analysing the determinants of environmental technology investments a panel data study of spanish industrial sectors abstract the aim of this paper is to empirically assess the determinants of environmental technology investments in the spanish industrial sectors with the help of panel data econometric techniques the paper confirms the relevance of the stringency of environmental regulation to explain overall investment patterns in environmental technologies these investments are also positively related to human and physical capital intensity and r d intensity and negatively related to the export intensity of sectors furthermore the study shows that the determinants for investments are likely to differ between environmental technology types i e end of pipe versus cleaner technologies

the empirical analysis of the determinants for environmental technological change a research agenda abstract technological change is usually considered a necessary albeit not sufficient condition for a transition to sustainability however the empirical analysis of the determinants to environmental technological change has not received too much attention in the environmental ecological economics literature and many open questions remain in this context based on a careful review of the literature this paper argues that further analysis should address several issues at different levels i e regarding the conceptual framework the thematic scope of the studies some methodological issues and other aspects related to the environmental policy variable first an integrated conceptual framework which takes into account the interplay between relevant variables influencing environmental technological change i e factors internal and external to the firm and characteristics of the environmental technologies and all the stages of this process with a greater emphasis on the invention stage should be developed other aspects should then be tackled including a focus on several themes i e a greater attention to cross sectoral technologies the barriers to different types of environmental technologies the international dimension of environmental technological change and environmental technological change in small and medium size enterprises methodological issues combination of case studies and econometric modelling and several issues related to the environmental policy variable

exact and heuristic solutions of the global supply chain problem with transfer pricing we examine the example of a multinational corporation that attempts to maximize its global after tax profits by determining the flow of goods the transfer prices and the transportation cost allocation between each of its subsidiaries vidal and goetschalckx vidal c j goetschalckx m 2001 a global supply chain model with transfer pricing and transportation cost allocation european journal of operational research 129 1 134 158 proposed a bilinear model of this problem and solved it by an alternate heuristic we propose a reformulation of this model reducing the number of bilinear terms and accelerating considerably the exact solution we also present three other solution methods an implementation of variable neighborhood search vns designed for any bilinear model an implementation of vns specifically designed for the problem considered here and an exact method based on a branch and cut algorithm the solution methods are tested on artificial instances these results show that our implementation of vns outperforms the two other heuristics the exact method found the optimal solution of all small instances and of 26 of medium instances

optimal policies for a capacitated two echelon inventory system this paper demonstrates optimal policies for capacitated serial multiechelon production inventory systems extending the clark and scarf 1960 model to include installations with production capacity limits we demonstrate that a modified echelon base stock policy is optimal in a two stage system when there is a smaller capacity at the downstream facility this is shown by decomposing the dynamic programming value function into value functions dependent upon individual echelon stock variables we show that the optimal structure holds for both stationary and nonstationary stochastic customer demand finite horizon and infinite horizon results are included under discounted cost and average cost criteria

the effects of environmental regulation on technology diffusion the case of chlorine manufacturing we use a hazard model to estimate the effect of environmental regulation on the diffusion of membrane cell production technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry we estimate the effect of regulation on both the adoption of the membrane technology at existing plants and on the exit of existing plants using older technologies we find that environmental regulation did affect the diffusion of the cleaner technology in the chlorine industry however it did so not by encouraging the adoption of membrane cells by existing facilities but by reducing the demand for chlorine and hence encouraging the shutdown of facilities using the environmentally inferior options this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

measuring the opportunity cost of holding money more evidence on the term structure of interest rates abstract this paper tests the statistical importance and forecasting performance of a term structure money demand equation relative to two competing specifications the evidence indicates that the term structure specification is preferred to one using a long term interest rate but not a short term rate forecasts for 1981 1982 reveal that the term structure model is preferable to both alternatives

