Profitability, uncertainty and multi-product firm product proliferation: The Spanish car industry

This article studies how product introduction decisions relate to profitability and uncertainty in the context of multi-product firms and product differentiation. These two features, common to many modern industries, have not received much attention in the literature as compared to the classical problem of firm entry, even if the determinants of firm and product entry are quite different. The theoretical predictions about the sign of the impact of uncertainty on product entry are not conclusive. Therefore, an econometric model relating firms’ product introduction decisions with profitability and profit uncertainty is proposed. Firm’s estimated profits are obtained from a structural model of product demand and supply, and uncertainty is proxied by profits’ variance. The empirical analysis is carried out using data on the Spanish car industry for the period 1990-2000. The results show a positive relationship between product introduction and profitability, and a negative one with respect to profit variability. Interestingly, the degree of uncertainty appears to be a driving force of entry stronger than profitability, suggesting that the product proliferation process in the Spanish car market may have been mainly a consequence of lower uncertainty rather than the result of having a more profitable market

From the “Mining Triangle” to the “Greater Region“ (“Großregion”/”Grande Région”). The Institutionalisation of the “SaarLorLux” Euroregion

Gairebé 182 milions d'ciutadans de la Unió Europea (= 37,5% de la població total) viuen en aproximadament 130 regions frontereres i transfrontereres. Aquestes regions contribueixen significativament al procés d'integració europea. Aquesta importància es documenta pel paquet dels Fons Estructurals 2007-2013, que ha estat presentat per la Comissió Europea i que va ser aprovat recentment pel Parlament Europeu. Considerant que la UE ha gastat uns 4875 € milions per a la cooperació transfronterera, transnacional i interregional en el marc de la iniciativa Interreg per al període 2000-2006, la cooperació territorial europea es convertirà en un dels tres objectius dels fons estructurals i rebrà € 7750000000 (5,57 milions d'euros per a la cooperació transfronterera només) per al període 2007-2013 (Comissió Europea, 2006a, 2006b). A part d'això, un nou conjunt de normes per a l'establiment d'una "agrupació europea de cooperació territorial" (AECT) ha estat adoptat i que facilitarà la cooperació transboundray, transnacional i interregional a la UE. Aquest treball s'ocuparà de les estructures de la institucionalització, la presa de decisions i l'execució i les polítiques de la "Gran Regió" / "Großregion" (d'ara endavant: GR o Gran Regió).

Mining and exploiting domain-specific corpora in the PANACEA platform

The objective of the PANACEA ICT-2007.2.2 EU project is to build a platform that automates the stages involved in the acquisition,production, updating and maintenance of the large language resources required by, among others, MT systems. The development of a Corpus Acquisition Component (CAC) for extracting monolingual and bilingual data from the web is one of the most innovative building blocks of PANACEA. The CAC, which is the first stage in the PANACEA pipeline for building Language Resources, adopts an efficient and distributed methodology to crawl for web documents with rich textual content in specific languages and predefined domains. The CAC includes modules that can acquire parallel data from sites with in-domain content available in more than one language. In order to extrinsically evaluate the CAC methodology, we have conducted several experiments that used crawled parallel corpora for the identification and extraction of parallel sentences using sentence alignment. The corpora were then successfully used for domain adaptation of Machine Translation Systems.

The Impact of Industry Collaboration on Academic Research Output: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of university knowledge and technology transfer activities on academic research output. Specifically, we study whether researchers with collaborative links with the private sector publish less than their peers without such links, once controlling for other sources of heterogeneity. We report findings from a longitudinal dataset on researchers from two engineering departments in the UK between 1985 until 2006. Our results indicate that researchers with industrial links publish significantly more than their peers. Academic productivity, though, is higher for low levels of industry involvement as compared to high levels.

Entrepreneurship, organization and economic performance among Spanish firms, 1930-1975. The case of the motor industry

Before the Civil War (1936-1939), Spain had seen the emergence offirms of complex organizational forms. However, the conflict andthe postwar years changed this pattern. The argument put forwardin this paper is based on historical experience, the efforts willbe addressed to explain the development of Spanish entrepreneurshipduring the second half of the twentieth century. To illustrate thechange in entrepreneurship and organizational patterns among theSpanish firms during the Francoist regime we will turn to the caseof the motor vehicle industry.

Determinants of organizational form: Transaction costs and institutions in the European trucking industry

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators(as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling outdifferences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypothesesin organizational economics, which have been shown to explain the choice of organizational form inUS industry, also apply in Europe. We then argue that the preference for subcontracting oververtical integration in Europe is the result of European institutions particularly, labor regulationand tax laws that increase the costs of vertical integration.

The drive for quality - the impact on accounting in the wine industry

There is a substancial literature on the accounting procedures needed to trackdown the costs of quality control and quality failure. In a drive for improved quality the changes in the process of production or service delivery will also give rise to new accounting needs. In this article we take one example of an industry, wine production, where in most countries there has been a movement towards expanding higher quality production. We report on interviews with wine producers in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Spain, and identify avariety of ways in which a more sophisticated approach to accounting has become necessary as a result of the drive for quality.

