Volume 17, Issue 1

Using China’s transaction-level trade data and firm-level production data during 2000–2006, this study first estimates the duration of Chinese industrial enterprises’ waiting for exporting. The results show that the average duration of waiting for exporting is 4.7 years and the median is 5 years. Besides, the hazard rate of export entry has the prominent positive duration dependence. Then, this study uses Cox proportional hazard model to analyse the impact of export cutoff productivity on the duration of waiting for exporting. The result indicates that the rise in the productivity threshold will significantly prolong the duration of waiting for exporting, and this conclusion is supported by a variety of robustness tests. In addition, the estimation result of hazard ratio shows that every 1% increase in productivity threshold will lead to a 0.1261% decrease in hazard rate of enterprises’ export entry. Moreover, the heterogeneity test indicates that the effect of export cutoff productivity on duration of enterprises’ waiting for exporting has the significant ownership and industry heterogeneity, but does not have the destination heterogeneity. Further, this study finds that China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation helps to weaken the threshold effect of export cutoff productivity on the duration of Chinese enterprises’ waiting for exporting, while the rise in the uncertainty will aggravate this effect. This study indicates that it should be the focus of government to actively promote the establishment of bilateral and multilateral free trade zones, to create a stable business environment for enterprises and to reduce the market uncertainty.

This article tries to estimate the operating efficiency among 30 years (1989–2018) in the information technology (IT) industry, where technologies are everchanging. The balanced panel data model of Kneip et al. is extended to an unbalanced panel data model for more generic applications. The estimation results based on listed IT firms in the US stock market provide evidence that the law of the jungle is applicable to the IT industry. The industry survivors, which often obtain and maintain market power through merger and acquisition, create economic moats by setting high barriers to entry to defend against risk and uncertainty and dominate the capital-intensive and technology-intensive IT industry. At the same time, the estimation results also demonstrate that the global IT industry is highly sensitive to technological waves and business cycles. Though thriving start-ups and spin-offs stimulate innovation and generate a richer diversity, economies of scale are still essential for sustainable development in the IT industry.

This study replicates the paper “Brown, J. P., Lambert, D. M., & Wojan, T. R. (2019). The effect of the conservation reserve program on rural economies: deriving a statistical verdict from a null finding. American Journal of Agricultural Economics , 101 (2), 528–540” and their procedure for calculating the so-called ex post power of statistical tests of significance for regression coefficients. There appears no generally accepted method for calculating ex post power, and Brown, Lambert, and Wojan (BLW) provided a bootstrapping method that can be applied after the parameter of interest is estimated. They recommend researchers to use this procedure to investigate whether a statistically insignificant finding is likely to be due to a low power property of the significance test. This study makes two main contributions. First, it verifies whether the data and code that BLW provided are reliable to reproduce their results. Second, it constructs Monte Carlo experiments to assess the performance of BLW’s method. The results indicate that their method produces ex post power estimates that are relatively close to the true power values. Mean power estimates are generally unbiased, and 95% of the estimates lie within +/− 5% points of the true power. In conclusion, my replication provides further evidence of the reliability of BLW’s method.

This article proposes a methodology to identify technological transitions (TTs) by systematically using the total variation distance (TVD) metric. We use a database of renewable energy generation (REG) patents to exemplify the usefulness of TVD to uncover moments where a “big change” in REG technology happened. To do this, we compare the observed frequency distribution of technology codes of REG patents filed between 1973 and 2015 in the US, spread across seven categories (e.g., wind and tidal). We identify two crucial TTs, one at the beginning of the 1980s and another in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In this manner, we reconcile qualitative evidence that registers major REG changes with a quantitative measure that reflects them. Policy evaluations or causality analyses often rely on identifying TTs accurately; therefore, this approach is not constrained to the REG technology or TTs but helps reveal such transition moments in a database whose characteristics are suitable for the use of TVD.

