convention industry and destination clusters evidence from italy abstract the study investigates aspects of the convention industry not well explored in the literature using a framework of cluster theory a quantitative method is used to assess the italian convention industry and its relationships with local infrastructure and tourism product supply the development of the different phases of the life cycle of convention destinations in italy is outlined and locational factors which influence them are investigated managerial and political strategies which would enhance the competitiveness of the italian convention industry in the global market are proposed furthermore the study evaluates the use of the cluster theory in investigating the hospitality industry contributing to the debate on local tourism development

strategic labour contracts labor contracts affect a firm s cost function and for this reason they can be used as a recommitment device to gain a strategic advantage against other firms in a model that is otherwise neutral it is found that if firms compete in prices then strategic considerations alone yield results similar to those obtained by c azariadis 1983 workers are underemployed and worse off in more adverse states of nature on the other hand if firms compete in quantities then the equilibrium contracts resemble those of j green and c kahn 1983 workers are overemployed and better off in more adverse states

transforming competitiveness into economic benefits does tourism stimulate economic growth in more competitive destinations abstract this research note investigates the impact of a destination s competitiveness upon tourism s contribution to economic growth using a cross section with 131 countries destination competitiveness is measured with the world economic forum s travel and tourism competitiveness index while tourism s contribution to economic growth is measured with the growth decomposition methodology results reveal that destination competitiveness has no statistically significant impact on tourism s contribution to economic growth tourism policy implications and directions for future research are also discussed

how stable is the tourism led growth hypothesis in malaysia evidence from disaggregated tourism markets abstract we contribute to the tourism growth literature by applying the newly developed combined cointegration test and the recursive granger causality test to re assess the stability of the tourism led growth hypothesis in malaysia with respect to 12 different tourism markets the cointegration test results suggest that economic growth of malaysia is cointegrated with all the 12 selected tourism markets however the recursive granger causality test shows that the tourism led growth hypothesis in malaysia is valid and stable with respect to tourist arrivals from only 8 out of the 12 tourism markets almost all of them are from developed countries hence not all international visitor arrivals could effectively drive the growth of the malaysian economy in light of this tourism marketing policies should focus more on those tourism markets that could significantly stimulate economic growth however there should not be total neglect of others as they potentially contribute to the economies of scale

strategic group formation and performance the case of the u s pharmaceutical industry 1963 1982 the focus of this paper is on three major questions 1 what is the theoretical rationale for the strategic group concept 2 does strategic group membership have performance implications and 3 are strategic groups and membership in strategic groups stable characteristics of industries a statistical procedure is proposed to longitudinally identify strategic groups the empirical setting is the u s pharmaceutical industry over the period 1963 82 while performance differences are found in terms of market share profitability differences between groups are not observed neither are differences found in terms of risk and risk adjusted performance these results are attributed to the existence of performance variation within each strategic group a dynamic model of competitive repositioning is proposed which helps integrate the findings from the study

industrial districts old wine in new bottles harrison b 1992 industrial districts old wine in new bottles reg studies 26 469 483 according to the theory of industrial districts a new wave of economic growth is being led in a number of regions in europe north america and east asia by spatially concentrated networks of mostly small and medium sized enterprises often using flexible production technology and characterized by extensive local interfirm linkages does this amount to a re emergence of the dominance of what urban and regional economists call agglomeration economies over the well known pressures on business to spatially disperse its operations neoclassical economic theorizing from marshall to perroux provides one perspective on the contemporary industrial district phenomenon another is afforded by granovetter s more recent elaboration of the ideas of embedding under and over socialization confronting each of these theoretical approaches with the other leads me to conclude that the industrial district prototypes involv

is tourism firm competitiveness driven by different internal or external specific factors new empirical evidence from spain abstract the quest to understand the multilevel antecedents of competitiveness has led to a separation of approaches on one side of the question are the environment theories that analyze the structural characteristics of the general and competitive environment on the other side are the resource based view and its extensions that highlight firm specific resources and capabilities as the main basis of firms competitiveness however in recent years the nature of competition and shifting economic conditions have given rise to new theoretical approaches that complement the assumptions underlying both environmental and firm theories specifically this study contributes by examining the regional environment effect the district effect and the strategic group effect through a study of 364 spanish tourism firms this research explores the relative importance of distinct external forces such as the general environment or country effect the regional effect the competitive environment or industry effect the district effect and internal factors such as the firm s tangible resources capabilities and strategy selection the results demonstrate that firms capabilities are more important than environment effects and tangible resources

