recognition applications in aged care work detailed arguments about the importance of recognition were present in adam smith s theory of moral sentiments but received little attention in classical and neoclassical economics however recognition is re emerging as an important concept in social and economic research in this study we consider the importance of recognition and misrecognition for a nuanced understanding of the motivation to undertake paid care work we use survey and interview data from a mixed methods study of the employment intentions of australian women working in aged care to investigate links between recognition wage rates and intentions to remain working in the sector our findings suggest that low wages convey misrecognition and that both wages and misrecognition have adverse implications for the future labour supply of aged care workers we conclude by considering particular challenges faced by the aged care sector and its workers in redressing low wage rates

identifying the efficiency status in network dea abstract data envelopment analysis dea is commonly employed to evaluate the efficiency performance of a decision making unit dmu that transforms exogenous inputs into final outputs in such a black box dea approach details of an internal production process of the dmu are typically ignored and hence the locations of inefficiency are not adequately provided in view of this dea researchers have recently developed various network approaches by looking into the black box where the inputs that enter the box and the outputs that come out of it are only considered however most of these network approaches evaluate divisional efficiency by using an optimal solution of their respective optimization problem if such an optimal solution is used in the case when there are multiple optima then managerial guidance based on this solution alone may be inappropriate because more appropriate targets from the viewpoint of management may be ignored taking this fact into account therefore we propose a network approach for identifying the efficiency status of each dmu and its divisions this approach provides a practical computational procedure

silicon envy how global innovation clusters hurt or stimulate each other across developed and emerging markets the authors examine intercluster dynamics among rival global clusters on monthly counts of patents startups and new product commercializations between 1999 and 2014 while controlling for numerous exogenous variables results show that rival innovation clusters facilitate rather than hinder each other s growth due to resources complementarities reverse fertilization occurs from emerging to developed clusters contrary to the received wisdom this study is the first to show intercluster dynamics as important drivers of cluster growth to explain the counterintuitive findings the authors draw upon the coopetition view which suggests mutually beneficial growth across all rival clusters rather than zero sum gains

a study of the relationship between competitiveness and technological innovation capability based on dea models researchers and managers have been searching for appropriate methods to explore the relationship between technological innovation capability and competitiveness in recent years this study attempts to find a systematic quantitative methodology to tackle this problem in a recent survey covering 182 industrial innovative firms in china the traditional data envelopment analysis dea model was employed to analyze the data collected the research results show that only 16 of the enterprises operate on the best practice frontier and there are some inconsistencies between organizational innovation capability and competitiveness in many enterprises decreasing returns to scale were found among about 70 of the inefficient enterprises and increasing returns to scale were found among the remaining 30 of the inefficient enterprises thus the internal innovation harmonizing process in these enterprises is considerably inefficient based on the restricted ranges of the input output factors a multi objective dea projection model has also been developed in this study to provide a benchmark for auditing competitiveness research results further indicate that there is still much room for enterprises to improve competitiveness in situations of confining score ranges of technological innovation capability and competitiveness

cognition market sentiment and financial instability the purpose of this paper is to explore the role for psychology within an open system structural theory of financial instability and to consider the implications for policy while behavioural finance has drawn on ideas from psychology in order to explain evidence of behaviour that deviates from the rationality axioms it is argued that the way in which psychology is framed by this approach is unduly limiting minsky s structural theory of financial instability with its keynesian and ultimately humean roots incorporates psychology into the theoretical foundations in particular cognition and sentiment are shown to be interconnected rather than separable it is concluded that the policy implications for addressing the current crisis while apparently similar between these different approaches are in fact very different the underlying theory involves different methodology and indeed different framing from behavioural finance the way in which the crisis is understood is therefore important for policy copyright the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

the 6lucas critique a generalisation the extraordinarily influential lucas critique of various familiar econometric practices is generalized the intention though is not to argue against the possibility of economics as science but to hasten its widespread realization to this end it is argued that a quite significant change of direction in economic practice is warranted and an outline of a sustainable potentially fruitful alternative approach is indicated c 1995 academic press ltd copyright 1995 by oxford university press