International environmental agreements have been met with the reluctance of some national authorities to accept general commitments aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. While acknowledging the crucial significance of the climate change process, politicians and regulators in some countries have argued that pollution measures would have a negative impact on their domestic welfare. This article uses a standard general equilibrium model of perfect competition to examine the welfare effects of taxing a polluting-exported good through an explicit representation of the trade relations of the economy in the presence of pre-existing taxes. The equivalent autarky model is used to contrast the welfare impacts with the open economy situation. The results extend the scope of the literature on second-best environmental taxation by identifying the complexity of the components affecting welfare in open economies.

This research studies the influence of foreign investors on payout policies and the peer effect of dividends. We show that peer effects on dividend policies exist in Korea using an instrumental variable approach. Additionally, our results suggest that foreign investor activities intensify the peer effect on dividend policies. Firms with a higher net purchase by foreign investors are more heavily scrutinized to reduce information asymmetry between managers and shareholders. This monitoring behavior affects dividend choices among firms and the responsiveness to peer influence. Further, the impact of foreign investors is prominent for dividend increases but not for decreases.

This study analyzes the interplay between the segregation level, education cost, and the evolution of group inequality. In a market economy, individuals have incentives to invest in skill acquisition because of wage differentials. Because skill achievement is costly, a person with a higher inherent ability or a better community background is more likely to invest. Bowles, Loury, and Sethi (2014) show the possibility of group inequality evolution with a high level of segregation when network externalities over the skill acquisition period affect an individual’s decision of skill achievement. This study emphasizes the effect of education costs on the evolution of group inequality. Even when the level of segregation is high, if the societal education cost of skill acquisition is not sufficiently large, group skill disparity may not evolve. Observing that education costs vary significantly across countries depending on the structure of their educational institutions, this theoretical analysis suggests that some countries may suffer more from between-group disparity than others because their education systems impose higher costs on individuals.

Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a key driver of both innovation and economic growth. It comprises two essential components: (i) discover entrepreneurial opportunities and (ii) accumulate entrepreneurial capital. Based on the Chinese Family Panel Studies in 2018, we consider online information acquisition and online learning to be important ways of discovering entrepreneurial opportunities. Additionally, we regard online social engagement and online businesses as essential channels of entrepreneurial capital accumulation. The study reveals that entrepreneurship is positively affected by online information acquisition, online learning, online social engagement, and online businesses. The robustness of our results has been confirmed in terms of model misspecification and the reverse causality of entrepreneurship to Internet utilization. Furthermore, evidence indicates that the impact of online learning on entrepreneurship is negatively moderated by human capital. Additionally, social capital and financial capital play a role in mediating the causal pathway linking online social engagement and online businesses to entrepreneurship.

This article examines the asymmetric aspect of U.S. consumption using disaggregated quarterly consumption expenditure data, including durables, nondurables, and services from 1994 to 2019. We apply a novel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag analysis considering a regime-switching mechanism and find that U.S. consumers behave differently during economic upturns and downturns, with asymmetry existing for the consumption of durables (in the long run) and services (in both the short and long-run), but not for nondurables. Since services account for more than 40% of U.S. aggregate output, the slow adjustment toward equilibrium and the elasticity less than unity proves that services are more of a necessity than a luxury for U.S. consumers. The results indicate that the consumption of services is the primary determinant of U.S. consumer behavior, and monetary policy has a limited effect on U.S. consumption.

Faced with increasingly serious environmental risks, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the regional environment to provide a solid foundation for environmental policies and actions in the future. This article builds a composite environment risk index that considers spatiotemporal factors and uses annual socio-economic and environmental data of China’s 31 provincial administrative regions from 2004 to 2019 to quantitatively analyze environmental risks. Furthermore, the article employs a panel data model to empirically test the key factors that lead to environmental risks. Moreover, this article employs SVAR models to analyze the dynamics of regional environmental systems in China. The study finds that, at least at this stage, the environmental risks in provincial regions in China are still relatively high, and the key factors of the risks are economic growth, urbanization development, secondary industry growth, and green policy. Therefore, China must adopt more stringent environmental protection policies and actions in the future.

