全面创新管理视角下企业技术创新能力成长模型

在对我国11家重点工业企业进行实地调研的基础上,提出全面创新管理视角下的企业技术创新能力成长模型,包括用户拉动、开放创新、全面创新、人才激励4个模块。认为企业技术创新能力的提升来自于如下方面:将创新与市场需求紧密结合;建立产学研、上下游、国内外有效结合的合作创新网络;实现技术创新、管理创新与制度创新的有效互动;充分发挥人才的创新潜力。     

How do extended benefits affect unemployment duration? A regression discontinuity approach

This paper studies a targeted program that extends the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to 209 weeks in Austria. Sharp discontinuities in treatment assignment at age 50 and at the border between eligible regions and control regions identify the effect of extended benefits on unemployment duration. Results indicate that the duration of job search is prolonged by at least 0.09 weeks per additional week of benefits among men, whereas unemployment duration increases by at least 0.32 weeks per additional week of benefits for women. This finding is consistent with a lower early retirement age applying to women.     

Replacement rates and labour market behaviour

This paper studies how the replacement rate, defined as the ratio of disposable income when unemployed to expected disposable income if beginning to work, affects individuals’ transition rate from unemployment. Linked register data, representing a local Finnish labour market in 1996, are analysed with piece-wise constant exponential hazard models. Results suggest that the effect of the replacement rate and, thus, of “unemployment traps”, is fairly modest. It does not seem to change with time spent unemployed. The impact on the transition rate into employment is lower than on the transition rate out of the labour force. Unemployment insurance recipients are found to be less sensitive to changes in the replacement rate than are unemployment assistance recipients.     

THE LEGACY AND CHALLENGE OF FISCAL POLICY IN SUB‐SAHARAN AFRICA1

This paper traces salient aspects of the evolution of fiscal policy in sub‐Saharan Africa since 1960 and highlights the need for further reforms to consolidate the gains of the recent past. The fiscal position of the sub‐Saharan African region as a whole has improved markedly during the past ten years, but most countries still face formidable fiscal challenges. To consolidate the progress made during the past decade and to tackle the remaining problems, sub‐Saharan African policymakers should remain firmly committed to sound fiscal policies.     

A revisited and stable Fourier transform method for affine jump diffusion models

In the last decade, fast Fourier transform methods (i.e. FFT) have become the standard tool for pricing and hedging with affine jump diffusion models (i.e. AJD), despite the FFT theoretical framework is still in development and it is known that the early solutions have serious problems in terms of stability and accuracy. This fact depends from the relevant computational gain that the FFT approach offers with respect to the standard Fourier transform methods that make use of a canonical inverse Levy formula. In this work we revisit a classic FT method and find that changing the quadrature algorithm and using alternative, less flawed, representation for the pricing formulas can improve the computational performance up to levels that are only three time slower than FFT can achieve. This allows to have at the same time a reasonable computational speed and the well known stability and accuracy of canonical FT methods.     

R&D Costs,Innovative Output and Firm Size in the Pharmaceutical Industry

This study examines the relationships between firm size, R&D costs and output in the pharmaceutical industry. Project–level data from a survey of 12 US–owned pharmaceutical firms on drug development costs, development phase lengths and failure rates are used to determine estimates of the R&D cost of new drug development by firm size. Firms in the sample are grouped into three size categories, according to their pharmaceutical sales at the beginning of the study period. The R&D cost per new drug approved in the US is shown to decrease with firm size, while sales per new drug approved are shown to increase markedly with firm size. Sales distributions are highly skewed and suggest that firms need to search for blockbuster drugs with above–average returns. The results are consistent with substantial economies of scale in pharmaceutical R&D, particularly at the discovery and preclinical development phases.     

Existence,uniqueness, and stability of optimal payoffs of eligible assets

In a capital adequacy framework, risk measures are used to determine the minimal amount of capital that a financial institution has to raise and invest in a portfolio of prespecified eligible assets in order to pass a given capital adequacy test. From a capital efficiency perspective, it is important to be able to do so at the lowest possible cost and to identify the corresponding portfolios, or, equivalently, their payoffs. We study the existence and uniqueness of such optimal payoffs as well as their behavior under a perturbation or an approximation of the underlying capital position. This behavior is naturally linked to the continuity properties of the set‐valued map that associates to each capital position the corresponding set of optimal eligible payoffs. Upper continuity can be ensured under fairly natural assumptions. Lower continuity is typically less easy to establish. While it is always satisfied in a polyhedral setting, it generally fails otherwise, even when the reference risk measure is convex. However, lower continuity can often be established for eligible payoffs that are close to being optimal. Besides capital adequacy, our results have a variety of natural applications to pricing, hedging, and capital allocation problems.     

SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION: A COMPARISON OF EAST ASIA AND EUROPE

Inspired by the observed contrasting patterns of geographical distribution of the electric machinery industry in East Asia and Europe, this paper conducts an empirical clarification of the difference in spatial relationships in industry sizes among countries within a region by use of spatial econometric techniques. The results indicate that, while the size of the electric machinery industry in a country is positively correlated with that of neighboring countries in East Asia, there is no significant spatial correlation in Europe. Such a difference in spatial interdependence has important implications for economic development in those regions.     

Internacionalización de las pymes: análisis de recursos y capacidades internas mediante lógica difusa

SMEs in the textile and apparel sector face major internationalization challenges arising from the dynamics of globalization and the signature of free trade agreements during the last decade. It is then necessary to analyze the export capability of these enterprises in terms of the resources, skills, and abilities needed to participate successfully in the international scene. A fuzzy inference system is proposed to model the resources, skills, and capabilities that determine export success. Linguistic variables, collected from entrepreneurs, experts, consultants, and researchers in the field, were used to define the internal factors that explain export capabilities. The proposed model is validated by using the textile and clothing cluster in Medellin, Colombia, as a case study. The model reports a particular global index of 26.7 for export capabilities. On the one hand, the result confirms the hypothesis that the capabilities and resources currently available to the sector are not sufficient for a successful integration into the international market, and most importantly, on the other hand, it specifies which factors and variables are important to improve the export capability of the sector.