Displaying from 41 to 50 of 89 available piece of news category "Article"
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Are destinations reverting to the pre-pandemic “normal”?
After three years since the pandemic started, it's crucial to assess how well adaptation has happened. In this research note, we looked at how Spanish provinces adapted in the years 2020 to 2022. We found that certain factors played different roles in absorbing the shock in 2020, adapting in 2021, and recovering in 2022. While some things have gone back to how they were, there are still lasting effects in 2022. For example, tourists still prefer natural destinations over urban ones, and some distant markets haven't fully recovered. Understanding these dynamics is important for the tourism industry to fully bounce back.
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How to distribute the European Regional Development Funds through a combination of egalitarian allocations: the CELmin
As Solís-Baltodano et al. (2021) figured out, almost a third of the total European Union budget was set aside for the Cohesion Policy during the 2014-2020 period. The distribution of this budget is made through three main structural and investment funds, trying to promote convergence in the level of development of EU countries. Specifically, the authors, by analysing this situation as a claims problem (O'Neill, 1982), find out the claims solution that performs better than the others by reducing inequality and promoting convergence to a greater degree (the Constrained Equal Losses rule). Nonetheless, when using this egalitarian division of losses, regions may not receive any funds. This paper defines a new way to distribute the limited resources of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). We propose a compromise between the egalitarian approaches, i.e., we combine the egalitarian division of the funds with an egalitarian division of the losses (what regions do not get). In doing so, our proposal applies the constrained equal losses solution while ensuring a minimum amount is allocated to each region (sustainable bound). Finally, we provide an axiomatic analysis of the new solution and we apply it to the ERDF problem.
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Regulatory commitment versus non-commitment: Electric vehicle adoption under subsidies and emission standards
The authors compare two regulatory structures in the application of emission standards and a subsidy scheme in the automobile market. The regulator can either commit to an emission standard or is not able to commit. Firms compete a ´ la Cournot and produce fuel-powered and electric vehicles. The emissions of fuel-powered vehicles can be abated by means of investing in emission-reducing innovation. Their results indicate that under commitment there are less emissions, higher subsidies and a major adoption of electric vehicles. By contrast, non-commitment yields more fuel-powered vehicles, more vehicles in total and higher consumer surplus. Electric vehicle producers obtain higher profits under commitment, whereas fuel-powered vehicle producers might be better off under both regulatory structures. Social welfare is higher under non-commitment as long as environmental damages are regarded severe. Otherwise, commitment is socially preferable. This result provides an explanation for observed differences in the duration of environmental standards between the US, the EU and China.
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Productivity and High Growth Enterprises: resilience and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic
Productivity and High Growth Enterprises: resilience and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic
The impact of crises on firm performance has been studied widely. This paper explores the relationship between firms' reaction to COVID-19 (in employment) and the adoption of digital technologies, taking into account their productivity, digitalisation level and high-growth episodes before the crisis. We match the EIB Group Survey of Investment and Investment Finance with ORBIS database for 27 EU Member States and the United Kingdom. We find that firms with higher productivity levels are less prone to decrease the number of employees in the short and long term due to the pandemic.
High-growth enterprises are less likely to expect a reduction in the number of employees in the long term. Moreover, firms in highly digitalised sectors have a lower probability to reduce the number of employees. Finally, our results suggest that COVID-19 leads firms to increase their use of digital technologies, especially those that were already more digitalised.
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Stackelberg Social Equilibrium in Water Markets
Market power in water markets can be modeled as simultaneous quantity competition on a river structure and analyzed by applying social equilibrium. In an example of a duopoly water market, the authors argue that the lack of backward induction logic implies that the upstream supplier foregoes profitable strategic manipulation of water to the downstream supplier. To incorporate backward induction, they propose the Stackelberg social equilibrium concept. The authors prove the existence of Stackelberg social equilibrium in duopoly water markets with an upstream-downstream river structure and derive it in the example of a duopoly market.
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From rapid decline to high growth: where in the distribution did COVID hit hardest?
The authors explore how did the COVID shock hit European firms at the upper quantiles (high-growth superstars) and the lower quantiles (rapidly declining firms). The authors analyse the European Investment Bank Investment Survey (2016-2020) and apply graphical techniques and quantile regression to evaluate the COVID shock along the growth rates distribution.
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The Art of Sharing Resources: How to Distribute Water during a Drought Period
Water scarcity is a growing problem in many regions worldwide. According to the United Nations, around one-fifth of the world's population lives in areas where water is scarce. Another one-quarter of the world's population must face water supply cuts, mainly because this proportion of the population lacks the necessary infrastructure to acquire water from rivers and aquifers (UN, 2005). Water is a resource that is essential to human survival and is also present in all productive processes in the economy. Therefore, we are challenged to adequately manage water to ensure the population's well-being and to achieve socioeconomic development.
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Built structures strongly influence cross-country patterns of energy demand and CO2 emissions
Built structures, i.e. the patterns of settlements and transport infrastructures, are known to influence per-capita energy demand and CO2 emissions at the urban level.
At the national level, the role of built structures is seldom considered due to poor data availability. Instead, other potential determinants of energy demand and CO2 emissions, primarily GDP, are more frequently assessed. We present a set of national-level indicators to characterize patterns of built structures.
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Data vs. information: Using clustering techniques to enhance stock returns forecasting
This study has shown that clustering models can help investors and traders predict stock prices and increase the returns of their trading algorithms.
We used a method called k-means clustering (with alternative distance metrics) to group stocks based on their quarterly financial ratios, prices, and daily returns.
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Average monotonic cooperative games with nontransferable utility
A non-negative transferable utility (TU) game is average monotonic if there exists a non-negative vector according to which the relative worth is not decreasing when enlarging the coalition. We generalize this definition to the nontransferable utility (NTU) case.