understanding carbon lock in abstract this paper narrative argues that industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co evolution driven by path dependent increasing returns to scale it is asserted that this condition termed carbon lock in creates persistent market and policy failures that can inhibit the diffusion of carbon saving technologies despite their apparent environmental and economic advantages the notion of a techno institutional complex is introduced to capture the idea that lock in occurs through combined interactions among technological systems and governing institutions while carbon lock in provides a conceptual basis for understanding macro level barriers to the diffusion of carbon saving technologies it also generates questions for standard economic modeling approaches that abstract away technological and institutional evolution in their elaboration the question of escaping carbon lock in is left for a future paper

a general unconstrained model for transfer pricing in multinational supply chains multinational supply chains operate in more than one country or tax jurisdiction and face decision problems concerned with trade flows of resources products and services transfer prices and allocation of transport costs between their divisions these decisions must consider for the sake of optimality corporate and governmental parameters such as the payment of dividends and royalties ownership of and control over subsidiaries income taxes differentials duties and quotas etc in this paper we generalize and extend the theory of the multinational firm to the case of multinational supply chains we propose a model that is more general and comprehensive than the previous ones proposed in the literature to be more specific our model integrates many of the previous research factors and includes new ones such as transport costs and duty drawbacks which are critical for supply chains that operate under international trade regulations under the maximization of the repatriated earnings objective we study the optimality conditions of the corporate decision variables to derive managerial guidelines and to determine how decisions regarding trade quantities transfer prices and transport cost allocations affect the amount of taxes to be paid to host governments as well as the total after tax repatriated earnings of the corporation

lower bounds for multi echelon stochastic inventory systems we establish lower bounds on the minimum cost of managing certain production distribution networks with setup costs at all stages and stochastic demands these networks include serial assembly and one warehouse multi retailer systems we obtain the bounds through novel cost allocation schemes we evaluate the bounds performance for one warehouse multi retailer systems by comparing them with simple heuristic policies the bounds are quite tight for systems with a small number of retailers we also present simplified proof of known optimality results for serial and assembly systems

carrot or stick contract frame and use of decision influencing information in a principal agent setting a fundamental management accounting issue is how to incorporate decision influencing information e g an ex post state signal into employment contracts our experiment examines the effects of contract framing on such information use in a principal agent setting in each of 40 rounds participants as employer and worker negotiate a contract that specifies pay depending on an ex post state signal state signal pay is framed as either a bonus or a penalty over two groups the results show that the bonus frame facilitates information use because of worker loss aversion although both groups initially underweigh the state signal the bonus group quickly converges toward the optimal weight whereas the penalty group persistently underweighs the state signal

fair transfer price and inventory holding policies in two enterprise supply chains abstract a key issue in supply chain optimisation involving multiple enterprises is the determination of policies that optimise the performance of the supply chain as a whole while ensuring adequate rewards for each participant in this paper we present a mathematical programming formulation for fair optimised profit distribution between echelons in a general multi enterprise supply chain the proposed formulation is based on an approach applying the nash bargaining solution for finding optimal multi partner profit levels subject to given minimum echelon profit requirements the overall problem is first formulated as a mixed integer non linear programming minlp model a spatial and binary variable branch and bound algorithm is then applied to the above problem based on exact and approximate linearisations of the bilinear terms involved in the model while at each node of the search tree a mixed integer linear programming milp problem is solved the solution comprises inter firm transfer prices production and inventory levels flows of products between echelons and sales profiles the applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a number of illustrative examples based on industrial processes

a global supply chain model with transfer pricing and transportation cost allocation abstract we present a model for the optimization of a global supply that maximizes the after tax profits of a multinational corporation and that includes transfer prices and the allocation of transportation costs as explicit decision variables the resulting mathematical formulation is a non convex optimization problem with a linear objective function a set of linear constraints and a set of bilinear constraints we develop a heuristic solution algorithm that applies successive linear programming based on the reformulation and the relaxation of the original problem our computational experiments investigate the impact of using different starting points the algorithm produces feasible solutions with very small gaps between the solutions and their upper bound ub