evaluating the environmental efficiency of a two stage system with undesired outputs by a dea approach an interest preference perspective abstract in this study we propose a new dea model to evaluate the environmental efficiency of a two stage system with undesired outputs the two stage system consists of two parts a production subsystem and a pollution treatment subsystem different choices for allocating resources to each subsystem represent different interest preferences of decision makers with the production subsystem corresponding to short term interests and the pollution treatment subsystem corresponding to long term interests based on a proposed new dea model three theorems are established to show the relationships between the interest preference parameter and the change of efficiency scores an empirical analysis was conducted using the data of 30 provinces and municipalities eight regions of china the empirical results show the effectiveness of the proposed model and the usefulness of the theorems for the real world data optimal efficiency rankings of the eight regions are provided and the efficiency rankings truly reflect the current environmental situations of these eight regions to examine the economic impacts and facilitate sustainable development we also analyze the shadow prices for undesired outputs corresponding implications of the empirical analysis are also discussed

asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage given incomplete factor markets appropriate time paths of flow variables must be chosen to build required stocks of assets that is critical resources are accumulated rather than acquired in strategic factor markets barney barney j 1986 strategic factor markets expectations luck and business strategy management sci october 1231 1241 sustainability of a firm s asset position hinges on how easily assets can be substituted or imitated imitability is linked to the characteristics of the asset accumulation process time compression diseconomies asset mass efficiencies inter connectedness asset erosion and causal ambiguity

industrial eco efficiency in china a provincial quantification using three stage data envelopment analysis abstract the coordinated development of industrialization and the ecological environment is vital to achieve ecological civilization in china integratively considering the economy energy and resources and environment this study aims to measure the industrial eco efficiency of 30 provinces autonomous regions and municipalities in china between 2005 and 2013 a three stage data envelopment analysis dea modeling approach is adopted to eliminate interference of the external environment and statistical noise with industrial eco efficiency measurement the results show that regional industrial eco efficiency in china is affected by the factors of the environmental regulation technological innovation level of economic development and industrial structure after eliminating the impacts of external environment and statistical noise china s national average industrial eco efficiency declines by 30 between 2005 and 2013 the industrial eco efficiency of the 30 provinces increases but at different rates of growth the variation of overall regional industrial eco efficiency is primarily caused by scale efficiency furthermore all the 30 provinces are classified into four groups to interpret the causes of variation and differences of regional industrial eco efficiency in general the management and technology level and the economy of scale of industries should be improved simultaneously even though specific opportunities for industrial eco efficiency improvement vary across provinces in china

theory creation and the methodological foundation of post keynesian economics for the last 15 years there have been extensive discussions about the foundations of post keynesian economics from these discussions post keynesians have reached the consensus that their economics is based on a philosophical foundation of realism and critical realism however the methodological foundation of post keynesian economics which refers to the methodological guidelines used for creating and developing theory has received relatively less discussion and development the aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion in this area by advocating that the method of grounded theory is consistent with critical realism and is a better and more developed set of guidelines for theory creation than the currently accepted alternatives copyright 2002 oxford university press

a new product growth for model consumer durables this article originally appeared in management science january 1969 volume 15 number 5 pp 215 227 published by the institute of management sciences a growth model for the timing of initial purchase of new products is developed and tested empirically against data for eleven consumer durables the basic assumption of the model is that the timing of a consumer s initial purchase is related to the number of previous buyers a behavioral rationale for the model is offered in terms of innovative and imitative behavior the model yields good predictions of the sales peak and the timing of the peak when applied to historical data a long range forecast is developed for the sales of color television sets

interlinkages between credit debt and the labour market evidence from turkey this article examines workers use of credit in the context of a developing country turkey based on empirical material collected through questionnaires and interviews with workers in the metal sector the results provide evidence of a link between workers debt and the type of wage employment in two ways first i demonstrate that insecurity of employment and income is important in determining the increased tendency to borrow and increasing the vulnerability of workers to debt service problems second i reveal that debt adds new dimensions to capital labour relations by functioning as a disciplining mechanism

post keynesian economics towards coherence this paper provides a comprehensive survey of post keynesian economics it argues that post keynesian economics has passed through the important initial stage of mounting a concerted critique of mainstream economics the focus however is on the stage reflected in current post keynesian research which the paper argues is concerned with elaborating a distinctive coherent approach that takes precedence over critique several traditions upon which post keynesian economics relies are identified institutionalism is proposed as an additional contributing tradition a novel aspect of the paper it is recognized however that more research is necessary to complete the post keynesian approach c 1996 academic press limited copyright 1996 by oxford university press

decomposition weights and overall efficiency in two stage additive network dea abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a technique for performance evaluation of peer decision making units dmus the network dea models study the internal structures of dmus using two stage network structures as an example the current paper examines additive efficiency decomposition where the overall efficiency is defined as a weighted average of stage efficiencies and the weights are used to reflect relative importance of individual stages we show that weights may not affect the calculation of stage efficiency scores and that variation in the overall efficiency resulting from using different weights can be associated with constant stage efficiencies we demonstrate the need to isolate the impact of weights on the overall efficiency we propose to use a new overall efficiency index to address some pitfalls in weighted additive efficiency decomposition our findings are illustrated using two empirical data sets representing two types of two stage network structures

