Displaying from 61 to 66 of 66 available piece of news category "Article"
-
The economic reaction to non-pharmaceutical interventions during Covid-19
Policy makers have implemented a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the spread of Covid-19 and reduce the burden on health systems. These restrictive measures have had adverse effects on economic activity; however, these negative impacts differ with respect to each country. Based on daily data, this article studies governmental economic responses to the application of NPIs for 59 countries. Furthermore, we assess if these economic responses differ according to the economic and sectoral context of the countries. By applying a counting model to the economic support intensity, our results quantify the average reaction of governments in counterbalancing the imposition of NPIs. We further re-estimate the base model by dividing the countries according to their GDP per capita, the intensity of their service sectors, and the expenditure by tourists. Our results show how each NPI implied a different level of economic support and how the structural characteristics considered were relevant to the decision-making process.
-
New indicator to predict high-growth enterprises
High-growth enterprises (HGEs) have a large economic impact but are notoriously hard to predict. Previous research has linked high-growth episodes to the configuration of lumpy indivisible resources inside firms, such that high capacity utilisation levels might stimulate future growth. We theorize that firms reaching critically high capacity utilisation levels reach a "trigger point" involving either broad-based investment in further growth or shrinking back to previous levels. We analyze EIBIS survey data (matched to ORBIS) which features a question on time-varying capacity utilisation. Overcapacity is a transitory state. Firms enter into overcapacity after a period of the rapid growth of sales and profits, and the years surrounding overcapacity have higher employment growth rates. Firms operating at overcapacity make incremental investments (e.g. capacity expansion, process improvements and modern machinery) rather than investing in R&D and new product development. We find support for the "fork in the road" hypothesis: for some firms, overcapacity is associated with launching into massive investments and subsequent sales growth, while for other firms, overcapacity is negatively related to both investments and sales growth.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