Producer price inflation has long been considered a leading indicator for consumer price inflation. However, the evidence supporting the cost-push theory of inflation over extended periods is inconclusive and lacks direct quantification. To address this gap, we employ structural break and causality tests, regression analysis, and local projection impulse-response functions. Our analysis allows us to precisely identify instances when producer prices lead consumer prices and quantify short-run and long-run pass-through rates. We find relatively robust evidence of a producer price pass-through rate between 8 and 12%. However, there are significant periods where unidirectional pass-through does not hold. Local projections reveal that producer price pass-through is small but persistent in states where producer prices lead consumer prices, and larger but shorter-lived in states where there is no causal directionality. Our findings enhance the understanding of producer price pass-through to consumer inflation, providing valuable insights for policymakers and market participants interested in accurately forecasting and managing inflationary pressures.

Despite the vital role of organizations’ knowledge management and its diverse influence on achieving sustainable organizational performance (SOP), as well as the impact of leadership behavior (LB), it is remarkable that no previous study has addressed this subject matter comprehensively. As a result, this study aims to investigate the relationship between SOP and knowledge risk management (KRM) while examining the role of LB. It adopts a quantitative approach and gathers data from Nigerian companies through an online questionnaire distributed between November 2019 and September 2020. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is utilized to test the hypotheses. Remarkably, no prior research has inspected the mediating and moderating role of LB in the connection between SOP and KRM until this study. Empirical results indicate that: (i) LB and KRM positively influence SOP; (ii) KRM has a positive impact on LB; (iii) LB moderates the relationship between KRM and SOP; and (iv) LB serves as a mediator between KRM and SOP. The findings of this empirical research will enhance managers’ understanding of the significance of LB in the relationship between KRM and SOP.

The digital landscape is characterized by the concentration of power in the hands of a few “gatekeepers.” Europe’s legal answer, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), constitutes a new legal approach. It aims at restricting this power and ensuring “fairness and contestability.” Traditionally, the tools of competition law were used to set the basic rules of how to operate in markets. The shift to a different technique, regulatory law, prompts three questions: First, why is it necessary to deviate from the path set in competition law? Second, what are the differences between the competition law approach and the regulatory approach of the DMA? Third, what are key decisions to be taken within the new regulatory framework? At the outset, the DMA is presented.

The current policy vision for Europe’s digital future centres around facilitating the availability of data by means of data access, sharing, and portability rights. In the existing legal framework, such rights are already foreseen in different legal instruments. In actual practice, however, (horizontal) data sharing is governed in the first place by contracts. Currently, well-established business practices and non-mandatory model contract terms are lacking. To reduce transaction costs and chilling effects in the sector, the main task would therefore be to provide a set of non-mandatory default rules or soft-law model contracts. The database maker’s sui generis right or trade secrets protection, mainstays of this area, have the potential to aggravate access problems and hamper efficient access and portability regimes. While the Trade Secrets Directive as a very modern and necessarily flexible instrument, on principle, is rather well-equipped for achieving balanced results, the Database Directive is in imminent need of reform, in particular as even the Data Act Proposal leaves many issues of the database sui generis right unsolved.

This article reviews the economics literature on the optimal design of intellectual property, the current framework for protecting data, focussing on the European Union, and the main features of data. It combines these to ask how current intellectual property protection instruments and surrounding regulation could be adapted to more usefully protect (non-personal) data that require investment to create and encourage its diffusion. The main changes from current protections include an expansion of registration and cataloguing systems, more definition of quality certification, and increased attention to portfolios of protection mechanisms.

Existing studies are not clear about the process of building organizational resilience that is crucial for the performance of firms. To tap into this still unexplored terrain, the aim of this qualitative study is to shed more light on how organizational resilience is built amid challenges from a perspective of path constitution. We present a single, longitudinal case study of the dynamic development of China Light & Textile Industry City Group, the leading textile trading platform operator in China. The results show that the process of organizations building resilience could be regarded as a process of organizational path constitution. Therefore, a theory model of the organizational resilience building was developed, which expanded the applicable scope of the path constitution theory. Further, this study deconstructed the mechanism of resilience building based on the interaction between opportunity space and organizational learning, which contributes to the organizational resilience literature and enriches the body of qualitative research in corporate management. Additionally, our findings provide practical implications for companies to maintain resilience and sustainable performance.

