Productivity Dispersion and Measurement Error

Several reasons have been put forward to explain the high dispersion of productivity across establishments: quality of management, different input usage and market distortions, to name but a few. Although it is acknowledged that a sizable portion of productivity dispersion may also be due to measurement error, little research has been devoted to identifying how much they contribute. We outline a novel procedure for identifying the role of measurement error in explaining the empirical dispersion of productivity across establishments. The starting point of our framework is the errors-in-variable model consisting of a measurement equation and a structural equation for latent productivity. We estimate the variance of the measurement error and subsequently estimate the variance of the latent productivity variable, which is not contaminated by measurement error. Using Norwegian data on the manufacture of food products, we find that about one percent of the measured dispersion stems from measurement error.     

New ventures in Cleantech: Opportunities,capabilities and innovation outcomes

Facing the challenge of climate change, innovations that imply environmental benefits create business opportunities for entrepreneurs. This paper analyzes innovation capabilities of startups in Cleantech and how the innovation outcomes of those startups develop over time. Based on the Mannheim Foundation Panel and applying propensity score matching, a cohort of 567 Cleantech startups is analyzed and compared with a control cohort of non‐Cleantech startups. We find that startups in Cleantech have, on average, higher technological capabilities compared with all other startups. Our econometric evidence shows that Cleantech startups are more likely to combine existing technology in a novel way. Finally, we find that Cleantech startups develop more market novelties in subsequent years when compared with their control group peers.     

International Capital Flows in the Model with Limited Commitment and Incomplete Markets

Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the empirical patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries in the past two decades. This paper integrates these two frictions into a two-country overlapping-generations framework to facilitate a direct comparison of their respective effects. In our model, limited commitment distorts the investment made by agents with different productivity, which creates a wedge between the interest rates on equity capital vs. credit capital; while incomplete markets distort the investment among projects with different riskiness, which creates a wedge between the risk-free rate and the mean rate of return to risky capital. We show that the two approaches are observationally equivalent with respect to their implications for international capital flows, production efficiency, and aggregate output.     

What’s at Stake in Securitising Climate Change? Towards a Differentiated Approach

Climate change has been successfully represented as a security concern to such an extent that it is firmly established on the political agenda, even though the implementation of concrete policies is disputed. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to better trace the process of securitising climate change and assess its normative implications. We establish a typology of six climate security discourses on the basis of two dimensions: three levels of referent objects and two logics of securitisation, one that corresponds to the original Copenhagen School framework and one where the threat takes the form of the invocation of risk. We find that there are significant differences in the relative importance of the resulting climate security discourses in Germany and the US, but that normatively, all discourses come with their own problems, which calls for more detailed scrutiny and assessment of climate security discourses and their political effects.     

Vis-à-vis vs. mixed dock door assignment: A comparison of different cross dock layouts

An important decision problem during the layout phase of a cross dock is related to the arrangement of inbound and outbound operations within a terminal. Either one side of the terminal is exclusively dedicated to inbound and the other to outbound destinations (vis-à-vis policy) or inbound and outbound destinations can facultatively be assigned all around the terminal (mix policy). The latter policy promises more flexibility, when finally assigning dock doors to truck destinations during operational planning, but comes for the price of ambiguous material flows and potential congestions inside the terminal. Both policies are compared with regard to their impact on operational planning, where deterministic, stochastic and unknown inbound loads are differentiated. Our results show the mix policy being superior in most cases except for unknown inbound loads.