Structural Change and Evolution of the Services Sector in the OECD

The aim of this article is to present the results of research on the structural changes that have been taking place in all the OECD countries from 1960 to 1985. The services sector continued to grow after the recent economic crisis but some different approaches are used in order to explain this.

First, the analysis tries to show the general trends of the structural changes and the behaviour differences of the OECD economies before and after the beginning of the international crisis. The article goes on to examine the intensity of the sectorial changes by countries, the aim being to investigate the coincidences and the important differences existing between them. In spite of some interesting points that come out of the research, the article offers a clear criticism of current ideas about what has been called ‘the tertiarisation process'.     

汪潮涌分享和给予带来幸福北京信中利投资有限公司董事长兼总裁

回忆起20余年前,收到美国罗格斯大学的录取通知书时的情形,汪潮涌还是感觉到幸福.此后,这种幸福感一直与他如影随形.汪潮涌给自己的幸福指数打90分以上."我一直感觉生活在幸福之中,但生活还可以活得更好."他说.记者:你对不丹的印象是怎么样的?     

Regulation and rent‐seeking: The role of the distribution of political and economic power

It is shown that the joint distribution of economic and political power plays a key role in determining regulatory and tax policies of national and subnational governments. If both economic and political power are evenly distributed across individuals, then regulatory and tax policies are efficient, but if they are unevenly distributed and positively correlated, then regulatory policy is used by subnational governments to redistribute income in favor of individuals with higher economic and political power at the expense of productivity and output. Consequently, the national government has to raise the tax rate to finance public expenditure. Moreover, if there exists a positive correlation between economic and political power, then the higher the fiscal gap, the larger the gap between equilibrium and efficient policies because subnational governments underestimate more the fall of public revenues caused by inefficient policies.     

Complementarity,Linkages between Firms,and the Effect of Entry Costs on Productivity

In a general equilibrium model where firms are heterogeneous in terms of productivity, we introduce differentiated goods in production that are not perfect substitutes, as well as intermediate inputs needed to produce those goods. We show that an increase in either the complementarity of differentiated goods or the share of intermediate inputs in gross output, significantly increases the negative effect of entry costs on total factor productivity (TFP) and output per worker. We also find that the effect of complementarity is quantitatively stronger. If we assume an empirically plausible value for the elasticity of substitution between differentiated goods, then the model considerably improves its ability to reproduce the observed negative relationship between entry costs and TFP or output per worker.     

Stakeholder’s Preference and Rational Compliance: A Comment on Sacconi’s “CSR as a Model for Extended Corporate Governance II: Compliance, Reputation and Reciprocity”

Lorenzo Sacconi’s recent re-statement of his social contract account of business ethics is a major contribution to our understanding of the normative nature of CSR as the expression of a fair multi-party agreement supported by the economic rationality of each participant. However, at one crucial point in his theory, Sacconi introduces the concept of stakeholders’ conformist preferences – their disposition to punish the firm if it defects from the agreement, refusing to abide by its own explicit CSR policies and norms. We take issue with him over this concept: we show that the assumption of conformist preferences is a moral premise, and it arguably weakens the normativity of the theory as a whole. As an alternative, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic approach. We draw upon recent applications of evolutionary game theory to moral philosophy (Skyrms, Danielson), and we use a computer simulation of the trust game. According to this approach, the failure of the logic of reputation, which is the problem conformist preferences were introduced to solve, is overcome through the dynamics of interaction.     

Understanding Filipino Rice Farmer Preference Heterogeneity for Varietal Trait Improvements: A Latent Class Analysis

Using an experimental methodology based on investment games, we examine whether smallholder rice farmers from Nueva Ecija, Philippines have heterogeneous preferences for improvements in 10 rice varietal traits. We use a latent class cluster approach to identify different segments of rice producing households and their distinct preferences for trait improvements. These clusters were characterised post hoc using household, farm, and marketing characteristics. On average, farmers invested the most in rice varietal trait improvements that offered opportunities to reduce losses caused by lodging, insects and diseases. We found four classes of farmers with distinct preferences for improvements in variety traits. The clusters were significantly different in terms of household and farm characteristics. These findings can guide breeding research in the development of varieties that have the traits farmers identified for improvement, and that will address the unique needs of distinct farmer segments.     

Environmental entrepreneurship as a multi‐component and dynamic construct: Duality of goals,environmental agency,and environmental value creation

Environmental entrepreneurship (EE) is a scholarly field that has gained traction in recent years under the premise that it might represent a solution to pressing environmental grand challenges. Despite substantial advances in recent decades, the field still lacks consensus on the conceptualization of EE. The lack of a settled and unified notion of EE hinders the progress of the field because it challenges EE’s legitimacy, hampers theoretical development, creates measurement, and empirical problems. In this study, we aim to provide an integrative theoretical conceptualization of EE that can help build bridges between fragmented views of the phenomenon. First, we perform a systematic literature review to identify existing definitions of EE, and second, we follow an inductive approach to analyze them. Drawing on past definitions, we propose EE as a multi‐component and dynamic construct that consists of three interrelated core components: duality of goals, environmental agency, and environmental value creation. This conceptualization of EE might help connect the fragmented literature and build internal coherence, and it could be instrumental to further developing the current theoretical approaches that inform the phenomenon.     

Multi-Party Negotiation When Agents Have Subjective Estimates of Bargaining Powers

This paper presents a method for generating Pareto-optimal solutions in multi-party negotiations. In this iterative method, decision makers (DMs) formulate proposals that yield a minimum payoff to their opponents. Each proposal belongs to the efficient frontier, DMs try to adjust to a common one. In this setting, each DM is supposed to have a given bargaining power. More precisely each DM is supposed to have a subjective estimate of the power of the different parties. We study the convergence of the method, and provide examples where there is no possible agreement resulting from it.     

The Random Walk Hypothesis in the Spanish Stock Market: 1980–1992

In this paper we test the random walk hypothesis in the Spanish stock market using disaggregated daily data base spanning the period January 1980 to December 1992. We find that daily returns are strongly correlated and nonlinear dependent. Furthermore, using the variance-ratio test, that is robust to heteroscedasticity, the results suggest that the rejection of the random walk hypothesis cannot be attributed completely to the effects of time varying volatilities. In this sense, the price changes can be potentially predictable over, at least, short time spans.     

Stock Characteristics,Investor Type,and Market Myopia

This paper investigates the role of stock characteristics and investor type in market myopia. Using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) to control for endogeneity, we obtain evidence indicating that market myopia is greater among stocks that are relatively hard-to-value and hard-to-arbitrage, and find this conclusion to be robust to the choice of proxy for these characteristics. We also obtain a significantly negative relationship between institutional ownership and market myopia, due to the former acting as informed traders who exploit mispricing created by individual traders. It is important to note that the impact of their role becomes significant only when they have a sizeable share in firm ownership, as is the case of UK mutual funds and pension funds and Spanish banks.