Previous research has shown that increments in the visual saliency of product packaging affect visual attention and subsequent choice. However, no studies have addressed this issue at the level of individual packaging elements such as product claims and labels. The present paper reports the findings of an eye-tracking study on consumer attention and product choice. The study revealed that increases in the visual saliency and surface size of packaging elements are associated with greater fixation likelihood and that attention to elements such as product claims and organic labels is associated with increased choice likelihood whereas attention to nutrition-related elements such as GDA labels or the Nordic keyhole label is associated with decreased choice likelihood.

We seek to reconcile the theoretical ambiguity and conflicting empirical findings regarding the impact of countries geographic distance from other countries on their performance as hosts for FDI. We identify a range of contingencies, related to country intrinsic characteristics and to their connectivity to other countries, which determine the consequences of distance for FDI performance. Longitudinal analyses of FDI flows to 161 countries during four decades show that distance affects FDI mostly indirectly, via its impact on a number of country characteristics. Political, informational, cultural and human connectivity to other countries turns the impact of distance insignificant. These findings suggest that whereas distance is a fixed attribute, its consequences vary in line with country attributes. They shift the discussion from distance as an exogenous determinant of FDI to endogenous country characteristics that are subject to government policies and require adequate strategic responses by MNEs.

We examine the relationship between firm value and the industry experience of independent directors. We find a positive and significant effect of independent directors with industry experience on market-to-book ratios. Our evidence suggests that the presence of these directors is complementary with other corporate governance practices, since the result appears mostly in well-governed firms. We also document higher R&D spending, lower earnings restatements, lower CEO compensation, higher CEO turnover, and larger cash holdings, in firms with a larger proportion of knowledgeable independent directors. Our study lends support to those arguing for professional boards in which independent directors are required to have extensive expertise in the relevant industry.

In accordance with Mc Crudden, the ‘legal research has engaged with the more recent social sciences in ways that would have seemed unlikely even 50 years ago. Socio-legal studies, sociology of law, law and economics must now be seen as integral to legal research’. Looking beyond the single discipline of law, trying to include into the legal discussion and analysis other disciplines seems to be particularly necessary when we refer to the phenomenon of money laundering.

The expected cost of capital is a crucial component for most of the topics in corporate finance. Unfortunately in the presence of risky debt, it is systematically overestimated. This bias is increasing in leverage and the volatility of cash flows. We show the existence of the bias and assess its size. We finally propose a novel methodology to obtain a direct unbiased estimation of the expected return on assets. This method avoids the computational error that is obtained from the estimation of the individual components.

What can companies do to achieve global competitive advantage and extra-ordinary profitability in the challenging years ahead? What are the new dynamics that we can expect in global competition? What are the consequences of connectedness -- from social networks to financial markets -- and how can companies benefit from these dynamics? For companies to thrive in the current environment, they must be able to use their power nodes and shape their business models to tap the sources of “profit power” around them. This gives them the upper hand in every competition, partnership or alliance. Understanding the importance of power nodes, and which ones are potentially part of the future of your enterprise, is the first step to success.

Prior empirical studies price distress under the assumption of normality. We find this assumption to be rejected by the data and subsequently examine the sensitivity of the distress risk premium to the distributional assumptions of the multivariate t (MVT). Large economic differences are evident in estimating the distress risk premium and its related size effect. For example, the difference in the estimated distress risk premium to small firms under the normal and the MVT is an annualized 8.4% over 1978 to 2007 sample period. The results highlight the economic importance of using distributional assumptions that capture in empirical characteristics of the data

This paper connects two strands of literature: gender and ethics, in particular the ethics of care on the one hand, and the recent literature on gender and finance and the financial crisis, in particular those views suggesting that women run finances more responsibly than men on the other hand. In this paper we explore this hypothesis. We do so from the perspective of the ethics of care, in particular the work by Virginia Held, who in a recent book, The Ethics of Care, connects this ethics to markets, politics and globalization. From this literature, we develop an analytical framework of actors in the financial sector in terms of ‘responsible agents’ who act in a particular institutional context, consisting of formal institutions (laws and regulations) as well as informal institutions (social norms, habits, rules of thumb, networks). Together, we understand the behavior of actors in the institutional context of the financial sector as practices, in which moral and economic dimensions of behavior are closely linked. Combining this with the empirical literature on gender and finance (such as about women’s greater risk aversion and lower tendency to try to beat the market as reflected in lower number of transactions compared to males in similar settings), we hope to be able to understand to what extent gender may make a difference in financial sector practices. We include a study case, some empirical data and descriptive data analysis.