productivity and customer satisfaction in swedish pharmacies a dea network model this paper presents a data envelopment analysis dea network model that allows inclusion of customer satisfaction in efficiency and productivity measures the network consists of a production node and a consumption node and offers flexibility in modelling the production and consumption process where a firm specific allocation of input resources to production and customer oriented activities is allowed the proposed model is applied on a sample of swedish pharmacies with organizational objectives that necessitates a monitoring of efficiency and productivity as well as customer satisfaction estimation results from the network model and a direct productivity model without customer satisfaction are compared and indicate that the technical efficiency is lower under the network model the productivity results indicate productivity progress under both models albeit with a slower rate of change under the network model

dea like models for efficiency evaluations of specialized and interdependent units abstract the problem of evaluating the efficiency of a set of specialized and interdependent decision making subunits dmsus that make up a larger decision making unit dmu is considered the dmsus are interdependent in the sense that part of the output produced by each of them may be used as an input by the other ones they are also specialized hence non homogeneous as they may have not the same inputs and outputs for this problem some efficiency indexes are introduced and they are shown to satisfy some basic properties

efficiency analysis of major cruise lines three major cruise lines account for 82 of the total market share their financial statements show different results between the operating incomes and net incomes over time to examine the major causes of the differences this study measured the efficiency of the top three cruise lines to develop a network dea model to analyze the cruise operations at two stages namely operating and non operating stages in addition the determinants of the efficiencies were examined using a bootstrapped truncated regression model overall cruise lines were efficient at the operating stage but varied widely in the efficiency of the non operating stage cruise lines attempting high capacity expansion were relatively inefficient because of the heavy interest payments arising from the high debt to capital ratio moreover the neglected hedging policy regarding the financial risks also contributed to the inefficiency

financialised internationalisation and structural hierarchies a mixed method study of exchange rate determination in emerging economies this paper conducts an extensive mixed method study of exchange rate determination in the brazilian foreign exchange market it combines semi structured interviews with foreign exchange market participants in brazil and london and advanced time series econometrics in line with post keynesian theory and critical realist ontology the interviews uncover the context specific expectations and underlying processes and structures that condition exchange rate dynamics in brazil and emerging economies more generally the results point to important structural changes in brazil s financial integration in the form of currency internationalisation and financialisation moreover they show that this internationalisation has been mediated through a structured and hierarchic international monetary system which fundamentally distinguishes exchange rate drivers in emerging economies from those in developed ones

best performing us mutual fund families from 1993 to 2008 evidence from a novel two stage dea model for efficiency decomposition when analyzing relative performance especially at the institutional level the traditional data envelopment analysis dea models do not recognize vastly different and important activities as separate functions and therefore cannot identify which function may be the main source of inefficiency we propose a novel two stage dea model that decomposes the overall efficiency of a decision making unit into two components and demonstrate its applicability by assessing the relative performance of 66 large mutual fund families in the us over the period 1993 2008 by decomposing the overall efficiency into operational management efficiency and portfolio management efficiency components we reveal the best performers the families that deteriorated in performance and those that improved in their performance over the sample period we also make frontier projections for poorly performing mutual fund families and highlight how the portfolio managers have managed their funds relative to the others during financial crisis periods

comparing innovation systems a framework and application to china s transitional context abstract this paper proposes a generic framework for analyzing innovation systems anchored around five fundamental activities r d implementation end use education linkage and focused on the performance implications of a system s structure and dynamics rather than simply describing the role and performance of particular actors institutions and policies this approach focuses on system level characteristics including the distribution of these activities within the system the organizational boundaries around them coordination mechanisms evolutionary processes and the effectiveness of the system in introducing diffusing and exploiting technological innovations the framework is applied to a comparison of china s national innovation system under central planning and since reforms revealing the evolving structure and dynamics of this system and current inconsistencies and perverse incentives that policymakers must address to realize their development goals more generally it provides a basis for addressing the implicit assumptions of organizational types roles and convergence among innovation systems emerging in very different contexts whether national regional or industrial