factors affecting tourism policy implementation a conceptual framework and a case study in china abstract the understanding of tourism policy making and implementation is important due to the multi faceted nature of tourism and the complexity in inter organizational relations and collaborative policy making this paper aims at contributing to the frameworks and theories regarding the implementation of tourism policy by considering the factors identified in both the top down and bottom up approaches of policy implementation the main purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual framework describing the factors affecting the implementation of tourism policy and illustrate the framework with the experience of tourism policy implementation at the local level in china it was found that four factors including economic and social macro environment institutional arrangements inter organizational relations ior and inter organizational co ordination structures ioc and interest groups were influential in the implementation of tourism policy furthermore the case study in china identified the roles of each factor in terms of constraints and facilitators in the real world context and enriched the conceptual framework by illustrating the relationships among factors this study sheds light on concepts and theories regarding tourism policy implementation it also addresses some solutions which may enrich the tourism policy literature in an asian and developing country context

the role of household production in models of involuntary unemployment and underemployment a classic result in the theory of labor contracts with asymmetric information is that underemployment results if and only if leisure is an inferior good a classic result in models where unemployment occurs because of indivisibilities including implicit contract models and some equilibrium macroeconomic models is that unemployment is involuntary if and only if leisure is an inferior good the authors introduce household production into otherwise standard versions of these models and show that this implies they can have underemployment in asymmetric information models or involuntary unemployment in indivisible labor models without assuming that leisure is inferior

optimal at will labour contracts an at will employment rule allows parties to sever their employment relationship for a good reason a bad reason or no reason at all schawb s 1993 life cycle justice accommodating just cause and employment at will michigan law review 92 8 62 a specific performance employment rule allows any party to force the other party to perform as specified in the contract although the theory of labour contracting generally assumes enforcement by specific performance in practice the vast majority of non union employment relationships are mediated by an at will rule when employment contracts are enforced by an at will rule i show that the standard counter intuitive predictions generated by standard labour contracting models disappear

environmental management of a tourist destination a factor of tourism competitiveness although research to date has addressed various elements of destination competitiveness there has been little attempt to systematically and comprehensively study the environmental competitiveness from the managerial perspective since the calgary tourism competitiveness model brought a systematic approach to tourism competitiveness research this paper selectively uses its management element as a tool to link the competitiveness and environmental management following the model the destination management is divided into two parts 1 managerial and 2 marketing e orts this paper studies them from environmental perspective first destination environmental competitiveness can be increased by appropriate managerial e orts related to environmental impact ei and environmental quality eq management second the destination competitiveness can be enhanced through certain environmental marketing activities further environmental management is categorised into groups management by codes of conduct by self developed environmental practice by certi ed or awarded best practice and by accreditation schemes their usefulness for environmental destination management and competitiveness is evaluated 1999 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

supply side investments an international analysis of the return and risk relationship in the travel leisure sector abstract this study investigates supply side investments in the tourism sector analysing the return and risk relationship of investments in tourism across several countries the performance of tourism sector companies listed on the stock exchange for the top one dozen countries according to the world economic forum wef tourism rankings is investigated by region across these countries and within each country by comparison to other sectors several metrics are used to compare the risk adjusted returns over a 15 year period ending march 2007 and sub periods to check the persistence of performance over time the results present a strikingly different ranking than those of the wef the implications for the flow of investment funds are of importance in a global capital market money will flow to those investments with the highest expected returns for a given risk level and this has consequential impacts for economic growth and employment in the tourism sector

the trend in the male female wage gap in the united states despite the rise in the feminist movement the enactment of equal opportunity legislation and the rapid increase in women s labor force participation a substantial sex differential in wages has persisted in the united states for at least 4 decades measured by hourly earnings of year round workers this wage gap was 31 in 1955 widened to a 35 37 range by the 1960s and early 1970s and then narrowed to 33 by 1982 this paper examines the extent to which changes in the characteristics of men and women in the labor force and other factors can account for the observed pattern the main finding is that increases in women s labor force participation were initially associated with a declining skill level of employed women relative to employed men where skill is measured by years of schooling and job tenure more recently the work experience of employed women has been increasing which helps account for the recent narrowing trend in the wage gap during the 1970s the wage gap probably woul have narrowed m