Wage determination in the Spanish industry

In this paper we estimate wage equations for the Spanish industryusing time series data on 85 industrial sectors, which allows us todistinguish between aggregate and sector specific effects in wagedetermination. Industry wages respond mainly to economy wide labourmarket conditions and to a much lesser extent to sector specificproductivity gains. The size of the insider effect has not remainedstable through the sample period. The estimated equations show a strongtransitory effect of unemployment on wages, which is in accordancewith the non--stationarity of the Spanish unemployment rate. Thishysteresis effect seems well accounted for by the sharp rise in theproportion of long term unemployment.

The electric revolution in Latin America

Latin America participated in the electric revolution which profoundly transformed the most developed Western economies between 1880 and 1930. The electrification of Latin America began relatively soon after these economies, but it was incapable of keeping up with them. Public electric lighting was introduced early in the big Latin American cities, where electric trams started running at almost the same time as in Europe, and electricity spread rapidly in the mining sector. In the most advanced countries or areas in the region, the manufacturing industry substituted the steam engine with the electric motor, following the example of industry in the United States and Europe. Nevertheless, towards 1930 electricity consumption per inhabitant for Latin America was far below that of the more advanced economies, and only the Latin American countries which lead the process of electrification had reached levels of electric consumption that were similar to those of the late industrialised European countries. One of the most striking features of the electric revolution in Latin America is rooted precisely in the enormous national differences. These differences are indicative of the great economic inequalities existing in the heart of the region and these nations highly diverse capacity for economic modernisation.

The persistence of abnormal returns at industry and firm levels

The present paper proposes a model for the persistence of abnormal returnsboth at firm and industry levels, when longitudinal data for the profitsof firms classiffied as industries are available. The model produces a two-way variance decomposition of abnormal returns: (a) at firm versus industrylevels, and (b) for permanent versus transitory components. This variancedecomposition supplies information on the relative importance of thefundamental components of abnormal returns that have been discussed in theliterature. The model is applied to a Spanish sample of firms, obtainingresults such as: (a) there are significant and permanent differences betweenprofit rates both at industry and firm levels; (b) variation of abnormal returnsat firm level is greater than at industry level; and (c) firm and industry levelsdo not differ significantly regarding rates of convergence of abnormal returns.

Subcontracting and vertical integration in the Spanish cotton industry

This paper examines changes in the organization of the Spanish cotton industry from 1720 to 1860 in its core region of Catalonia. As the Spanish cotton industry adopted the most modern technology and experienced the transition to the factory system, cotton spinning and weaving mills became increasingly vertically integrated. Asset specificity more than other factors explained this tendency towards vertical integration. The probability for a firm of being vertically integrated was higher among firms located in districts with high concentration ratios and rose with size and the use of modern machinery. Simultaneously, subcontracting predominated in other phases of production and distribution where transaction costs appears to be less important.

Wage structures and family economies in the Catalan textile industry in an age of nascent capitalism

This paper deals with changes in managerial practices in Catalonia in anage of nascent capitalism (1830-1925) and adaptive family strategies inorder to face the absence of state welfare. During the 19 t h Century andin the absence of recorded labor contracts, human resources of the firmwere organized by means of implicit contracts and informal labor markets.With the advent of scientific organization of labor, wage per hour workedbegan to be recorded. This is why in the 1920s the perfect competitionmodel applies to our case. On the other hand, in the same period, and inthe absence of state welfare, ideas stemming from cooperative game theoryapply to the pattern of household income formation. Kin related networkswere used to improve the living standards of the household. In thisparticular direction we also show that there was a demonstration effectby means of which migrant s living standards were higher than those ofnatives.

The Spanish motor industry in the first third of the 20th Century: A lost opportunity

The Spanish automobile industry had a late start. Although the country proved capable of short production runs of high-quality vehicles during the first third of the century it never managed to build up its own industry, unlike Great Britain, France, or Italy. What then, were the critical shortcomings that prevented the establishment of large Spanish motor manufacturers? Put another way, why did all of the companies set up during the first half-century fail to survive? This paper attempts to shed some light on these questions, employing a wide-ranging analysis of both internal and external factors affecting the industry. A feeble internal market, lack of resources and production factors are usually adduced as reasons, as are Spain's general economic backwardness and the role played by the public authorities. However, this paper mainly focuses on the internal factors concerning company strategy and organisation. A comparison with the Italian case helps put the traditional arguments in proper perspective and highlights those covering business strategies. Finally, we argue that a broad range of factors needs to be analysed to fully understand why Spain failed to establish a motor industry.

The use of derivatives in the Spanish mutual fund industry

We study the use of derivatives in the Spanish mutual fund industry. The picture that emerges from our analysis is rather negative. In general, the use of derivatives does not improve the performance of the funds. In only one out of eight categories we find some (very weak and not robust) evidence of superior performance. In most of the cases users significantly underperform non users. Furthermore, users do not seem to exhibit superior timing or selectivity skills either, but rather the contrary. This bad performance is only partially explained by the larger fees funds using derivatives charge. Moreover,we do not find evidence of derivatives being used for hedging purposes. We do find evidence of derivatives being used for speculation. But users in only one category exhibit skills as speculators. Finally, we find evidence of derivatives being used to manage the funds cash inflows and outflows more efficiently.