dynamic incentives of environmental regulations the effects of alternative policy instruments on technology diffusion abstract we develop a framework for comparing empirically the effects of alternative environmental policy instruments on the diffusion of new technology market based and command and control approaches can he quantitatively compared by estimating the economic penalty that firms through their actions reveal to be associated with violation of standards in the context of concerns about global climate change we empirically examine the likely effects of pigouvian taxes technology adoption subsidies and technology standards we employ state level data on the diffusion of thermal insulation in new home construction comparing the effects of energy prices insulation cost and building codes

a multiechelon inventory problem with secondary market sales we consider a finite horizon multiechelon inventory system in which the surplus of stock can be sold i e disposed in the secondary markets at each stage in the system what are called nested echelon order up to policies are shown to be optimal for jointly managing inventory replenishments and secondary market sales under a general restriction on model parameters we establish that it is optimal not to both sell off excess stock and replenish inventory secondary market sales complicate the structure of the system so that the classical clark and scarf echelon reformulation no longer allows for the decomposition of the objective function under the optimal policy we introduce a novel class of policies referred to as the disposal saturation policies and show that there exists a disposal saturation policy determined recursively by a single base stock level at each echelon that achieves the decomposition of this problem the resulting optimal replenishment policy is shown to be the echelon base stock policy we demonstrate the heuristic performance of this disposal saturation policy through a series of numerical studies except at extreme ranges of model parameters the policy provides a very good approximation to the optimal policy while avoiding the curse of dimensionality we also conduct numerical studies to determine the value of the secondary markets for multistage supply chains and assess its sensitivity to model parameters the results provide potentially useful insights for companies seeking to enter or develop secondary markets for supply chains this paper was accepted by martin lariviere operations management

the influence of market demand upon innovation a critical review of some recent empirical studies abstract a number of recent empirical studies of technical change at the level of the individual firm have concluded that market demand is the dominant influence upon the innovation process calling forth innovations in market economies the pace of innovation in the private sector heavily influences the growth of national output and productivity and these studies and their conclusions have therefore received much attention having been extensively quoted in discussions of appropriate government policy for the encouragement of innovation this paper reviews a number of these studies and concludes that their findings and the interpretations of their findings in the secondary literature are seriously flawed and in many cases invalid the proposition that market demand governs the innovation process is by no means conclusively demonstrated in these studies and they are therefore inadequate and inappropriate guides for the formulation of policy most of the studies examined employ a working definition of demand factors which is so broad as to embrace a range of possible influences upon innovation which should more properly be classified elsewhere the concept of demand utilized in these studies bears little resemblance to the more restrictive and precise definition of market demand found in economics in addition the phenomena analyzed in these studies are a very heterogeneous lot the studies do not address identical empirical questions and their findings are as a result neither uniform nor unambiguous both demand and supply side influences are crucial to understanding the innovation process and it is the exclusive preoccupation with only one set of these forces which is criticized in this paper some implications of the criticism for government policy toward innovation are discussed in the conclusion

an operational profit sharing and transfer pricing model for network manufacturing companies abstract new age companies are forging partnerships with other firms to market products that have been assembled through manufacturing activities distributed at different locations these locations belong to more than one company and the product passes through these different sites during its manufacturing stages this manufacturing collaboration is known as network manufacturing according to the network philosophy companies form alliances to manufacture a product and share in its operating profits this paper proposes a framework and methodology for profit sharing and transfer pricing between network companies we propose a paradigm that enables maximization of operating profits by the manufacturing network in its larger supply chain suggesting a departure from the model that maximizes profits for the individual company within the sphere of its own supply chain