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

short run and long run performance of international tourism evidence from bayesian dynamic models abstract measuring the technical efficiency of the tourism industry is essential for evaluating tourism sustainability and reshaping tourism activities this paper introduces for the first time a new dynamic stochastic frontier model to 1 measure and compare the short run and long run technical efficiencies of leading tourism destinations and 2 provide impulse response functions and persistence measures to trace out the dynamic effect of shocks in technical inefficiency we develop our model in a bayesian framework using carefully constructed markov chain monte carlo mcmc techniques we report efficiency results and persistence scores for individual destinations and discuss how different destinations recover from shocks in tourism performance

a dynamic approach to voluntary environmental contributions in tourism abstract in an evolutionary game theoretical model of tourism firms that use an endogenous natural common pool resource cpr we show that stable equilibria with voluntary environmental initiatives may coexist with other equilibria where voluntary abatement is absent the basins of attraction of the equilibria are identified and a bifurcation analysis is carried out producing two results with policy implications first there is a highly non linear relationship between the cost of abatement required to be green and the share of green firms second increases in the number of the cpr s users will ultimately dissipate the incentives to make abatement beyond regulation

factor supply differences as a source of comparative advantage the core of international microeconomics remains the heckscher ohlin factor proportions model although the page count in recent academic journals is decidedly against the heckscher ohlin model this is more a reflection of how economists spend their research time than what they believe time will tell whether the flurry of formal models with scale economies and strategic interactions will be able to squeeze the heckscher ohlin model to a small part of economists collective consciousness frankly i doubt that this will happen after all the heckscher ohlin model has competed for decades with these other viewpoints and has done so quite successfully the new theories of international trade are novel in a linguistic sense discarding the english only language of an earlier generation in favor of the language of modern mathematical modeling there is no doubt that linguistic innovations are important and are capable of driving the profession one way or the other at least on a temporary basis recall that even the word protection is a metaphor intended to make tariffs seem attractive i wonder how the commercial policy debate would go if tariffs were labeled robbery instead of protection i hope that there is something about the content of the message separate from the language that determines the ultimate course of the intellectual currents of our profession insightfulness validity usefulness and the like ought to matter and may be decisive linguistic novelty is one possible reason for the recent interest in scale economies and industrial strategies as explanations of international trade another possibility is that in the marketplace of ideas demand creates its own supply there is a new thirst for isolationism on the part of a substantial segment of the u s population who in the last several decades have found their earnings under attack from foreign competition it would be unseemly and counterproductive for this group of workers owners to petition the u s government merely to increase their own earnings they demand and they have been supplied some substantial intellectual foundation to justify their complaints about reduced earnings the new trade theory does the job quite nicely thank you a not insubstantial reason why economists should cling to the heckscher ohlin model is that it gives trade barriers the label that they genuinely deserve highway robbery of course this robbery is often more in the style of robin hood than jesse james but nonetheless when the metaphors are peeled away every trade barrier that i have ever seen is a device to transfer income from one group to another or perhaps more frequently to stop the transfer of income that would otherwise take place trade barriers may have side effects but income redistribution is their primary purpose i find myself at roughly the 10 percent point in this paper without mentioning any empirical facts first there was linguistic felicitousness and novelty then there was pandering what about the facts don t they matter sorry they do not matter very much one important reason why the facts do not matter much is that the heckscher ohlin model and every other model in economics is both factually correct and factually incorrect we have not developed an intellectual culture that can deal with the complexity and ambiguity of real economic phenomena we teach ourselves a naive anderson graduate school of management university of california los angeles ca 90024

from contents to processes versus a dynamic destination management model ddmm abstract in the tourism market it is destinations that compete not individual firms ritchie j r b crouch g i 2000 the competitive destination a sustainable perspective tourism management 21 si 1 7 growing competition both national and international is making this more and more apparent in fact every destination defined here as tourist district has to position its products in such a way that gives them character and personality the traditional fragmented structure of the european market has spurred the development of metamanagement organizations called destination management organizations dmos today dmos are called on to play a critical role to help local firms build sustainable competitive advantage and to create competitive advantage for the entire district through positioning choices this paper proposes a dynamic model of destination management ddmm which identifies typical metamanagement processes a dmo can use to shape district strategy the usefulness of this work can be seen not only in the need to formulate a good strategy which is often described in terms of positioning or criticality strategy content but also a method or a path that enables firms to build that positioning or acquire that criticality strategy process in fact kaplan and norton 2001 the strategy focused organization how balanced scorecard companies thrive in the new business environment hbs press note that the ability to implement a strategy is more important than the quality of the strategy itself the model proposed here consistent with the empirical evidence gathered in multiple longitudinal case studies underscores the criticality of two different types of metamanagement processes i a series of operative activies here defined as primary processes which can shape the resources of the district and serve to create supply and communicate local product systems and ii a series of support processes which can provide the glue between various players public and private profit and non profit entrepreneurs and community that operate within the district if these processes are effectively managed they have a significant impact on the competitive advantage of the firms operating in the tourist district