client profitability of diffusion segments across countries for multi generational innovations the influence of firm market and cross national differences there is scant research on the important managerial question of how to maximize returns on investments in either international business or international marketing literature we propose and test a conceptual framework using data from a large technology manufacturer service provider despite early adoption by innovators and early adopters the early majority segment is most profitable however the late majority segment and the early adopters segment are the next most profitable in the developed and emerging countries respectively we propose a decision support framework incorporating cross national distances on single generation and multi generation profitability for mnes offering multi generational products in multinational markets to be more profitable

a multivariate garch model of international transmissions of stock returns and volatility the case of the united states and canada this study examines the short run dynamics of returns and volatility for stocks traded on the new york and toronto stock exchanges the main finding is that inferences about the magnitude and persistence of return innovations that originate in either market and that transmit to the other market depend importantly on how the cross market dynamics in volatility are modeled moreover much weaker cross market dynamics in returns and volatility prevail during later subperiods and especially for canadian stocks with shares dually listed in new york implications for international asset pricing hedging strategies and regulatory policy are discussed

predicting the path of technological innovation saw vs moore bass gompertz and kryder competition is intense among rival technologies and success depends on predicting their future trajectory of performance to resolve this challenge managers often follow popular heuristics generalizations or laws such as moore s law we propose a model step and wait saw for predicting the path of technological innovation and we compare its performance against eight models for 25 technologies and 804 technologies years across six markets the estimates of the model provide four important results first moore s law and kryder s law do not generalize across markets neither holds for all technologies even in a single market second saw produces superior predictions over traditional methods such as the bass model or gompertz law and can form predictions for a completely new technology by incorporating information from other categories on time varying covariates third analysis of the model parameters suggests that i recent technologies improve at a faster rate than old technologies ii as the number of competitors increases performance improves in smaller steps and longer waits iii later entrants and technologies that have a number of prior steps tend to have smaller steps and shorter waits but iv technologies with a long average wait time continue to have large steps fourth technologies cluster in their performance by market

knowledge diffusion market segmentation and technological catch up the case of the telecommunication industry in china abstract this paper examines the growth of technological capability in the telecommunication industry in china we apply a modified version of lee and lim s lee k lim c 2001 the technological regimes catch up and leapfrogging findings from the korean industries research policy vol 30 model of technological learning and catching up using the three cases of the shanghai bell the cit led r d consortium and indigenous companies such as huawei we analyze how the catching up in the telecommunication industry occurred we find that the important factors in the catch up are the strategy of trading market for technology the knowledge diffusion from shanghai bell both to the r d consortium and to huawei and industrial promotion by the government as a condition for successful catch up the paper points out that the technological regime of the telephone switches is featured by a more predictable technological trajectory and a lower cumulativeness these conditions and strategies helped the chinese firms to achieve a stage skipping catch up namely by skipping the stage of analogue electronic switches to jump to digital electronic switches

regional inequality in the european union does industry mix matter ezcurra r gil c pascual p and rapun m 2005 regional inequality in the european union does industry mix matter regional studies 39 679 697 the aim of this paper is to test for the respective roles of regional and sectoral factors in productivity convergence in the european union between 1977 and 1999 the methodology used for this is a new one that combines an alternative version of shift share analysis with various results quoted in the literature on personal income distribution the empirical evidence suggests that regional disparity in productivity in the european union is closely related to intrinsic differences between regions whatever the case the results that emerge also reveal the fundamental role of the country effect in accounting for regional disparities in income per worker in europe in addition our empirical results support the relevance of one sector growth models to explicate per capita income disparities in the european regions

influencing factors on hydrogen energy r d projects an ex post performance evaluation abstract to enhance its energy security korea made a significant r d investment in developing hydrogen energy technology over a period of 10 years the hydrogen energy r d center was established in 2003 with a 100 billion korean won krw government investment that would fund the initiative through 2012 this paper is a meaningful attempt to evaluate the ex post performance of completed hydrogen energy r d projects using data envelopment analysis dea through empirical analysis we focus mainly on measuring ex post performance and uncovering the influencing factors on that performance the results of our empirical analysis reveal several interesting findings first overall the ex post performance of completed projects is relatively low however there are major performance gaps among projects second r d type technology type and private sector investment are factors influencing project performance more specifically projects identified as basic research storage technology or without private sector investment had the highest performance with an acceptable level of statistical significance third dea can provide unique information such as results of returns to scale and slack analysis which cannot be gleaned from parametric methods as time went on the decreasing returns to scale drs ratio increased and the increasing returns to scale irs ratio decreased this means that the r d budget was used less and less effectively as time passed moreover among the three year project period the second year s r d budget was used most efficiently in each r d project this study can provide meaningful information to policy makers to enhance the performance of future r d projects and to promote hydrogen r d projects as well as advance the hydrogen economy

