INPUT–OUTPUT ANALYSIS: THE NEXT 25 YEARS

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the International Input–Output Association and the 25th volume of Economic Systems Research. To celebrate this anniversary, a group of eight experts provide their views on the future of input–output. Looking forward, they foresee progress in terms of data collections, methods, theory testing, and focus and scope.     

Theorizing the Politicizing City

This introductory symposium article develops a framework for an urban political reading and a theorization of urban uprisings. We argue that there is a need to foreground the notion of the urban political as central to the theoretical and practical demands of urban research today. First, we revisit critical urban theory in light of recent urban insurrections and point out a lack of sustained theoretical engagement with the political. Second, based on this critique, we argue for what we call a ‘re‐centring of the urban political' to rethink urban theory in ways that consider the city as a site of political encounter, interruption and experimentation, even when, or perhaps especially when, these ways fall outside institutional forms or lack the organizational form or legitimacy of social movements. Thus, we attempt to place politics at the heart of radical urban political theory and practice today in order to make sense of urban subjects, events and claims that elude established government practices and institutionalized structures.     

How Do Investors' Expectations Drive Asset Prices?

Based on an extension of the process of investors' expectations to stochastic volatility we derive asset price processes in a general continuous time pricing kernel framework. Our analysis suggests that stochastic volatility of asset price processes results from the fact that investors do not know the risk of an asset and therefore the volatility of the process of their expectations is stochastic, too. Furthermore, our model is consistent with empirical studies reporting negative correlation between asset prices and their volatility as well as significant variations in the Sharpe ratio.     

Externalities of R&D Expenditures

Innovation is generally recognized as a major source of economic growth. R&D investments explicitly aim at generating innovations and creating knowledge. Since knowledge has certain public good properties, positive externalities are likely to exist. In this paper, we extend well-known concepts from the input-output literature (backward multipliers) to indicate at which commodities stimuli should be targeted to enhance R&D and its positive externalities in the economy as a whole. Next, we argue that there may also be negative externalities of R&D, due to increased prices. This issue can be studied by means of forward multipliers. Both concepts are applied to the United States, 1977-90.     

Service innovation as a political process

Service innovation processes are driven by stakeholders in interaction and are understood and sketched as a value negotiation process that consists of an iterative process of securing potential value in service. While previous research has focused on service innovation as a harmonious closed system, our study explores service innovation as a political process in which stakeholders negotiate to create and secure future value. Data are collected through interviews and participant observations in four different case studies. Our study contributes to the field by illuminating service innovation as a political process and explaining how this is operationalized. The findings also contribute to an understanding of how stakeholder resources impact a chosen strategy; the resulting strategy’s impact on the service concept vis-à-vis its potential value; and how several involved stakeholders formulate, negotiate, and secure future potential value, which are the activities that drive a service innovation process.     

THE BIAS OF THE MULTIPLIER MATRIX WHEN SUPPLY AND USE TABLES ARE STOCHASTIC

The literature on stochastic input–output (I–O) analysis has paid considerable attention to the bias in the Leontief inverse. This paper extends previous studies by assuming supply and use tables (SUTs rather than I–O tables or input coefficients matrices) to be stochastic. This is a natural starting point because SUTs have become the basic data sources for I–O applications. In a Monte Carlo simulation experiment, a given SUT is randomized in two different ways and the effects are determined for eight different multiplier matrices. The analysis is carried out for Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Finland, using their SUTs for 2006. The findings indicate that, in general, biases are statistically significant but negligibly small. This corroborates earlier findings obtained for stochastic I–O tables.     

Ist der Fahrplan der Energiewende noch einzuhalten?

The German energy transition represents a policy-driven, sustainability-oriented restructuring of both supply- and demand-side components of the entire energy system by 2050. Whereas the development of renewable energies in the electricity sector is right on track, due to the feed-in tariffs of the German Renewable Energy Sources Act, many other crucial requirements for a successful transition are not, amongst others the improvement of energy effi ciency and the decarbonisation of the transport sector. Contrary to the public discussion, the primary future challenges do not consist in limiting electricity prices or abandoning feed-in support schemes, but rather in coordinating the variety of actors as well as appropriately matching the different system elements (grids, technologies, energy sectors, demand and supply side, etc.). Much remains to be done. By highlighting some examples like the need to take into account future implications of climate change for the energy sector, the consequences of the current crisis in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme and the need for a cautious adjustment of the EEG, the paper argues that the major challenges regarding the German energy transition mainly go beyond the current policy-driven and short-term discussion of energy prices. Germany’s pioneering attempt to integrate steadily increasing share of non-dispatchable electricity from renewable sources is challenging the stability of the system. Several characteristics in the current selfregulating system are identifi ed and analysed, which reveal themselves as potential weaknesses or shortcomings in the upcoming system.     

Dividend Stickiness,Debt Covenants,and Earnings Management

Consistent with the notion that dividends are very sticky, Daniel, Denis, and Naveen ( 2008 ) report evidence that firms manage earnings upward when pre‐managed earnings are expected to fall short of dividend payments. However, we find that this evidence is not robust when controlling for firms' tendency to manage earnings upward to avoid reporting earnings declines; only firms with high leverage exhibit a statistically weak tendency to manage earnings to close deficits of pre‐managed earnings relative to dividends. We further report that the decision to cut dividends depends on whether reported earnings fall short of past dividends, but not on earnings management that eliminates a shortfall in pre‐managed earnings relative to dividend payments. Overall, our evidence suggests that firms that face dividend constraints are more likely to cut dividends than to manage earnings to avoid dividend cuts.