efficiency and productivity of french ski resorts abstract this paper analyses french ski resorts productivity with the luenberger productivity indicator lpi based on the directional distance function it permits the calculation of a productivity indicator that is decomposed into technical efficiency change and technological change the conclusions are that productivity decreased for the majority of french ski resorts which is almost always explained by technological change finally the mixed results do not establish a clear relationship between the ski resorts size and productivity therefore the kruskal wallis test is used to statistically verify this relationship managerial implications are derived from this study

equilibrium search unemployment endogenous participation and labor market flows the sustainability of welfare states requires high employment and high participation to raise the tax base to analyze labor supply in a world with market frictions we propose and solve a macro model of the labor market with unemployment and labor force participation as endogenous and distinct states in our world workers decisions of participating are determined by an entry decision and an exit decision a calibration of the model improves the usual representations of labor markets since it quantitatively accounts for the observed flows between employment and nonparticipation the paper investigates also the effect of payroll taxes and unemployment benefits on participation decisions taxes reduce entries and increase exits whereas unemployment benefits at a given job finding rate raise entries and have ambiguous effects on exits jel j2 j6

pay gap by gender in the tourism industry of brazil abstract this study aims to analyse wage gaps by gender in the brazilian tourism sector this involves investigating wage differences in order to identify the variables that determine the wages paid for these activities we sourced our statistics from the micro data collected by the national household sample survey pnad released by the brazilian institute of geography and statistics ibge in 2012 we deployed the decomposition of oaxaca 1973 and blinder 1973 to measure the differences in wages within the sector through this decomposition we conclude that gender pay discrimination exists in tourism in brazil demonstrating that women are less valued than men even when sharing the same job characteristics as a result we make policy recommendations and put forward suggestions for further research on the subject

an application of the dea double bootstrap to examine sources of efficiency in bangladesh rice farming in this article we examine sources of technical efficiency for rice farming in bangladesh the motivation for the analysis is the need to close the rice yield gap to enable food security we employ the dea double bootstrap of simar and wilson 2007 to estimate and explain technical efficiency this technique overcomes severe limitations inherent in using the two stage dea approach commonly employed in the efficiency literature from a policy perspective our results show that potential efficiency gains to reduce the yield gap are greater than previously found statistically positive influences on technical efficiency are education extension and credit with age being a negative influence

destination competitiveness applying different models the case of slovenia abstract a tourism country s competitiveness is important especially when countries strive for bigger market shares tourism managers have to identify and explore competitive advantages and analyse the destination s competitive position the degree to which a country can benefit from its tourism sector depends largely on this sector s competitive position in the international tourist market this paper refers to the de keyser vanhove model of a competitive destination which was applied to slovenia in 1998 it also studies the integrated model of destination competitiveness developed in a collaborative effort of researchers dealing with the cases of korea and australia and examines its determinants and individual competitive indicators as perceived by slovenian tourist stakeholders on the supply side the result shows that slovenia is more competitive in its natural cultural and created resources but less competitive in the management of tourism and according to the integrated model demand conditions with both uncompetitive elements reducing the slovenian tourism industry s ability to add value the end discussion points out weaknesses in the development of tourism competitiveness models and calls for greater unity with the competitiveness factor theory and for more caution when creating the main competitiveness factors and models

beyond the rhetoric of sustainable tourism abstract recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the concept of sustainable tourism for the most part attention has focused on defining the concept authors have reasoned that in order to achieve sustainable tourism a sound understanding must first be gained of what the concept means this article does not take issue with this general approach but nevertheless argues that the time has now come to move on from defining sustainable tourism to begin to consider how it may best be implemented in practice an approach based on the methodology of environmental economics is suggested as a possible way forward

