Creating relational rents: The effect of business groups on affiliated firms’ performance in Indonesia

This research attempts to extend the discussion of business groups in emerging economies by treating business groups as a form of interorganizational network that generates relational rents among affiliated firms by creating technological and managerial capabilities. Based on the relational view, this research investigates whether value created by business groups depends upon sharing, combining, and exchanging unique and specific resources or assets among affiliated firms. Results show that technological capabilities contribute to create relational rents in terms of affiliated firms’ investment in R&D and human capital. Managerial capabilities also contributed to generating relational rents through investment in managerial knowledge acquisition for affiliated firms without R&D units and in training for affiliated firms with R&D units. However, learning by exporting and learning from imported input do not yield relational rents within business groups. Overall, these findings reveal that business groups as interorganizational networks are contingent on their internal, unique, and specific capabilities, as social capital theory argues.

Housing and Income Inequality in Europe: Distributional Effects of Non-Cash Income From Imputed Rents

This article uses survey data to estimate non-cash income from imputed rents, using a consistent methodology for all countries to assemble comparable statistics that allow for a valid inter-country comparison. We can confirm a significant impact of non-cash income and find an inequality-decreasing effect for the unconditional income distribution which highly correlates with the proportion of owner-occupiers in the respective countries. However, aggregated inequality measures are not suited to analyze the increase in the conditional income inequality between owner-occupiers and renters, who do not obtain income from imputed rents by definition. Therefore, we apply a reweighting decomposition that controls for the heterogeneous housing characteristics among European countries and allows us to decompose the distributional changes into a part that is explained by the proportion of tenure types and household size and a remaining part that reflects the relative dispersion of imputed rents along the income distribution.     

Oil dependence and entrepreneurship: Non-linear evidence

This study examines the empirical nature of the oil dependence-entrepreneurship nexus, building on recent research that extends the “resource curse” beyond its effects on economic growth. For the period from 2006 to 2018, the sample includes 115 countries at various stages of economic development. Using panel threshold methods, we discover an inverted U-shaped relationship, indicating that even small increases in oil rents increase entrepreneurship below the threshold. Globally, oil rents above a threshold of 77 % stifle entrepreneurship. Regional differences and institutional vulnerability act as moderators.