productivity and intermediate products a frontier approach abstract in recent years it has become popular to measure productivity using non parametric approaches however this has been done while ignoring intermediate products here we develop a non parametric productivity measure that explicitly incorporates such products

information technology as competitive advantage the role of human business and technology resources this paper investigates linkages between information technology it and firm performance although showing recent signs of advance the existing it literature still relies heavily on case studies anecdotes and consultants frameworks with little solid empirical work or synthesis of findings this paper examines the it literature develops an integrative resource based theoretical framework and presents results from a new empirical study in the retail industry the findings show that its alone have not produced sustainable performance advantages in the retail industry but that some firms have gained advantages by using its to leverage intangible complementary human and business resources such as flexible culture strategic planning it integration and supplier relationships the results support the resource based approach and help to explain why some firms outperform others using the same its and why successful it users often fail to sustain it based competitive advantages

effects of government financial incentives on firms innovation performance in china evidences from beijing in the 1990s abstract the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of chinese government financial incentives on firms innovation performance during the nation s initial economic transition period in the mid 1990s through a large scale empirical survey of more than 1000 chinese manufacturing firms the empirical evidences show that whereas the major government financial incentives such as special loans and tax credits were positively influential to innovative economic performance of firms direct earmarks not only failed to enhance innovative economic performance it sometimes negatively affected it surprisingly the findings show that all financial incentives of governments were unrelated to the patents of either high tech or general firms and direct earmarks affected the patents of these firms negatively although not to a significant degree this indicates that the centrally planned funding system of the 1990s was ineffective for enhancing technological progress for chinese manufacturing firms the study results imply that the chinese government should further increase the role of market force in its reforms a more market driven model by developing more s t initiatives to match the strategic directions of different enterprises particularly soes is recommended

regional r d efficiency in korea from static and dynamic perspectives han u asmild m and kunc m regional r d efficiency in korea from static and dynamic perspectives regional studies research and development r d efficiency has gained great attention in regional innovation research this study examines the r d efficiency patterns of 15 korean regions for 2005 09 it employs data envelopment analysis to identify the regions r d performances relative to the best practices from the static perspective and the malmquist productivity index to evaluate their changes in performance within a given timeframe providing a dynamic perspective the results classify the korean regions into deteriorating lagging and improving groups and indicate that most regions suffer from declining r d productivity over time because of their inability to catch up with the best practices

deriving the dea frontier for two stage processes data envelopment analysis dea is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units dmus recently dea has been extended to examine the efficiency of two stage processes where all the outputs from the first stage are intermediate measures that make up the inputs to the second stage the resulting two stage dea model provides not only an overall efficiency score for the entire process but as well yields an efficiency score for each of the individual stages due to the existence of intermediate measures the usual procedure of adjusting the inputs or outputs by the efficiency scores as in the standard dea approach does not necessarily yield a frontier projection the current paper develops an approach for determining the frontier points for inefficient dmus within the framework of two stage dea

a realist appraisal of post keynesian pricing theory this paper argues that based on the ontological insights of critical realism epistemological guidelines can be established to review post keynesian pricing theories critically consequently the paper suggests a basis on which the coherence of post keynesian pricing theory can be established crucially some often cited contrib u t i o n s are inconsistent with such a realist define d post keynesian economics the role of empirical work in critical realism is discussed

developing countries changing nature of financial integration and new forms of external vulnerability the brazilian experience this article argues using the example of brazil that the changing nature of developing and emerging countries decs financial integration has created new forms of external vulnerability causing large and volatile capital and exchange rate movements despite sound fundamentals and a substantial reduction in its traditional external vulnerabilities the brazilian real has been one of the most volatile currencies over recent years the article argues that this has been the result of the surging exposure of foreign investors in an increasingly complex set of very short term domestic currency assets following a minskyan analysis we demonstrate that the changing nature of brazil s external vulnerability confirms both the inherent and endogenous instability of international capital flows and decs subordinate role in the international financial system we conclude with policy recommendations to reduce decs external vulnerability sustainably

testing for efficiency catching up we used advances in data envelopment analysis dea techniques to examine efficiency scores and investigate the issue of convergence and divergence in a cross country analysis specifically we used bootstrapping techniques to examine a data set of 52 developed and developing countries we found that when using the standard dea model some of the results were not robust further we broke the sample into groups to examine club convergence we found that efficiency scores were significantly different between groups and that there was some evidence of convergence of efficiency scores within each group