tobin s q and the importance of focus in firm performance using tobin s q as a measure of performance we seek to estimate the relative importance of industry focus and share effects in determining firm performance our methods are analogous to those of richard schmalensee and like him we find that industry effects account for the majority of the explained variance however we also find that firm effects exist in the form of focus effects that is narrowly diversified firms do better than widely diversified firms we interpret this finding as consistent with profit maximization by firms with different factor endowments

the firms that feed industrial districts a return to the italian source italian industrial districts comprise a great variety of firms and are criss crossed by various networks and business groups although the vast majority of industrial district firms are relatively small it is a mistake to assume that they are organizationally symmetrical and that they mimic the supposedly dominant norms of the communities in which they are located larger firms frequently organize production among groups of smaller firms introduce technological innovations and expand existing markets copyright 1999 by oxford university press

measuring the efficiency of trade shows a spanish case study abstract trade shows are an important industry in the spanish economy which contribute positively to regional development however the cost of attending a trade show is very high for exhibiting firms and so knowledge of trade shows efficiency is necessary in order to define the decision making process for the exhibiting firm with the aim of evaluating the efficiency indexes of operating trade shows this study applies a multi stage methodology for oriented dea models and a nonparametric test to analyze the differences in efficiency levels driven by specific variables and organizational forms the sample is made up of 45 trade shows at ifema madrid s fair institution the results show significant differences in efficiency across ifema the nonparametric tests reveal differences in efficiency levels driven by the sector and the type of trade show moreover the evidence allows provide managerial implications and future developments

firm and industry effects within strategic management an empirical examination this study brings out the complementarities between resource based and industrial organization schools within strategic management through an empirical examination of firm and industry effects a variance component analysis of 264 single business companies from 69 industries using 5 and 15 year periods suggests that firm effects are more important than industry effects on firm performance but not on core strategies such as technology and marketing the findings also point to the need to study core strategies at lower levels of aggregation to understand the sources of competitive advantage 1998 john wiley sons ltd

estimating the performance effects of business groups in emerging markets business groups confederations of legally independent firms are ubiquitous in emerging economies yet very little is known about their effects on the performance of affiliated firms we conceive of business groups as responses to market failures and high transaction costs in doing so we develop hypotheses about the effects of group affiliation on firm profitability affiliation could either boost or depress firm profitability and members of a group are likely to earn rates of return similar to other members of the same group using a unique data set compiled largely from local sources we test for these effects in 14 emerging markets argentina brazil chile india indonesia israel mexico peru the philippines south africa south korea taiwan thailand and turkey we find evidence that business groups indeed affect the broad patterns of economic performance in 12 of the markets we examine group affiliation appears to have as profound an effect on profitability as does industry membership yet strategy scholars have a much clearer grasp of industries than of groups moreover membership in a group raises the profitability of the average group member in several of the markets we examine this runs contrary to the wisdom conventional in advanced economies that unrelated diversification depresses profitability overall our findings suggest that the roots of sustained differences in profitability may vary across institutional contexts conclusions drawn in one context may well not apply to another copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

measuring innovation in tourism from the schumpeterian and the dynamic capabilities perspectives this paper offers a diagnosis of the state of the issue regarding the measurement of innovation in the tourism industry at the company level and some recommendations for overcoming identified problems the study addresses two central issues how existing secondary databases of innovative activity define the boundaries of the tourism industry and the degree to which these databases reflect the particular characteristics of this economic activity it is concluded that these analyses present serious biases and anomalies hindering the understanding of the situation at the micro level and complicating the issue of international comparability and the analyses do not capture the internal heterogeneity of innovative behavior of tourism companies from specific intra sectoral activities the problems concern inappropriate indicators and the need for survey methods to complement the development of innovation scoreboards in secondary sources the study concludes by detailing a set of proposals that should be considered in the context of a scoreboard to provide a comprehensive view of a tourism firm s technological and organizational innovations as well as its innovative capabilities combining schumpeterian theory and the dynamic capabilities based approach and also making cross national comparisons feasible

a review of innovation research in tourism abstract over the past two decades there has been increasing focus on the topic of innovation in tourism this article reviews the research contributions various categories of innovation product process managerial marketing and institutional are addressed important determinants of innovation are acknowledged including the role of entrepreneurship technology push and the existence of territorial industry clusters representation of knowledge is also identified as a critical factor for both the occurrence and nature of innovations the review reveals that there is still only limited systematic and comparable empirical evidence of the level of innovative activities and their impacts and wider implications for destinations and national economies an agenda for future research is emerging suggesting that there is quest for both formal quantification and for qualitative studies of the foundations processes implications and policies of innovation in tourism