Most of the work testing the quantity-quality model has concentrated on the tradeoff between family size and educational attainment. We argue that child health is a plausible measure of quality that has not been fully explored in the empirical literature. Using data from the Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey (MHSS), we estimate the effect of family size on child mortality and several measures of child health. Our results suggest that even in rural Bangladesh there is little evidence of a tradeoff between child quantity and health.

We develop a comprehensive quantitative account of changing practices in Economics in the last 122 years. The analysis uses “word detection” algorithms to appraise the prevailing practices. We document a shift toward isolation from other disciplines during most of the twentieth century. In sharp contrast, the most recent decades show a strong move towards a more connected discipline. Periods of more connectedness are associated with openness to a broader set of features of economic agents and the economic environment. In parallel, the 1960s and 1970s show a notable acceleration in the move towards a more mathematical approach. This development did not reverse. As a result, the current state of the discipline is characterized by an embrace of mathematical tools together with openness to a wider set of aspects and findings developed in other disciplines. Most of the reported variables show surprisingly high correlations across disciplines and across journals.

Dice la sabiduría popular que soñar no cuesta nada, pero aun ese oficio no es sencillo en la Argentina. Hace trece años escribí otro prólogo, el de Otro siglo, otra Argentina, al que llamé “un sueño posible”. Allí conjeturaba cómo podría llegar a ser la Argentina del Bicentenario del 2010, sin pensar que llegaría tan rápido, claro. Mi inveterado optimismo me llevó a errar en varios pronósticos, aunque no en todos. Advertía que se trataba de un sueño posible pero de ninguna manera inevitable, ya que así como podía lograrse una mayor realización del país y de sus personas, también podían ocurrir pesadillas diversas y sueños grises, que ciertamente tuvieron lugar. Decía también que para que el “buen sueño” se realizara se requería atravesar muchas fronteras. No bastarían las instituciones políticas y económicas, aun mejoradas. Eran necesarios también cambios en la sociedad y en la cultura. Y era menester gestar una inteligente integración al mundo, una nueva y más integrada geografía, un nuevo modo de ser industrioso, el ahorro productivo como modo de vida, una nueva constitución social centrada en las personas, capaz de revitalizar las empresas y el trabajo y de democratizar el capital y la educación en pos de una síntesis superadora tanto del ‘capitalismo salvaje’ como del ‘Estado Providencia’, un Estado reinventado para el siglo XXI y basado en la total transparencia de nuestros gobiernos y procedimientos públicos y en una renovación de la representación política. En fin, para hacer real el sueño también sería necesario darle primero la forma de un proyecto, no de una utopía

Based on data from 76 strategic initiatives in five multi-business corporations, this paper examines relationships between three dimensions of network relations on the inter-group level and the performance of strategic initiatives. Findings suggest inverted U-shaped relationships between performance and relational and structural dimensions of networks, and a linear, positive relationship for the cognitive dimension. In addition, exploration moderates relationships between performance and all three dimensions of inter-group networks. Compared to exploitation initiatives, negative consequences of strong ties and centrality are more pronounced in exploratory initiatives. Although exploratory groups appear to benefit less from increases in shared vision, shared vision is a positive influence on performance for both types of initiatives.

Siendo la movilidad económica un fenómeno de largo plazo por naturaleza, su medición requiere de un panel largo de variables como salarios, ingresos o gastos de consumo de las personas o de los hogares. Pero la falta de tales datos y la existencia de sesgos debido a los errores de medición ponen algunos reparos en el uso de datos longitudinales. Sin embargo, es posible usar un pseudo-panel dinámico que estime consistentemente la movilidad individual aún en presencia de errores en los ingresos reportados.

Recognizing the multiplicity of stories and possible interpretations in any narrative approach, we develop our ‘story’ (i.e. this journal article) within the emerging tradition of responsible writing. We conceptualize organizational change as the normal condition of organizing rather than as an episodic event. In these circumstances, sense-giving and sense-making stories were found to be important in handling and creating instances of stability. Further, we attempt to show how old stories are told in new ways, while adapting to changing needs of its members created by contextual developments. We provide a discursive analysis of an institutional video on Knowledge Management, four in-depth interviews with members of the Argentine Association of Regional Consortiums of Agricultural Experimentation (AACREA), a rural farming association and a set of twenty-one interview transcripts from the institution’s archives. An analysis of dualities present in the stories show how change is both managed (sense-giving) and understood (sense-making). We refer to five of these dualities and show how the tension they carry is functional and productive to the growth and development of the organization.