The purpose of this study is to identify important strategies to increase sustainable energy investments in emerging economies. For this situation, first, four different indicators are selected according to the dimensions of the balanced scorecard technique. The weights of these items are computed by using Quantum Spherical fuzzy DEMATEL. In the second phase, emerging seven (E7) countries are ranked regarding the performance of sustainable energy investments. In this process, Quantum Spherical fuzzy TOPSIS is taken into consideration. The main contribution of this study is that prior factors can be defined for emerging economies to increase sustainable energy investments in a more effective way. Furthermore, a novel decision-making model is developed while integrating TOPSIS and DEMATEL with Quantum theory, Spherical fuzzy sets, facial expressions of the experts, and collaborative filtering. It is concluded that competition is the most significant factor for the performance of sustainable energy investments. In addition, the ranking results denote that China and Russia are the most successful emerging economies with respect to sustainable energy investments. It is strongly recommended that emerging countries should mainly consider benchmarking the capacity of energy hubs with the aim of increasing the capacity of ongoing energy plants.

This study underscores the indispensable role of knowledge management (KM) in promoting sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing economies. SMEs, being the backbone of various facets of society, including employment rates, gross domestic product growth, innovation, social cohesion, economic development, growth, and public policies, should be considered. SE is a pressing issue for low- and high-income countries and developed and developing economies. The study utilized a self-administered questionnaire to gather data from 490 SMEs operating in different commercial regions and industries, providing a large-scale empirical study that fills gaps in the existing literature. The study highlights the significance of KM processes in facilitating organizational integration (OI) activities, which positively influence the SE practices of these SMEs. The research offers practical recommendations for SMEs to foster SE through effective KM practices and OI strategies. Moreover, the study provides valuable insights for future research in this area. The findings of this study have substantial implications for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers seeking to enhance the entrepreneurial landscape in developing economies.

This article examines the relationship between Bitcoin volume and term deposit investments in Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey (MINT) from 2016 to 2021. We run cointegration and error-correction econometric models for each country, analyzing both the long-term and short-term interactions between Bitcoin volume and time deposits. Our findings indicate a negative association between Bitcoin volume and term deposits in all the MINT countries, except Mexico. This suggests that individual investors in economically and financially unstable nations are increasingly turning to Bitcoin as an alternative investment option. The observed effects, while currently modest, highlight the potential threats posed by decentralized cryptocurrencies to the monetary systems of emerging economies, impacting the stability of the banking industry and overall economic growth.

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of social responsibility practices carried out with the cooperation of businesses and sports clubs on brand image, brand awareness, and brand loyalty, and the mediating role of the sports club’s image in this effect. The questionnaire method was used as a data collection tool for this research. The fans of sponsored sports clubs were asked questions through this form. The research population consists of supporters of four active, business-sponsored sports clubs from among the 16 teams of the Turkish Basketball Super League, operating in the food sector. The research sample was chosen using a stratified sampling method and consists of 1,865 questionnaires that were applied. The survey was collected using the face-to-face technique. The findings can assist in planning effective social responsibility projects, by offering ideas and guidance to those businesses and sports clubs trying to improve the perception of their brand image, comparing the study results with those of previous studies in this field and testing them, and suggesting research opportunities for future studies.

Adapting to market and technological turbulence is essential for survival in a developing enterprise and requires making changes. Firms may need to increase their innovation performance to keep up and struggle with these changes to gain a competitive advantage. We believe that the courage of the entrepreneur emerges as a catalyst in such a struggle. Since a firm’s superior performance is contingent on both internal and external environments of the firm, depending on, contingency theory, the current study investigates the effect of market and technological changes, which are part of environmental changes, on innovation performance in nascent enterprises and the moderating role of courage in this effect. The authors collected data from 331 innovative companies acting in free trade zones by using the convenience sampling method via HR department managers. The results showed that market and technological changes were significantly and positively related to innovative performance, and the entrepreneur’s courage moderated this relationship. It can be stated that entrepreneurs with high courage responded to changes with more innovation than those with low courage.