Analysing Materials and Energy Flows in an Industrial District using an Enterprise Input–Output Model

Recent approaches to sustainable development leave much room for policies at a local level. In fact, it is becoming evident that targets such as increasing resource productivity, preserving natural cycles, or extending the present level of welfare, are best pursued within the confines of a local area. In particular, environmental changes are best brought about by considering local systems of firms as cornerstones of cooperative strategies and using data on materials and energy use in physical terms. In this paper, an enterprise input–output model is developed for an industrial district, i.e. a local group of firms specialized in the production of a single final output. The model allows for a detailed quantitative analysis of materials and energy flows and the consequent generation of waste and pollution. As a planning tool, the model may be used to evaluate alternative scenarios, such as the possibility of re- using waste taking account of sustainability requirements. An empirical case study applies the model to an industrial district in Southern Italy producing leather sofas.     

Assessing customer passion,commitment, and word-of-mouth intentions in digital assistant usage: The moderating role of technology anxiety

Consumers develop a passion for the use of innovations, which is a critical determinant of their success. Research has largely examined drivers of initial acceptance of digital assistants (DAs) and has yet to fully understand the factors driving or deterring consumers’ passion towards DAs and the behavioural outcomes. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response framework, this study examines a unique set of factors (usefulness, ease of use, privacy concern, and localisation) that act as stimuli to drive an organismic state of passion for DAs, and how this produces behavioural responses of word-of-mouth (WOM) intention and commitment to DA use. The study also examines how technology anxiety moderates passion’s impact on WOM intentions and commitment. The findings show that usefulness, ease of use, privacy concern, and localisation are significant explanatory variables of consumers’ passion towards DAs. Furthermore, passion towards DAs results in WOM intentions and commitment to its use. The findings further show that passion’s effect on DAs in explaining WOM intentions and commitment is weakened by technology anxiety. Lastly, passion is the mediating mechanism through which usefulness, ease of use, privacy concern, and localisation impact WOM intentions and commitment. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are highlighted.     

Taking two to tango: A comparative nationalism view of cross-border acquisitions

Nationalism is an important yet underexplored issue in the international business strategy literature. As a new reality, the resurgence and augmentation of nationalism in recent decades has brought disruption effects that challenge traditional arguments on the international expansion of multinational enterprises (MNEs). We suggest that nationalism is not merely about one’s own national interest but should be extended to consider the mutual forces from home and host countries in international business (IB) research. This study proposes a comparative nationalism view to investigate the impacts of various types of intercountry nationalism on MNEs’ expansion through cross-border acquisitions. Through scenario analysis, the MNEs’ expansion trajectories are characterized by different degrees of comparative nationalism, including incremental expansion, deceleration, leapfrogging, and divestment strategies. Our findings and propositions create a new vision for cross-border research considering the interacting effect of national sentiments. We also discuss promising future research agendas enabling further exploration of this topic.     

Wealth effects and agency costs

We analyze how the agent's initial wealth affects the principal's expected profits in the standard principal–agent model with moral hazard.We show that if the principal prefers a poorer agent for all specifications of action sets, probability distributions, and disutility of effort, then the agent's utility of income must exhibit a coefficient of absolute prudence less than three times the coefficient of absolute risk aversion for all levels of income, thus strengthening the sufficiency result of Thiele and Wambach (1999). Also, we prove that there is no condition on the agent's utility of income alone that will make the principal prefer richer agents. Moreover, we show that, for an interesting class of problems, the principal prefers a relatively poorer agent if agent's wealth is sufficiently large. Finally, we discuss how alternative ways of modeling the agent's outside option affects the principal's preferences for agent's wealth.     

Investment and saving in Angola and the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle

This article analyses the relationship between investment and savings for Angola using the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle, with monthly data from January 2000 to December 2013. Integer and fractional integration and cointegration techniques are employed to investigate the relationship between investment and savings. Several regression specifications are employed, concluding that the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle is not validated for the Angolan economy. Policy implications are derived.     