destination performance introducing the utility function in the mean variance space economic characteristics of home countries can cause considerable variations in the tourism demand for example the average level of expenditure per tourist varies from one origin to another and these variations may alter overtime thus different tourist nationalities are associated with different level of expenditures and risks therefore strategies aimed at minimizing the variations may become an important issue for the policy makers in this paper we aim to use the productivity measurement theory in a mean variance space to a french region nord pas de calais by introducing the utility function in a mean variance framework with this method we can calculate the optimal portfolio share for each origin and give some useful political advices to the policy decision makers to improve the performance of the tourist sector

dynamic capabilities what are they this paper focuses on dynamic capabilities and more generally the resource based view of the firm we argue that dynamic capabilities are a set of specific and identifiable processes such as product development strategic decision making and alliancing they are neither vague nor tautological although dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their details and path dependent in their emergence they have significant commonalities across firms popularly termed best practice this suggests that they are more homogeneous fungible equifinal and substitutable than is usually assumed in moderately dynamic markets dynamic capabilities resemble the traditional conception of routines they are detailed analytic stable processes with predictable outcomes in contrast in high velocity markets they are simple highly experiential and fragile processes with unpredictable outcomes finally well known learning mechanisms guide the evolution of dynamic capabilities in moderately dynamic markets the evolutionary emphasis is on variation in high velocity markets it is on selection at the level of rbv we conclude that traditional rbv misidentifies the locus of long term competitive advantage in dynamic markets overemphasizes the strategic logic of leverage and reaches a boundary condition in high velocity markets copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

a family production overlapping generations economy abstract this paper provides a theoretical analysis of an overlapping generations economy in which production decisions and input output allocations are all carried out at the family level i consider a single class of output allocation schemes and various degrees of knowledge about the production technology under complete knowledge i show that a family organizational structure in which everyone receives his marginal contribution to output invests less in physical capital than under a perfectly competitive equilibrium environment under incomplete knowledge i analyze and compare how beliefs about the input output relationship affect the physical capital accumulation dynamics and the long run standards of living

differentiated price loss aversion in destination choice the effect of tourists cultural interest abstract this article looks into the differentiated effects of loss aversion depending on whether individuals show cultural interest when choosing a destination based on the fact that perceived value implies not only sacrifices but also the expectations of a certain level of quality and prospects of satisfaction together with the idea the prospect theory applies to tourism prices the article states the hypothesis that interest in culture when choosing a destination lowers people s loss aversion by incorporating the reference dependent model into a multinomial logit model with random parameters which controls for heterogeneity the empirical application shows that culture interested tourists are less loss averse i e the negative effect of finding a higher than expected price diminishes with cultural interest the expectation of enjoyment of these attributes and the more conscious attitude toward maintenance restoration activities of cultural sites are hypothesized to lead prices to be evaluated differently when selecting a destination

incorporating destination quality into the measurement of tourism performance a bayesian approach studies on destination benchmarking have so far ignored destination quality in the measurement of tourism performance destination quality plays a critical role in attracting tourism outputs e g arrivals receipts and hence ignoring it represents an important shortcoming that might bias the benchmarking outcomes the present paper develops for the first time a bayesian stochastic frontier model that incorporates destination quality into the estimation of tourism performance the model we propose benchmarks tourism destinations based on both overall performance i e technical efficiency and quality performance we impose a dynamic structure on both technical efficiency and destination quality and differentiate between short run and long run estimates of these measures we provide ranking of technical efficiency and destination quality for 101 tourism destinations and discuss the implications of our findings

financial distress and underemployment a reasonable model of the labour market over the business cycle should predict among other things that a in very low states of product demand there may be too little employment from an efficiency perspective but as the state improves employment will increase until ultimately it is efficiently deployed and b in low states of demand a worker s welfare level will be low and as the state of the world improves so will the worker s welfare except possibly at high levels of demand where the worker s utility may start to fall surprisingly there does not exist a labour contract based model that is consistent with predictions a and b in fact the standard results in the literature are if leisure is a normal good then there will be too much employment in essentially all states of the world and the welfare of the worker declines as the state of the world improves in this paper a labour contracting model is constructed that is consistent with the above mentioned predictions two necessary ingredients in the model are the possibility of financial distress in low demand states and partial provability in contracting financial distress can be viewed as frustrating renegotiation and thus inefficient outcomes are possible in equilibrium partial provability the ability of an informed player to make verifiable claims or statements to an uninformed player eliminates certain kinds of inefficient outcomes in particular it eliminates the possibility that in equilibrium there is too much employment this last result is interesting in itself because it is commonly believed that normality of leisure necessarily implies that labour contracting models will generate employment levels that are too high from an efficiency perspective

