Delaying the timing of offshoring low-skilled tasks

This paper examines the impact of uncertainty on offshoring low-skilled tasks. The model shows that greater demand uncertainty adversely affects the expected profit and timing of offshoring. It is also shown that a home-country tax rate deduction increases the volatility of the expected profits, making offshoring appear to be more risky. One policy implication of our results is that, in order to delay relocation of MNE's production from the home country, a government should adopt tax rate deduction rather than a direct subsidy because the former is more economical and effective than the latter.     

The Political Economy of Austerity in Southern Europe

ABSTRACT

Europe’s response to the sovereign debt crisis in Southern Europe has been premised on the idea that these states can return to growth through internal devaluation and fiscal consolidation. This article explores the distributive consequences of that strategy in Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. We argue that standard measures of poverty do not capture the deterioration in living standards as fully as anchored poverty. Moreover, we show that inequality trends conceal considerable re-ranking within the income distribution: those who were rich in 2012 had got richer in 2009–12, but those who were rich in 2009 lost ground in 2009–12. We find that in all four countries the new poor include significantly fewer pensioners and more unemployed workers, and are considerably poorer than the old poor had been. We demonstrate that there was significant variation in the magnitude and design of austerity, with Italy imposing a far smaller adjustment than Spain, and Portugal achieving less inequality in spite of robust fiscal consolidation. Nevertheless, even when austerity measures were designed to reduce inequality by compressing incomes downward, their second-order macro-economic effects ultimately increased inequality (except in Portugal). In the last section, we explore the political reasons for this variation.     

The value of state education to consumers in the UK

This paper considers the value of state schooling, as perceived by consumers, taking into account that many households supplement the minimum education provided free of charge with out-of-pocket payments through acquiring accommodation in the catchment area of a high-quality state school. It suggests ways to circumvent difficulties in modelling household behaviour arising from joint housing-education consumption in the context of a two-stage demand system, where the proposed money metric of state schooling can be estimated from data readily available in household expenditure surveys. The empirical analysis, based on UK data, estimates this money metric as the amount households with school-age children would be willing to accept in order to opt out of the state education system. The efficiency and distributional implications of the empirical findings are discussed.     

Socially Responsible Institutional Investment in Private Equity

This article studies institutional investor allocations to the socially responsible asset class. We propose two elements influence socially responsible institutional investment in private equity: internal organizational structure, and internationalization. We study socially responsible investments from Dutch institutional investments into private equity funds, and compare socially responsible investment across different asset classes and different types of institutional investors (banks, insurance companies, and pension funds). The data indicate socially responsible investment in private equity is 40–50% more common when the decision to implement such an investment plan is centralised with a single chief investment officer. Socially responsible investment in private equity is also more common among institutional investors with a greater international investment focus, and less common among fund-of-fund private equity investments.     

Agritourism networks: empirical evidence from two case studies in Greece

This study investigates the characteristics of informal agritourism-related networks within destinations with the help of social network analysis by measuring macro and meso structural aspects of networks in two tourist destinations in Greece with different geographic characteristics: an island-Lesvos (in North Eastern Aegean) and a continental locality-Plastiras Lake (central part of Greece). The main objective is to illustrate and discuss quantitative and qualitative aspects of these networks with selected actors who are linked (directly or indirectly) with the agritourism sector through personal in-depth and semi-structured interviews. The quantitative aspects include: quantity of links, spatial extent of networks, type of relationship, its “thickness”, the duration of the relationship, issues of seasonality as well as satisfaction of the cooperation. The qualitative aspects include the type of relationship of the actors over the link and who (if anyone) has “control” over this relationship. The main findings indicate that the examined networks are partially affected by the geographic characteristics of the case studies and they are very similar in terms of absolute numbers and network metrics. Although research on networks has been an emerging and promising approach, qualitative characteristics of informal networks seem to be integral for understanding networks and planning tourism policies.     

Knowledge types to progress the development of sustainable technologies: a case study of Swedish demonstration plants

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Knowledge development and diffusion through demonstration plants are necessary to progress the development of sustainable technologies, yet...     

Voluntary or mandatory enrollment in training and the motivation to transfer training

The purpose of this study is to examine the motivation to transfer training in a multidimensional way. It investigates autonomous and controlled motivation and explores the difference in motivation to transfer according to whether the employee is enrolled in training on a voluntary or mandatory basis. This is a cross‐sectional hypotheses‐testing study. Data were collected at a large insurance company involving employees who had participated in training programs in the previous 6 months. Findings show that when considering autonomous motivation to transfer, results support the argument that being voluntarily enrolled in the training program shows a higher impact on motivation to transfer than being mandatorily enrolled. When considering controlled motivation to transfer, results do not support such an argument, probably because of the nature of controlled motivation to transfer that in practice reduces the difference in results between the two types of enrollment.     

Tender evaluation and supplier selection methods in public procurement

The EU procurement directives stipulate that public contracts be awarded to the lowest bidder or to the bidder with the economically most advantageous tender; the latter requiring that a scoring rule be specified. We provide a simple theoretical framework, based on standard microeconomic theory, for tender evaluation (scoring and weighing) and discuss the pros and cons of methods such as highest quality (beauty contest), lowest price and price-and-quality-based evaluations. We argue that the most common method, price-to-quality scoring, is inappropriate for several reasons. It is non-transparent, making accurate representation of the procurer's preferences difficult. It is often open to strategic manipulation, due to dependence on irrelevant alternatives, and it tends to impose particular and unjustified non-linearity in bid prices. The alternative quality-to-price scoring method, where money values are assigned to different quality levels, is a better alternative. However, when the cost of quality is relatively well-known and several providers can offer optimal quality, lowest price is the preferable supplier selection method, while beauty contests may be preferred when purchasing budgets are inflexible.     

Proxying Ability by Family Background in Returns to Schooling Estimations is Generally a Bad Idea*

When schooling is measured with error and data on ability are lacking, return to schooling estimates will be subject to positive omitted variable bias (OVB) and negative measurement error bias (MEB). We investigate how these biases are affected when ability is proxied by family background variables. We show that the effect on OVB is uncertain, while MEB invariably increases in magnitude. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that MEB generally dominates OVB. With more background variables or increased measurement error, the total bias rapidly becomes negative and increasing in magnitude, thereby driving the return estimate further and further away from the true value.     

Are the determinants of bank loyalty brand specific?

One of the primary concerns of companies is to develop loyal customers, and banks are no exception. Past research attempted to examine the role of satisfaction, perceived quality and image, as drivers of bank brand loyalty. However the characteristics of specific bank brands were not taken into consideration. Using data collected from a sample of 216 retail bank customers, banking with five different banks in Athens Greece, this paper investigates whether similar antecedents could be used to predict brand loyalty in various institutions. The results imply that, depending on the bank, different drivers could influence in a dissimilar manner the formation of loyalty and therefore further research is needed to generalise the suggested models.