assessment of china transit and economic efficiencies in a modified value chains dea model abstract this study incorporates the concepts of undesirable intermediate intermediate input uncontrollable input and undesirable output to the value chains model chen and zhu 2004 thereby creating a modified value chains model to compute transit and economic efficiencies in 30 regions of china the modified value chains model forms a more general formulation to the value added chains in the utilization of the above concepts it also provides an optimal intermediate measure which differs from the independent two stage measure empirical evaluations indicate that large scale transit development in china s coastal area does not necessarily represent higher transit efficiency because in the coastal area there is a lack of significant positive relationships between transit and economic efficiency high economic efficiency does not contribute to greater transit efficiency the finding also suggests that by simultaneously decreasing the quantity in passenger and freight transport transit and economic efficiencies have greatly improved in most regions of china

correlated arch corrarch modelling the time varying conditional correlation between financial asset returns abstract although the time variation of the conditional correlations of asset returns is a well established stylized fact and of crucial importance for efficient financial decisions there is no explicit general model available for its estimation and forecasting in this paper we propose a bivariate garch covariance structure in which conditional variances can follow any garch type process while conditional correlation is generated by an explicit discrete time stochastic process the corrarch process a high order corrarch can parsimoniously be represented by a corgarch process the model successfully generates the reported stylized facts establishes an autocorrelation structure for correlations and thus provides an explicit framework for out of sample forecasting we provide empirical evidence from the g7 stock market indexes

deficient foresight a troublesome theme in keynesian economics the fact that john maynard keynes had made a distinguished contribution to the theory of probability 1921 no doubt predisposed many of his readers to imbue with great significance his subsequent remarks on the related topic of uncertainty in economic decision making among those who have provided commentaries on his work there are those who have singled out this uncertainty theme not only for its special importance but also for its potential for analytical subversion the purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the ideas involved in this particular aspect of keynes work together with the lines of argument that have emerged from those commentators who have pursued it the result of this scrutiny will be to call into question the idea that there is anything peculiarly subversive in the analytical consequences of broaching problems of uncertainty in economic decision making i shall argue rather that as an analytical issue it is depending on how it is handled either innocuous or else quite indiscriminately destructive

cost and learning efficiency drivers in australian schools a two stage network dea approach this article explore performance issues in australian public schools using a two stage dea network model which accounts simultaneously for both cost and learning efficiency levels in the cost efficiency stage different types of expenses and investments are employed to support a given number of students teachers and administrative staff in the learning efficiency stage these groups of individuals help to produce important outputs related to performance in student tests and school rankings results indicate that australian public schools are heterogeneous policy implications are also discussed

asset stock accumulation and the sustainability of competitive advantage reply authors reply to comments regarding their paper dierickx i k cool 1989 asset stock accumulation and the sustainability of competitive advantage management sci

two studies of women s retirement incomes in australia assessing some outcomes of pluralism in economic research to illustrate the potential use of plural research methods two studies of australian women s retirement incomes are examined the first study employed quantitative microsimulation techniques its outcomes emphasised low lifetime earnings as a cause of women s lower retirement incomes the second study used an inductive approach known as grounded theory and its conclusions emphasised household decision making processes as a cause of both women s low lifetime earnings and lower retirement incomes using runde s criteria for assessing causal explanations a comparison is made of the outcomes of the two studies the conclusion is that rather than being seen as competing accounts the outcomes of the two varying research methods can be viewed as complementary by demonstrating the different insights afforded by contrasting research methods this paper provides some support for pluralism of research methods within the discipline of economics

interprovincial two stage water resource utilization efficiency under environmental constraint and spatial spillover effects in china although existing studies have paid much attention to the measurement model of water resource utilization efficiency they have failed to consider the spatial spillover effect of some influencing factors of water resource utilization efficiency causing biased results this study measures the water resource utilization efficiency of 31 provincial administrative regions in china from 2001 to 2014 and the efficiency of each stage by adopting a slack based efficiency evaluation model based on the relaxation of two stages to consider undesirable output then this study employs a spatial durbin econometric model by considering spatial effect to analyze the influencing factors of the overall efficiency of water resource utilization by per capita water resources industrial water living water consumption per capita gross domestic product degree of opening to the outside world industrial structure technological progress and other aspects by comparison existing studies do not consider the spatial spillover effect this study estimates the direct and indirect effects of the influencing factors of water resource utilization efficiency to distinguish local and neighbors impacts of influencing factors of water resource utilization efficiency the results are as follows 1 first stage overall efficiency is significantly higher than second stage water resource utilization efficiency overall efficiency is close to second stage efficiency and second stage efficiency determines the overall effectiveness of water resource utilization 2 the spatial autocorrelation intensity of water resource utilization overall efficiency is significantly greater than zero and water resource utilization overall efficiency presents concentration distribution in the space for which the eastern coastal regions are high high type and the central and western regions are low low type 3 the overall efficiency of water resource utilization has spatial spillover effects and the region s overall efficiency is influenced by both region and neighborhood region 4 the direct and indirect effects of domestic water consumption degree of opening up and industrial structure are the primary significant influencing factors of overall efficiency of water resources in china the spatial spillover effects of domestic water consumption and industrial structure have a significant impact to improve water resource utilization efficiency the government and citizens should focus on such solutions as pollution reduction domestic water savings and transforming the industrial structure moreover china should consider the spatial effects of these influencing factors when government policies are designed

relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach enflo k and hjertstrand p relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach regional studies this paper addresses the issue of western european regional productivity growth and convergence by means of data envelopment analysis dea decomposing labour productivity into efficiency change technical change and capital accumulation the decomposition shows that most regions have fallen behind the production frontier in efficiency and that capital accumulation has had a diverging effect on the labour productivity distribution using bootstrapping methods the paper also accounts for the inherent bias and the stochastic elements in the efficiency estimation it is found that the relative ranking of the efficiency scores remains stable after the bias correction even after controlling for spatially correlated measurement errors and that the dea successfully identifies the regions on the production frontier as significantly more efficient than other regions enfl

growing growing gone cascades diffusion and turning points in the product life cycle research on the product life cycle plc has focused primarily on the role of diffusion this study takes a broader theoretical perspective on the plc by incorporating informational cascades and developing and testing many new hypotheses based on this theory on average across 30 product categories the authors find that i new consumer durables have a typical pattern of rapid growth of 45 per year over 8 years ii this period of growth is followed by a slowdown when sales decline by 15 and stay below those of the previous peak for 5 years iii slowdown occurs at 34 population penetration and about 50 of ultimate market penetration iv products with large sales increases at takeoff tend to have larger sales declines at slowdown v leisure enhancing products tend to have higher growth rates and shorter growth stages than nonleisure enhancing products time saving products tend to have lower growth rates and longer growth stages than nontime saving products vi lower probability of slowdown is associated with steeper price reductions lower penetration and higher economic growth vii a hazard model can provide reasonable predictions of the slowdown as early as the takeoff the authors discuss the implications of these findings

the slow pace of rapid technological change gradualism and punctuation in technological change discussions of technological change have offered sharply contrasting perspectives of technological change as gradual or incremental and the image of technological change as being rapid even discontinuous these alternative perspectives are bridged using the punctuated equilibrium framework of evolutionary biology using this framework it is argued that the critical event is not a transformation of the technology but speciation the application of existing technology to a new domain of application as a result of the distinct selection criteria and the degree of resource abundance in the new domain a new technological form may emerge the new technological form may be able to penetrate other niches and in particular may precipitate a process of creative destruction and out compete prior technologies this framework is applied to an historical study of wireless communication from the early experimental efforts of hertz to the modern development of wireless telephony

development and application of the hicks moorsteen productivity index for the total factor productivity assessment of wastewater treatment plants abstract the assessment of the productivity change in wastewater treatment plants is essential to improve performance and reduce operational costs several indices are available to compute unit productivity however some assessments are more reliable than others in the absence of price data the malmquist productivity index is the most commonly applied but it does not maintain total factor productivity properties under variable returns to scale technology hence malmquist productivity index is not a suitable index to compute total factor productivity change in wastewater treatment plants the present study served to overcome such limitations by calculating for the first time total factor productivity changes in a sample of 204 spanish wastewater treatment plants using the hicks moorsteen productivity index it is a multiplicatively complete index which can be decomposed as several sub indices representing technical and efficiency changes therefore this study also investigated the drivers of total factor productivity change in wastewater treatment plants results showed a 5 4 total factor productivity decline per year from 2003 to 2008 in the plants analysed the primary driver in the reduction was efficiency change alternatively technical change improved during the five years of study the results of this study provide support for policymakers and managers in decision making processes and contribute to the improvement of technical and economic wastewater treatment plants performance in addition it is evidenced that wastewater treatment plants current dependence on external energy sources should be reduced to improve productivity and reduce costs to citizens who pay for wastewater treatment services