the estimation and decomposition of tourism productivity this paper estimates a total factor productivity index that allows for a rich decomposition of productivity in the tourism industry we account for two important characteristics first the heterogeneity between multiple tourism destinations and second the potential endogeneity in inputs importantly we develop our index at the macro level focusing on cross country comparisons using the bayesian approach we test the performance of the model across various priors we rank tourism destinations based on their tourism productivity and discuss the main sources of productivity growth we also provide long run productivity measures and discuss the importance of distinguishing between short run and long run productivity measures for future performance improvement strategies

do markets differ much this essay reports the results of a crosssection study of differences in accounting profitability that sheds light on some basic controversies in industrial economics most previous cross section studies in this field have been concerned with testing hypotheses about structural coefficients in models meant to apply to essentially all markets as we have learned more about the difficulties of constructing such general models and of performing tests on their structural parameters properly structural cross section analysis has fallen out of fashion in contrast to most of the cross section literature the analysis reported here is fundamentally descriptive it does not attempt directly to estimate or to test hypotheses about structural parameters i hope to show by example that one can perform illuminating analysis of cross section data without a host of controversial maintained hypotheses cross section data can yield interesting stylized facts to guide both general theorizing and empirical analysis of specific industries even if they cannot easily support full blown structural estimation one can view the sort of search for stylized facts conducted here as either a replacement for or an input to interindustry structural estimation depending on one s feeling about the long run potential of that research approach this study also departs from much of the cross section literature by being fundamentally concerned with the importance of various effects not just with coefficient signs and t statistics in particular this essay provides estimates of the relative importance of firm market and market share differences in the determination of business unit divisional profitability in u s manufacturing using 1975 data from the line of business program of the u s federal trade commission ftc i find support neither for the existence of firm effects nor for the importance of market share effects moreover while industry effects apparently exist and are important they appear to be negatively correlated with seller concentration in these data section i relates firm market and share effects to current issues and controversies in industrial economics and thus supplies the motivation for our empirical analysis the remainder of the essay treats the data and

time series growth in the female labor force in this paper we investigate the reasons for the growth in the female labor force in america during the twentieth century in our research we study the longer term trends since 1900 and conduct a more intensive examination of developments after the second world war on the basis of our work we conclude that rising real wages accounted for 60 of the total growth in the female labor force half of this wage effect in expanding labor supply was the fertility reducing consequence of a higher female wage

tourism revenues and residential foreign investment flows in spain a simultaneous model the aim of this work is to analyse the determinants of the tourism revenues and the residential foreign investment in spain during the period 1967 1998 to do so a two equation simultaneous model is proposed to be estimated the specification highlights the simultaneous and direct interdependence of the tourism revenues and the residential foreign investment flows this result contrasts with the traditional standard specification of the international tourism demands in spain nonlinear simultaneous estimations cointegration techniques and a battery of specification tests are the econometric tools applied in the work

the evolution of mass tourism destinations new approaches beyond deterministic models in benidorm spain although deterministic models of the evolution of mass tourism coastal resorts predict an almost inevitable decline over time theoretical frameworks of the evolution and restructuring policies of mature destinations should be revised to reflect the complex and dynamic way in which these destinations evolve and interact with the tourism market and global socio economic environment the present study examines benidorm because its urban and tourism model and large scale tourism supply and demand make it one of the most unique destinations on the mediterranean coast the investigation reveals the need to adopt theories and models that are not purely deterministic the dialectic interplay between external factors and the internal factors inherent in this destination simultaneously reveals a complex and diverse stage of maturity and the ability of destinations to create their own future

performance of french destinations tourism attraction perspectives in this paper we assess and compare the performance of french tourism destinations using the data envelopment analysis dea two stage procedure where in the first stage the efficiency score are calculated and then followed in the second stage by a bootstrapped truncated regression model in the context of france such analysis takes an additional importance especially as the country is expected to face a decrease in its tourism competitiveness a discussion in terms of d attraction and e attraction is also proposed and policy recommendations are derived