A new perspective on the exporter productivity premium: online trade

We use a unique firm-level data set including 9000 companies from 26 European Union countries covering four different sectors to take a close look at the relationship between online exports and productivity. The online exporter productivity premium is estimated using different techniques (ordinary least squares, quantile regressions and robust estimation). Results consistently indicate that the estimated online exporter productivity premium is statistically different from zero, positive and significant from an economic point of view. European online exporters, according to these results, are approximately 2% more productive than non-online exporters. Productivity differences between firms could be related to variables that are not included in the empirical model. More research would be needed to address this issue in the future.     

Analysis of the Efficacy of Public Spending on Research and Development in State Programs

This paper presents an approach to assessing the efficacy of public spending on research and development in state programs. At present, there is a need to develop a unified approach to the analysis and evaluation of the efficacy of such spending from the perspective of participants in state programs (federal executive bodies). The proposed approach does not allow evaluating the efficacy of public spending on the development of research areas assigned to the authors.     

Competition and cooperation in the exploitation of the groundwater resource

We study the exploitation of a common groundwater resource, first as a static and then as a differential game, in order to take into account the strategic and dynamic interactions among the users of the resource. We suppose that firms can form coalitions or can decide not to cooperate. The non-cooperation regime is characterized by pumping that lead to depletion of the aquifer; the cooperation preserves the resource. Open-loop and feedback equilibria have been computed and compared in order to characterize the existence of cooperators and defectors in water resources management.     

Reference points for measuring social performance: Case study of a social business venture

We present a longitudinal qualitative case study to elaborate on how a social venture forms reference points for social performance. Although organizations increasingly use various social performance targets to direct their operations, the scholarly knowledge on social performance reference points remains limited. We make use of the prior accounting literature and draw on the idea of compromising accounts to discuss how provisional and performative metrics can have a significant role in how organizations develop new ways to evaluate their social performance. Given that the social performance reference point criteria are ambiguous and the corresponding referents malleable, performative accounts are helpful as they can intervene in the organizational life by making particular things visible, providing space for interpretations, and facilitating discussion, thus creating temporary settlements and enabling opportunities for productive compromises between different organizational groups and evaluative principles. The recursive feedback loops between reference point referents, criteria and accounting artefacts help the organization to make sense of its own social performance and interpret the associated performance feedback, and thereby provide ground for organizational decisions on further action. Moreover, we discuss how imperfect accounts can be useful for social businesses in their pursuit of developing their activities and achieving social impact.     

Assessing information integration processes: a comparison of findings obtained with between-subjects designs versus within-subjects designs

Quality & Quantity - Within-subject designs (WSDs) remain unpopular in psychology. Social psychologists have argued that they create “demand” and “order” effects....     

The importance of consumer multihoming (joint purchases) for market performance: Mergers and entry in media markets

Consumer “multihoming” (watching two TV channels, or buying two news magazines) has surprisingly important effects on market equilibrium and performance in (two‐sided) media markets. We show this by introducing consumer multihoming and advertising finance into the classic circle model of product differentiation. When consumers multihome (attend more than one platform), media platforms can charge only incremental value prices to advertisers. Entry or merger leaves consumer prices unchanged under consumer multihoming, but leaves advertiser prices unchanged under single‐homing: Multihoming flips the side of the market on which platforms compete. In contrast to standard circle results, equilibrium product variety can be insufficient under multihoming.     

Introduction to the policy articles on Trump to Biden: Implications for Canadian Agriculture

President Biden was sworn in on January 20, 2021 after a 4‐year term by President Trump. Certainly, Trump's norm breaking presidency impacted Canada in significant ways and the agricultural sector was no exception. In this issue, we have a set of four short articles discussing the possible implications on Canadian agriculture of transitioning from a Trump to Biden presidency. Issues related to Canada‐U.S. agricultural trade, political norms and uncertainty, U.S. domestic support, participation in trade agreements, and U.S.‐China relations are all considered.     

Outward foreign direct investment by Polish state-owned multinational enterprises: is ‘stateness’ an asset or a burden?

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are commonly associated with undue advantages due to preferential treatment by the state. Simultaneously they are often quoted as handicapped given the notorious state interference, management problems and agency tensions. They used to be regarded as a mainly domestic issue but in the context of globalisation and the fact that states enter treaties with new obligations, SOEs’ performance ceased to be solely a domestic problem, increasingly so as state-owned multinational enterprises (SOMNEs) emerge. This article presents the results of research on Polish SOEs’ outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). It offers an overview of overseas activities of nine major Polish firms with a state stake and aims to contribute to the conceptual literature on foreign investments conducted by SOMNEs. We distinguish between FDI by SOMNEs as specific – privileged (facilitated) or discriminated (hampered) – investments subject to the home country’s state power and the host country’s state perception.     

Alliances and the innovation performance of corporate and public research spin-off firms

We explore the innovation performance benefits of alliances for spin-off firms, in particular spin-offs either from other firms or from public research organizations. During the early years of the emerging combinatorial chemistry industry, the industry on which our empirical analysis focuses, spin-offs engaged in alliances with large and established partners, partners of similar type and size, and with public research organizations, often for different reasons. We seek to understand to what extent alliances of spin-offs with other firms (either large- or small- and medium-sized firms) affected their innovation performance and also how this performance may have been affected by their corporate or public research background. We find evidence that in general alliances of spin-offs with other firms, in particular alliances with large firms, increased their innovation performance. Corporate spin-offs that formed alliances with other firms outperformed public research spin-offs with such alliances. This suggests that, in terms of their innovation performance, corporate spin-offs that engaged in alliances with other firms seemed to have benefitted from their prior corporate background. Interestingly, it turns out that the negative impact of alliances on the innovation performance of public research spin-offs was largely affected by their alliances with small- and medium-sized firms.     

A Real Options Model of Real Estate Development with Entitlement Risk

Most development projects encounter a highly uncertain entitlement process that is largely uncontrollable by developers. In this study, entitlement is modeled as a separate stage within a compound real option, where developers begin with minimal control (maximum risk) and each successful stage increases control (decreases risk). We solve the model analytically, provide three‐dimensional numerical comparisons, and empirically test the model's predictions using hand collected rezoning petitions. Our main result refines the classic development option model: developers first invest early (secure entitlements) in order to obtain the option to subsequently delay investment (construct the optimal building at the optimal time).