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

asset profiles for technological innovation abstract this paper proposes a conceptual distinction between four generic categories of assets for technological innovation 1 scientific research assets 2 process innovative assets 3 product innovative application assets and 4 aesthetic design assets technological innovation may sometimes require the activation of only one asset type but more often a specific constellation of more asset types has to be mobilized the asset categories differ profoundly with respect not only to their respective competence bases but also with respect to their functional contribution to industrial innovation and mostly also to their organizational attachment this way of conceiving technological innovation is opposed to the one dimensional r d conception that tends to view r d as one functional asset along with others like manufacturing or marketing it is argued that the different innovative assets are often located in different organizational settings within the corporation the coupling between assets is discussed in terms of inter asset specificity we illustrate the great variation of innovative asset profiles across a wide spectrum of product categories the concept of technological trajectories is reinterpreted in terms of asset profile oscillations and regroupings finally the framework is related to recent efforts to formulate a resource based theory of the firm and the implications for innovation strategy is discussed

an audit of technological innovation capabilities in chinese firms some empirical findings in beijing china abstract recent studies have advocated different technological innovation capabilities tics and discussed their impact on a firm s competitive performance this paper introduces a study framework of innovation audit and examines the relevance of seven tics to building and sustaining the competitiveness of chinese firms empirical data was acquired through a recent study of 213 chinese firms in beijing china regression analysis was employed to examine the correlation between tics and innovation rate sales growth and product competitiveness among these firms the findings verify that r d and resources allocation capabilities are the two most important tics a strong r d capability could safeguard innovation rate and product competitiveness in large and medium sized firms whereas a resources allocation capability would enhance the sales growth in small firms however the impact of learning and organising capabilities on a firm s innovation performance has yet to be investigated the findings of this paper suggest that chinese firms should consider a more balanced focus on their tics harmonising enhancement in order to maintain their sustainable development effectively plan and implement their innovation strategies as well as enhance their whole innovation capability chinese firms should closely relate their tics to the formulation of technology strategy and harmonisation of innovation and r d activities

evaluating innovative processes in french firms methodological proposition for firm innovation capacity evaluation abstract measuring innovation processes is a major concern for academics and firm managers this study proposes an innovation capacity ic measure framework based on a set of 15 innovation management practices every practice is subdivided into multiple criteria which are directly observable phenomena or facts the statistical method of value test and a multi criteria approach are adopted to propose a typology of four groups of innovative firms proactive preactive reactive passive the features observed on these groups of firms allow the determination of the firms innovation capacity and are useful for providing recommendations and practical actions for them with a view to reinforcing it data from a sample group of 39 small and medium sized enterprises smes in the manufacturing industry in lorraine france were collected via a field survey and were fed into the model to determine the innovation capacity of the companies

measuring the efficiency of china s regional innovation systems application of network data envelopment analysis dea chen k and guan j measuring the efficiency of china s regional innovation systems application of network data envelopment analysis dea regional studies this study applies a relational network data analysis envelopment to the systematic evaluation of the innovation efficiency of china s regional innovation systems by decomposing the innovation process into the two connecting sub processes technological development and subsequent technological commercialization the results show that only one fifth of china s regional innovation systems are operating on the empirical best practice frontier during the whole process from technological development to commercialization furthermore it is found that substantial inconsistencies exist between technological development capacity and commercialization capacity in most regional innovation systems and that downstream commercialization capacity plays a more important role in the innovation performance of regional innovation systems chen k et guan j evaluer

relative efficiency of r d activities a cross country study accounting for environmental factors in the dea approach abstract this paper applies the production framework associated with the data envelopment analysis dea method to evaluate the relative efficiency of r d activities across countries r d capital stocks and manpower are treated as inputs while patents and academic publications are considered as outputs a three stage approach which involves using dea for evaluating efficiency and using tobit regressions for controlling the external environment is applied to 30 countries in recent years the results show that less than one half of the countries are fully efficient in r d activities and that more than two thirds are at the stage of increasing returns to scale most countries have a more significant advantage in producing sci cum ei publications than in generating patents

the organization of innovation in a transitional economy business and government in chinese electronic publishing abstract the national innovation system that emerged in china in the 1990s integrates government science and technology efforts typically through the intermediation of public research institutes with the business activities of industrial enterprises in illustrating the institutional and organizational characteristics of this innovation system the case study of founder group world leader in pictographic language electronic publishing systems demonstrates both the strategic role of the state in the process of change and the increasing importance for economic success of the integration of investment strategy and organizational learning in industrial enteprises that compete for domestic and global markets