the role of the public administrations in the promotion of the environmental activity in spanish industrial companies abstract an aim of this study is to analyse the managers opinions in relation to the environmental policy instruments that the public administrations promote in order to force firms to care for the natural environment in the same way we study the relation between the perceived importance of these instruments and the level of collaboration between the public administrations and firms in this area taking into consideration the fact that in spain firms are still in a relatively incipient stage from an environmental standpoint we analyse how these instruments are assessed by managers of spanish industrial firms besides we study whether several opinions are one of the causes of less collaboration in environmental public programs we show that the tightening of the legislation in the environmental area induces a deeper consciousness among companies about the environmental problem because of this and despite having other instruments the public administrations should legislate and enforce the legislation as a first measure of environmental control afterwards we were able to confirm that there does not exist any relation between the importance of the administrative instruments and the perception of the efficacy of these on the part of the managers as they are being implemented nowadays we also confirm that there are no significant differences in the judgement of the importance efficacy relation among those companies that maintain different type of relations with the public administrations in the environmental field this result allows us to arrive at the conclusion that in spite of the differences between the importance and the efficacy that the companies attach to the administrative instruments these differences do not influence the type of relations that the companies maintain with the public administrations in the environmental field therefore it seems that these relations depend on other factors perhaps the level of information of the companies about the public programs or about the necessary resources to have access to them

newsvendor bounds and heuristic for optimal policies in serial supply chains we consider the classicn stage serial supply systems with linear costs and stationary random demands there are deterministic transportation leadtimes between stages and unsatisfied demands are backlogged the optimal inventory policy for this system is known to be an echelon base stock policy which can be computed through minimizingn nested convex functions recursively to identify the key determinants of the optimal policy we develop a simple and surprisingly good heuristic this method minimizes 2 n separate newsvendor type cost functions each of which uses the original problem data only these functions are lower and upper bounds for the echelon cost functions their minimizers form bounds for the optimal echelon base stock levels the heuristic is the simple average of the solution bounds in extensive numerical experiments the average relative error of the heuristic is 0 24 with the maximum error less than 1 5 the bounds and the heuristic which can be easily obtained by simple spreadsheet calculations enhance the accessibility and implementability of the multiechelon inventory theory more importantly the closed form expressions provide an analytical tool for us to gain insights into issues such as system bottlenecks effects of system parameters and coordination mechanisms in decentralized systems

simultaneous capacity and production management of short life cycle produce to stock goods under stochastic demand this paper derives the optimal simultaneous capacity and production plan for a shortlife cycle produce to stock good under stochastic demand capacity can be reduced as well as added at exogenously set unit prices in both cases studied with and without carryover of unsold units a target interval policy is optimal there is a usually different target interval for each period such that capacity should be changed as little as possible to bring the level available into that interval our contribution in the case of no carry over is a detailed characterization of the target intervals assuming demands increase stochastically at the beginning of the life cycle and decrease thereafter in the case of carry over we establish the general result and show that capacity and inventory are economic substitutes the target intervals decrease in the initial stock level and the optimal unconstrained base stock level decreases in the capacity level in both cases optimal service rates are not necessarily constant over time a numerical example illustrates the results

the standard error of regressions statistical significance as used in economics has weak theoretical justification in particular it merges statistical and substantive significance the 182 papers using regression analysis in the american economic review in the 1980s were tested against 19 criteria for the accepted use of statistical significance most some three quarters of the papers did poorly likewise textbooks in econometrics do not distinguish statistical and economic significance statistical significance should not be the focus of empirical economics

investigating policy and r d effects on environmental innovation a meta analysis in the last decades a wide research effort has been devoted at the analysis of the determinants of environmental innovation ei whereas agreement seemed to emerge around a cluster of determinants mainly technology push market pull policy push pull and firm specific factors empirical analyses have failed to provide strong confirmation on the relevance of some core variables after a qualitative discussion of this literature we empirically assess it by exploiting meta regression analysis techniques to test the effectiveness of two determinants policy and r d our findings are clear as for the first we show that only certain types of policy have proven to affect ei in particular regulatory stringency as for r d we show that the use of estimation methods is not neutral to the outcome of the primary studies

