A worldwide assessment of scientific production in economics (1992-1997)

The aim of this article is to analyse the worldwide production in economics. To that end, bibliometric indicators are constructed by way of a database made-up of 55 international journals, covering the period 1992–1997. A ranking of the leading thousand international affiliations is established and quality indices of the first 200 are presented. Finally, a detailed analysis is carried out at country level and with respect to the 12 leading countries.     

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.     

The biennial Malmquist productivity change index

In this paper we introduce a new Malmquist productivity index that has three attractive features: it avoids linear programming infeasibilities under variable returns to scale, it allows for technical regress, and it does not need to be recomputed when a new time period is added to the data set. The proposed index is compared to both the adjacent Malmquist index and the global Malmquist index in an empirical example, which highlights the drawbacks of the existing indexes compared to the proposed biennial Malmquist index.Our results show that 13% of the observations in the data set may have to be ignored due to infeasibilities when decomposing the adjacent Malmquist index. Using only this reduced data set does at times lead to quite different results than those generated by applying the proposed biennial Malmquist index to the entire data set. The empirical example also shows that productivity change estimated between two time periods using the global Malmquist index change substantially when a third time period is added to the data set, whereas the proposed biennial Malmquist index is immune to this problem.     

大运之后更精彩——恩华特封闭式垃圾自动收集系统成为深圳大运村环保亮点

恩华特封闭式垃圾自动收集系统极大程度地免除了异味,杜绝了二次污染,大幅降低了疾病传播的风险,是社区垃圾收集方式革命性的突破,为提高社区规划设计、美化社区形象、提升物业价值提供了有力的支持。     

Firms’ linkages with public research organisations in Argentina: Drivers, perceptions and behaviours

This paper analyses firms’ drivers for linking to public research organisations (PRO) (first goal) and compares perceptions and behaviours of linked vs. unlinked firms (second goal). We used an original firm database constructed from a representative survey with information for linked and unlinked firms for year 2005 in Argentina. Drivers were estimated using a Probit model, while differences in perceptions and behaviours between linked and unlinked firms were assessed with propensity score matching techniques. For our first goal we found that (i) firms’ knowledge bases were not drivers for linking to PRO and (ii) networking capabilities matter but there is a substitution effect between interacting with PRO and interacting with other economic agents in the market when firms aim at exchanging information rather than doing joint research. These findings may imply that current linkages are not exploiting properly their knowledge potential; it may be worth designing a division of labour among PRO in their functions in PRO-industry interactions. For our second goal: we found that (i) linked firms invest more in innovative activities; (ii) they are more prone to patenting; (iii) both groups of firms value similarly PRO research outputs available at arm length (i.e. without direct linking). Given the asymmetric development on appropriability tools between PRO and firms and the fact that all firms benefit from PRO research outputs, the higher predisposition of linked firms towards patenting, suggests that special attention should be placed at analysing the risks of a private appropriation of publicly created knowledge.     

Economic growth,inflation and oil shocks: are the 1970s coming back?

This article analyses the relationship between oil price shocks and the macroeconomic evolution of the Group of Seven (G7) countries. Using the Qu and Perron (2007) methodology, we endogenously identify three breaks in the nonlinear relationship across our 1970 to 2008 sample. We compute long-term multipliers and find that the response of output and inflation to oil price shocks is greatest in the 1970s and progressively disappears until the late 1990s. In contrast to the previous literature, we observe that both effects reappear in the 2000s, especially on inflation. Nevertheless, the transmission of oil price shocks to the economy is weaker than in the 1970s, which means that oil price shocks have lost some of their explanatory power. Precisely identifying these effects is crucial for the design of adequate economic measures to control or smoothen them.     

Sources of strategic fit in high-tech firms

This study analyses the concept of strategic fit as a factor explaining organisational performance. We propose that strategic fit should include aspects of environment perception as well as the gap between planning processes and strategic implementation. Studying the firm's capacity to reduce this gap, we identify various organisational capabilities and analyse their relationships. Through managers’ responses from a sample of firms in European high-technology sectors, we find sufficient empirical evidence to affirm that strategic fit facilitates improvement in organisational performance. We also observe that strategic flexibility, real options and organisational learning are sources of strategic fit. So-called learning organisations facilitate generation of options that give the organisation the strategic flexibility needed to achieve fit with the environment. Strategic flexibility is defined in both the adaptive and anticipative sense. Our article thus offers a new perspective to contribute to better understanding of strategic fit and its antecedents.     

The relationship between tax rates and tax revenues in eurozone member countries - exploring the Laffer curve

We estimate Laffer Curves for direct and indirect taxes for each Eurozone country, using panel data from 1995 to 2011, by means of Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) models. We choose the three taxes that contribute the most to the government tax revenue: the value added tax (VAT), the corporate income tax (CT), and the labour income tax (LT). From our estimated significant parameters, which have the expected signs according to the Laffer Curve theory, we obtained a maximum/optimal tax rate for VAT for Greece, Portugal, and Slovakia and for the majority of the Eurozone countries for direct taxes. We also take into consideration the business cycle. Many countries do not present differences in regime, and when they do, the optimal tax rate is higher during recessions. Finally, we compare the observed tax rates in 2012 to the estimated optimal tax rates, to assess if the 2012 policy was located at the prohibitive range of the Laffer Curve. Our results are important for the discussions about fiscal discipline and harmonization in the Eurozone, since they exhibit important disparities between countries and taxes. We can see that, especially for CT and LT, there is a strong divide between the values of the optimal maximum tax rates for Eastern European countries and Western European economies. Additionally, the economic and financial conditions of each country also influence the value for the tax rate.     

Some Stylized Facts about International Trade Flows

Since the mid‐1990s there has been a proliferation of empirical models in the trade literature. Focus has ranged from the effect of particular explanatory variables to improved econometric techniques. However, there appears to be a lack of analyses on large international trade datasets aiming at describing the “stylized facts” of observed bilateral trade flows. Uncovering them is crucial as any empirical econometric model should reflect the basic properties of the data generating process. On the basis of a large panel dataset this paper finds that bilateral trade, despite being often unbalanced, tends to be reciprocal and persistent, and that the extensive margin of trade must not be disregarded. Moreover, bilateral trade flows are probably best modeled as a mixed panel of stationary and non‐stationary processes. The stationary vs non‐stationary separation of these flows, although not random, does not appear to be related to any common characteristics of the trading partners.     

韩国利率市场化改革与其经济金融运行变化

文章回顾了韩国利率市场化改革的历程及其经济金融运行的积极变化。20世纪80年代起，韩国逐渐放弃政府主导型的管理政策，启动利率市场化改革进程。其改革经历了从放开到管制、从管制到重新放开的两个阶段，虽然其中经历了挫折，但最终还是成功实现。利率市场化促进了实际利率由负转正，达到了在控制通胀的前提下促进经济增长之目的。