. Traditional models of learning both inside and outside of the workplace have become unable to explain the complexity of such a process, weaving between and overlapping formal and informal components. Starting with this premise, the aim of the present paper was to analyse the role of knowledge and experience as important learning frames, which allow the acquisition and development of competencies in the workplace. A human resource development perspective was adopted, aimed at reconciling both the organizational and individual stances implied in the process. The methodology of achieving this was to review the most recent literature on workplace learning, with a special focus on its formal and informal dimensions.     

Household financial vulnerability: An empirical analysis

Using survey data, we investigate household financial distress. Specifically, we propose an indicator of financial vulnerability to jointly analyse different features of household financial distress, analysing its socio-demographic and economic determinants. A total number of 3102 Italian households make up the sample.The empirical analysis highlights that for the median level of the financial vulnerability index households already exhibit some important symptoms of financial vulnerability, such as problems in getting to the end of the month or an inability to face unexpected expenses. As regards the determinants of the financial vulnerability index, three findings need to be pointed out. First, the level of debt servicing is positively related to financial vulnerability and the effect is stronger for households holding unsecured debt, i.e. consumer credit. Second, financial vulnerability also increases for impulsive individuals, who may adopt impatient, short-sighted behaviour patterns which make it difficult for them to be fully aware of the consequences of their financial and spending decisions. Third, a higher level of education helps to reduce financial fragility.