Displaying from 91 to 94 of 94 available piece of news category "Article"
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No international tourists? How domestic destinations have competed for national tourists during COVID times.
The COVID-19 has caused a dramatic fall in international tourism demand. Destinations within countries have revised their promotion strategies, intensifying the competition for the domestic market, less affected by mobility restrictions. This paper proposes a contest theory model for characterizing this new context. Two types of destinations, coastal (sun and sand) and rural, compete for the existing demand in terms of promotion spending. The competition is driven by two main factors: the relative strategic advantage of each destination in the international and domestic markets and the strategic value given to each market. The pandemic has likely modified these factors, reducing the traditional advantage of coastal destinations and shifting the valuation towards the domestic market. According to the model, these changes may increase competition for the domestic market, with destinations rising promotion spending even in a context of reduced demand, which is consistent with the empirical evidence.
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Green and digital entrepreneurship in smart cities
This paper investigates the relationship between the implementation of smart city initiatives and the number of new firms, paying special attention to the rates of green and digital entrepreneurship as smart cities tend to follow sustainable and/or digital orientations. We find evidence of a positive (causal) relation between smart city initiatives and entrepreneurship rates in a sample of Belgian municipalities, particularly when these initiatives follow a bottom-up approach and/or the level of implementation is high. In contrast, having sustainable and/or digital orientations in smart city initiatives does not generally make any difference in the rates of entrepreneurship, the exception being the digital rates in large municipalities. These results suggest that the smart city initiatives may be acting as a local entrepreneurship-supporting policy. They also support the view that smart cities are mainly (but not only) associated with technological developments (in large cities).
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Gender, occupational diversity of R&D teams and patents generation: an application to Spanish firms
This paper studies the relationship between gender and occupational diversity in R&D teams and their capacity to generate patents. It is based on an extensive sample of 4,085 firms from the Spanish Community Innovation Survey over the 2004‒2014 period. Applying an exponential Poisson regression that controls for endogeneity through the generalised method of moments, the empirical results show that gender diversity has an ambiguous effect. Although it affects patents negatively, this impact is non-significant for patents with international protection. Patent generation is however positively affected by the diversity of categories in the R&D teams. Hence, the key question is not gender per se but rather the occupational status of the R&D teams.
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Pollution and congestion in urban areas: The effects of low emission zones
The great weight that the car has as a means of mobility in large cities generates significant negative externalities both in terms of pollution and congestion. The goal of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of low emission zones (LEZs) and to compare it with the existing results in literature on the effectiveness of urban tolls. First, we build up a theoretical model that departs from De Borger and Proost (2012), who study the effects of urban tolls on congestion, by incorporating pollution into the analysis and LEZs as an alternative (quantity-based) policy measure. Then we perform an econometric analysis taking advantage of a unique and extremely original panel of large European urban areas over the period 2008-2016, using data on congestion from TomTom and data on pollution (PM2.5) from environmental sciences. We conclude that LEZs can curb pollution. They are particularly effective in highly polluted cities, when they are applied to a wide area of the city, and/or when they are stringent in the type of restricted vehicles. Instead, LEZs are ineffective in mitigating congestion. This is a very relevant result, given the growing importance of LEZs in Europe.