verifying the relation between labor productivity and productive efficiency by means of the properties of the input output matrices the european case abstract this article discusses the relationship between labor productivity and the degree of production efficiency for 24 countries inside the european union eu over a period of 17 years a panel data econometric model is used to estimate it to this end an indicator of productive efficiency has been applied it is based on the dominant eigenvalue of the matrix of technical coefficients of the input output model this indicator allows the relationship between the economic sectors of each country and its productive technologies to be taken into account the results reveal a significant relationship between the proposed productive efficiency indicator and labor productivity finally several implications from a policy perspective are suggested as concluding remarks

general wisdom concerning the factors affecting the adoption of cleaner technologies a survey 1990 2007 abstract cleaner technologies ct have recently received much attention in diverse media and policy agendas this comes out of the clear role they play in environmental protection and sustainability and the large potential to contribute to economic growth and competitiveness the realization of both potentials depends on the level diffusion and exploitation achieved today very low this article presents a selective survey of papers that today represent the general wisdom concerning the factors affecting adoption as a primary condition to diffusion and exploitation of ct the paper helps to clarify the challenges facing diffusion modelers and policy makers when dealing with policy design assessing the levels of diffusion achieved as well as the factors affecting diffusion of a particular technology the paper ends outlining further research need in the field

the price of reverse factoring financing rates vs payment delays reverse factoring a financial arrangement where a corporation facilitates early payment of its trade credit obligations to suppliers is increasingly popular in industry many firms use the scheme to induce their suppliers to grant them more lenient payment terms by means of a periodic review base stock model that includes alternative sources of financing we explore the following question what extensions of payment terms allow the supplier to benefit from reverse factoring we obtain solutions by means of simulation optimisation we find that an extension of payment terms induces a non linear financing cost for the supplier beyond the opportunity cost of carrying additional receivables furthermore we find that the size of the payment term extension that a supplier can accommodate depends on demand uncertainty and the cost structure of the supplier overall our results show that the financial implications of an extension of payment terms need careful assessment in stochastic settings

joint inventory and cash management for multidivisional supply chains this paper develops a centralized supply chain model that integrates material flows with cash flows the supply chain is owned by a single firm with two divisions the downstream division headquarters facing random customer demand replenishes materials from the upstream division the firm installs a financial services platform that pools the divisions cash into a master account managed by the headquarters in each period cash is received from customers and paid to the outside vendor after materials are delivered the headquarters determines how much cash to retain for inventory replenishment the objective is to determine an optimal joint inventory replenishment and cash retention policy for the entire supply chain we prove that the optimal policy has a surprisingly simple structure both divisions implement a base stock policy for inventory replenishment the headquarters monitors the corporate working capital and implements a two threshold policy for cash retention this result is obtained by exte

combined pricing and inventory control under uncertainty this paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty more specifically we analyze the following single item periodic review model demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the item s price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions the price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system a replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods stockouts are fully backlogged we address both finite and infinite horizon models with the objective of maximizing total expected discounted profit or its time average value assuming that prices can either be adjusted arbitrarily upward or downward or that they can only be decreased we characterize the structure of an optimal combined pricing and inventory strategy for all of the above types of models we also develop an efficient value iteration method to compute these optimal strategies finally we report on an extensive numerical study that characterizes various qualitative properties of the optimal strategies and corresponding optimal profit values

does the development of environmental innovation require different resources evidence from spanish manufacturing firms in recent years environmental innovations are getting increasingly at the center both of the scientific debate and of the policy maker agenda adopting the resource based view this paper provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the specific role of internal external and hybrid resources in the environmental innovation development using a dataset of 4829 spanish manufacturing firms and estimating probit models it is found that internal resources have greater importance for environmental innovations moreover green innovators seem to be characterized by more intensive external relationships for hybrid resources acquisition of equipment but not of patents is more relevant finally evidence suggest the relevance of complementing the analysis of the external factors triggering environmental innovations with those of the internal resources the firm has access to in order to fully understand and support the development of environmental innovations