Truthful germs are contagious: A local-to-global characterization of truthfulness

We study the question of which social choice functions from an abstract type space to a set of outcomes are truthful, i.e., implementable by truthful mechanisms, when utilities are quasi-linear. For convex domains, our main theorem characterizes truthful social choice functions as those satisfying two properties: local weak monotonicity and vortex-freeness. The first of these constrains the function values at any two sufficiently proximal points, while the second asserts that its line integrals around sufficiently small triangular loops must vanish.The characterization implies a local-to-global principle that allows one to deduce truthfulness of a function from its behavior on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of each point. Other consequences include a simple alternate derivation of the Saks–Yu Theorem that weak monotonicity characterizes truthfulness of functions having a convex domain and finite range, and a sufficient condition for constructing truthful functions by “stitching together” truthful subfunctions on different subsets of the domain.     

Do jobs follow people or people follow jobs? A meta-analysis of Carlino–Mills studies

Do jobs follow people or people follow jobs? A meta-analysis of Carlino–Mills studies. Spatial Economic Analysis. This study examines the classic question as to whether ‘jobs follow people’ or ‘people follow jobs’ by performing a meta-analysis of 321 results from 64 Carlino–Mills studies. It is found that the results are highly divergent, but that more results point towards ‘jobs following people’ than towards ‘people following jobs’. When it comes to the reasons for the variation in results, we find that the results are mostly shaped by the geographical location, spatial resolution, and population and employment characteristics present in the data, as well as by the model’s specification, its functional form and the spatial weight matrix specification.     

Dynamic contracting under imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs

We develop a dynamic principal–agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect optimal dynamic contracts. We make a methodological contribution to the literature by solving the continuous-time contracting problem using a discrete-time approximation approach. We obtain a simple characterization of optimal renegotiation-proof contracts in terms of the solution to a nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE). We then exploit the properties of the ODE to derive a number of novel implications for the dynamics of long-term contracts that alter the intuition gleaned from the previous literature. Optimism has a first-order impact on incentives, investment and output that could reconcile the “private equity” puzzle. Consistent with empirical evidence, the interaction between asymmetric beliefs, risk-sharing and adverse selection costs could cause the time-paths of the agent's incentive intensities to be increasing or decreasing. Our results also suggest that the incorporation of imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs could potentially reconcile empirical evidence of an ambiguous relation between risk and incentives, and a non-monotonic relation between firm value and incentives. Permanent and transitory components of risk have differing effects on incentives, which suggest that empirical investigations of the link between risk and incentives should appropriately account for different components of risk.     

EMPIRICAL ESTIMATION OF NON-LINEAR INPUT–OUTPUT MODELS: AN ENTROPY ECONOMETRICS APPROACH

Despite theoretical advances, non-linear input–output models have been empirically applied only to a limited extent. This is mainly due to the fact that the number of parameters to be estimated is much higher than the number of available data points. Taking advantage of the recent proliferation of input–output databases and by applying an estimation strategy that relies on entropy econometrics, this paper suggests a way to estimate the parameters that characterize non-linear relationships between inputs and output. This non-linear modelling allows for considering time-specific input coefficients, instead of fixed ones. Several types of multipliers can be derived from this non-linear model, and the proposed generalized maximum entropy (GME) estimator allows estimating them from time series or cross-sectional datasets of input–output tables. The proposed GME technique is illustrated by means of an empirical application that estimates the parameters that characterize a non-linear input–output model for the Spanish economy over the period 1995–2011.     

Outsourcing and structural change. Application to a set of OECD countries

The examination in this paper aims to bridge outsourcing and structural change analyses in order to obtain more accurate insights into the extent of outsourcing and to extract more reliable policy recommendations for dealing with its effects. We do this by applying a ‘battery’ of outsourcing measurements to a group of OECD countries from 1980 to the mid 1990s. Expected results (e.g. the idiosyncratic outsourcing patterns of the UK) are confirmed on a more systematic and comparable basis, while original results (e.g. the low integration of business services in manufacturing in the former socialist economies) are based on the exploitation of new data.