Do economic integration agreements affect trade predictability? A group effect analysis

Recent theoretical findings in the trade literature suggest that economic integration agreements (EIAs) not only increase the level of trade but also make it more stable and predictable. This paper proposes a Hausman–Taylor quantile regression approach to identify the causal effect of EIA membership on trade predictability. The proposed methodology accounts for group effects in the gravity equation and is computationally efficient. Our results corroborate the theoretical findings that EIAs make trade more stable and predictable and this conclusion is even stronger for deeper EIAs.     

Irrigation water productivity in Cambodian rice systems

Knowledge of the marginal productivity of water is crucial for decisions about its allocation between uses, which is particularly important in the context of increasing competition for water. Using primary, plot‐level panel data, this article estimates the marginal productivity of water from supplementary irrigation in lowland rice systems in Cambodia, taking into account farmer and plot heterogeneity as well as self‐selection of supplementary irrigation. Our estimates indicate a range of elasticities for rice output with respect to water inputs of between 0.057 and 0.069 for wet season production, substantially lower than previous estimates based on either aggregate or trial data. We discuss the policy implications of these results, in particular with respect to the utility of demand management policies and the challenges they pose to the decentralization of water management to Farmer Water Users Groups.     

Design principles of hybrid approaches in new product development: a systematic literature review

Setting the right approach for new product development (NPD) in the presence of uncertainty remains an ongoing debate in innovation management. Stage-gate systems (SGS) and agile methodology (AM) are the dominant approaches. Recently, hybrid approaches (combining SGS and AM) have been proposed. Although these hybrid approaches represent a significant development in NPD, combining them without considering their design principles might lead to contradictory and competing conceptual formulations, thus increasing the difficulty of comparison among studies. Moreover, scholars and practitioners may struggle to understand when, why and how a certain configuration of the NPD process provides the right response to different manifestations of uncertainty. The current literature faces problems regarding the clarity of design principles (e.g. flexibility and adaptability), and this has led to research gaps concerning the uncertainty contingency and outcomes of hybrid approaches. This study combines bibliometric and content analyses to identify four design parameters and principles of NPD hybrid approaches: flexibility, adaptability, velocity and integration. Our findings might help advance the development and comparison of different hybrid approaches.     

Managers and Wage Policies

Do individual top managers matter for wages and wage policies? Are there general differences in “style” among managers with respect to worker compensation? To shed light on these questions, we exploit a large panel dataset from Portugal that allows us to match workers, firms, and managers, and follow the movements of the latter across different firms over time. While accounting for the effect of worker and firm heterogeneity, we estimate the role of top manager fixed effects in determining wages and wage policies. The estimates suggest that (i) top managers have a significant influence on wages and wage policies; (ii) there exists different managerial “styles”; and (iii) managers’ (observable) attributes matter for worker compensation.     

The innovation performance of MNE subsidiaries and local embeddedness: evidence from an emerging economy

We examine the innovation performance of MNE subsidiaries and their embeddedness in sources of local knowledge in a policy framework within the context of an emerging economy. Based on first-hand evidence from multiple case studies, we found that: (1) there was variability between the subsidiaries in terms of the cumulative manner and speed at which they improved their innovation performance over time, using progressively levels of accumulated capability as a proxy; (2) these differences in innovation performance improvement reflected heterogeneity between the subsidiaries in terms of the learning efforts made to acquire knowledge from local organizations; (3) the varied frequency in which the subsidiaries developed such local relationships reflects their differing responses to a common industrial policy that makes use of tax incentives to stimulate such links. The paper reveals the limitations of this conventional type of industrial policy in stimulating industrial development and the embeddedness of MNEs. It also suggests that a new direction for policy, which incorporates public–private negotiations and a focus on the firm-centred building of innovation capabilities, should be pursued in order to accelerate the innovation performance progress of latecomer firms.     

Networks,firms, and trade

Fixed costs associated with learning about demand and setting up distribution networks are expected to be lower when there are more potential contacts in the destination market, suggesting a greater probability of market entry and larger export revenues. We match historically-determined emigration stocks with detailed firm-level data from Portugal to examine the effect of migrant networks on these export outcomes. We find that larger stocks of emigrants in a given destination increase export participation and intensity. In addition, we show that the former of these effects tends to be more pronounced among firms that are more likely to have close ties with the emigrants. These results are consistent with a multiple-destination version of the Melitz (2003) model featuring market-specific entry costs and idiosyncratic firm-destination demand shocks.