the persistency and volatility of the firm r d investment revisited from the perspective of technological capability abstract the persistency and volatility of firm rd however previous research has found mixed evidence concerning the persistency and volatility of firm rd positive shocks however technological capability offsets the internal cash flow effect and causes persistency in rd negative shocks these imply that r d investment is not a dichotomous decision between persistency and volatility and is conditional on each firm s technological capability

empirical generalizations in eco innovation a meta analytic approach abstract although discussions on eco innovation are ongoing and the concept is evolving its central idea is highly stimulating thus a great number of studies has been conducted in recent years around the world based on different perspectives contexts and outcomes therefore the identification and analysis of factors related to eco innovation are essential if knowledge in this field is to be improved and consolidated this research aimed to advance our understanding of the different dimensions of eco innovation through a meta analytical review of its antecedents or drivers consequents and moderators thus a total of 71 studies was analysed generating 818 effect sizes and 220 582 cumulative samples the main findings revealed that barriers company capabilities environmental regulation market turbulence information sources r d and company size were significant antecedents to eco innovation it was also noted that a significance relationship exists between eco innovation and firm performance regarding the moderating effect it was observed that culture the economic situation of the country and context influence the relationship between eco innovation and performance the results revealed that countries with a lower hdi presented stronger effects between eco innovation and firm performance than countries with a higher hdi these findings were interesting because they could demonstrate that eco innovation tends to promote more competitive advantage in countries with environmental problems and consequently a lower hdi

redefining innovation eco innovation research and the contribution from ecological economics while innovation processes toward sustainable development eco innovations have received increasing attention during the past years theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze these processes are poorly developed against this background the term eco innovation is introduced in this paper addressing explicitly three kinds of changes towards sustainable development technological social and institutional innovation secondly the potential contribution of neoclassical and co evolutionary approaches from environmental and innovation economics to eco innovation research is discussed three peculiarities of eco innovation are identified the double externality problem the regulatory push pull effect and the increasing importance of social and institutional innovation while the first two are widely ignored in innovation economics the third is at the least not elaborated appropriately the consideration of these peculiarities may help to overcome market failure by establishing a specific eco innovation policy and to avoid a technology bias through a broader understanding of innovation finally perspectives for a specific contribution of ecological economics to eco innovation research are drawn it is argued that methodological pluralism as established in ecological economics would be very beneficial for eco innovation research a theoretical framework integrating elements from both neoclassical and evolutionary approaches should be pursued in order to consider the complexity of factors influencing innovation decisions as well as the specific role of regulatory instruments and the experience gathered in ecological economics integrating ecological social and economic aspects of sustainable development is highly useful for opening up innovation research to social and institutional changes 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

coordination mechanisms in decentralized serial inventory systems with batch ordering this paper studies a periodic review serial supply chain in which materials are ordered and shipped according to r nq policies three information scenarios are considered depending on the level of information available echelon local and quasilocal in the echelon scenario each stage can access the inventory and cost information within its echelon comprising the stage itself and all downstream stages in the local scenario each stage only accesses its own local information finally in the quasilocal scenario each stage knows its local information plus the actual customer demands we propose coordination schemes that regulate the stages to achieve the supply chain s optimal cost under each information setting all these coordination schemes fit comfortably within an emerging practice called supply chain finance which includes the organization and technology needed to implement them

determinants of environmental innovation new evidence from german panel data sources abstract in most cases empirical analyses of environmental innovations based on firm level data relied on surveys for one point in time these surveys allow for the inclusion of many explanatory variables such as different policy instruments or the influence of pressure groups but it is not possible to address the dynamic character of environmental innovations this paper uses two german panel databases the establishment panel of the institute for employment research iab and the mannheim innovation panel mip of the centre for european economic research zew to explore the determinants of environmental innovations the econometric estimations show that the improvement of the technological capabilities knowledge capital by r d triggers environmental innovations environmental regulation environmental management tools and general organizational changes also encourage environmental innovation a result that has also been postulated by the famous porter hypothesis

determinants of environmental innovation in us manufacturing industries abstract this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation we employ panel data models to study how environmental innovation by us manufacturing industries responded to changes in pollution abatement expenditures and regulatory enforcement during the period 1983 through 1992 we find that 1 environmental innovation as measured by the number of successful environmental patent applications granted to the industry responded to increases in pollution abatement expenditures however 2 increased monitoring and enforcement activities related to existing regulations did not provide any additional incentive to innovate we also find some empirical evidence that environmental innovation is more likely to occur in industries that are internationally competitive

interrelating operational and financial performance measurements in inventory control financial supply chain management and working capital management are increasingly receiving attention as important avenues to increase profitability in supply chains by actively managing payment terms and working capital requirements managers can influence financial performance and achieve significant cost savings however measures to improve financial performance implicitly restrict and influence operational performance in our research we elaborate on the benefits of equally considering both operational and financial aspects in decision making for the physical and financial supply chain we develop a mathematical model that determines the optimal purchasing order quantity under working capital restrictions and payment delays we analyze the trade offs between the most commonly used financial and operational measurements such as service level return on investment profit margin and inventory level our results demonstrate the significance of payment delays increases decreases in the upstream downstream payment delays favor the system s operations by decreasing operational costs moreover increases in the working capital employed in the system decrease the total operational cost increase the total financial cost and lower the return on working capital investment c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved

community pressure and clean technology in the informal sector an econometric analysis of the adoption of propane by traditional mexican brickmakers abstract in many developing countries the informal sector comprised of low technology unlicensed micro enterprises is a major source of pollution environmental management in this sector is exceptionally challenging though clean technologies offer a means of mitigating the problem to our knowledge there has been no rigorous empirical research on why informal or even small scale firms do and do not adopt them as a first step toward filling this gap this paper presents the results of an econometric analysis of the diffusion of propane among informal traditional brickmakers in cd juarez mexico a leading source of air pollution owing to their reliance on cheap highly polluting fuels such as used tires and scrap wood the two key policy implications of our analysis are that 1 it is possible to successfully promote the adoption of a clean technology by intensely competitive informal firms even when the new technology significantly raises variable costs and 2 community pressure applied by competing firms and private sector local organizations can generate incentives for adoption

innovation and the international diffusion of environmentally responsive technology abstract new evidence is presented on environmental innovation and diffusion over the 1970s and 1980s at a global level a substantial amount of innovations occurred in the united states japan and germany the share of environmental patents in all patents varied between 0 6 and 3 and as such was higher than the corresponding share of pollution abatement expenditure in gdp japanese environmental innovation rates were consistently high certain plausible connections between environmental regulation and innovation also emerge across these three countries and over time innovation responded to pollution abatement expenditure an indicator of the severity of environmental regulations environmental patenting rates in developing countries were also high reaching 2 in many years in brazil developing country innovators obtained a non trivial number of patents most of which appear geared towards adapting imported technologies to local conditions however domestic innovation was only one path to new technologies imports of disembodied environmental technologies foreign patents registered in developing countries were substantial foreign patents were typically important or generic patents evidence also suggests that such patents protected intellectual property in equipment exported developing countries especially in east asia often chose to obtain technologies embodied in pollution abatement equipment

inventory management with asset based financing most of the traditional models in production and inventory control ignore the financial states of an organization and can lead to infeasible practices in real systems this paper is the first attempt to incorporate asset based financing into production decisions instead of setting a known exogenously determined budgetary constraint as most existing models suggest we model the available cash in each period as a function of assets and liabilities that may be updated periodically according to the dynamics of the production activities furthermore our models allow different interest rates on cash balance and outstanding loans which is an enhancement over most traditional models in that inventory financed by a loan may be more expensive than that by out of pocket cash we demonstrate the importance of joint consideration of production and financing decisions in a start up setting in which the ability to grow the firm is mainly constrained by its limited capital and dependence on bank financing we then explain the motivation for asset based financing by examining the decision making at a bank and a set of retailers in a newsvendor setting