Uskali Mäki (2002: 8) has contended that “economics” is a dangerously aggregated notion: “there is no one homogeneous ‘economics’.” Within all the versions of economics two of them have predominated along history. The first one refers to a portion of human affairs related with the material condition of the human being. The second one refers to a perspective of analysis of all human actions. The emergence of the latter has to do with epistemological requirements that economics has incorporated. In the paper, first, these two versions will be introduced together with an appraisal of their pros and cons. Second, a textual analysis of the words related to economics, i.e., economy, economic and economically, will be presented. The intention of this analysis is to discover which of the two versions deals better with what is ordinarily understood as economic. It will also give origin also to a proposal about the tasks of economics. A diagnosis about why economics has become a science about something that is not its real subject will come third. It will follow a proposal of therapy. Finally a conclusion will close.

This paper analyzes the corporate governance system of business groups in Argentina during the post market reforms period. Several cases of -successful and unsuccessful- business groups’ performance are studied in order to determine which are the key variables that allow firms to survive and expand under an increasingly challenging environment. I argue that successful cases share some key features in their corporate governance systems in terms of business structure and strategy. Their corporate governance strategy has evolved during the post market reform era but still holds some characteristics that are a legacy from previous periods. Despite the strong effect towards convergence that globalization is supposed to generate, the corporate governance of Argentine business groups does not seem to be converging to the standards of developed countries’ corporate governance system.

We investigate how the competitive complexity of an industrial sector affects its profitability. For that purpose, we developed a set of simulations representing industries as complex systems where different firms co-evolve linked by multiple competitive dimensions. We show that increases in the complexity of an industry, resulting from increases in the number of players and in the number of competitive dimensions linking them, damages industry performance. We also found that the negative impact on performance resulting from a higher number of competitive dimensions decreases as the number of players in the industry increases and that the decrease in industry performance associated to big increases in the number of players is mediated by the number of competitive dimensions linking them.

This paper studies the consequences of product-market competition on firms’ decisions to delegate more or fewer decision-making responsibilities to managers. By simultaneously addressing the choice of both competitive actions and organizational design, the paper makes an attempt at bringing economic theory and management strategy closer together. I show that, for a given number of firms, and increase in market size increases centralization, as the owner of the firm finds it more costly to accept rent seeking by the managers. However, this increase in market size will lead to the entry of more firms, which calls for more decentralized decision making. Under reasonable conditions, the aggregate effect leads to a U-shaped relationship where firms in both small and large markets are characterized by high levels of discretion, while there is less discretion for intermediate market sizes. Stronger competition, as measured by an increase in product substitutability leads to more discretion in concentrated markets, but to less discretion in dispersed markets, in markets in which the possibilities for product differentiation are important and in markets with high entry costs.

Globalization has led to profound changes in the ways and forms under which cross-border firm cooperation takes place. Increasingly such firm cooperation takes place between firms in developed countries and firms in developing and emerging market economies. Much research interest has been given to cooperation with firms in Asia, and significantly less to cooperation between firms in Europe and in Latin America. This joint research project will focus on cooperation between Danish affiliate firms and their local partners located in Argentina.

En el presente trabajo se presenta una revisión crítica del tratamiento dado por la literatura a cuatro cuestiones centrales vinculadas a la corrupción: i) definición del concepto, ii) metodologías de medición, iii) determinantes de los niveles de corrupción y iv) consecuencias. El trabajo hace especial énfasis en el cuarto punto, concentrándose en el impacto de la corrupción sobre el crecimiento y desarrollo económico. Para ello, se presenta una revisión crítica del tratamiento y los resultados aportados por la literatura formal y empírica en los últimos años.

The presentation analyzes the effectiveness of the Industrial Pollution Reduction Plan undertaken by the municipal government of Montevideo, Uruguay, with funds from the Inter American Development Bank to increase the levels of compliance of industrial firms with effluent standards. The estimation results indicate that the Plan failed to increase the levels of compliance. Even more, the enforcement activity by the municipal and national governments had no statistically significant marginal effect on the level of BOD5 reported by the plants. Finally, more than one third of the industrial plants may have under-reported emissions levels, on average. The results are analyzed from the perspective of institutional and political economy arguments given in the literature to explain the choice of cost ineffective instruments to control pollution.

This case study examines the ongoing international dispute involving two Latin American countries, Argentina and Uruguay, initiated by the latter’s approval of two Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) pulp mill projects on the River Uruguay’s –their natural boundary– eastern coast. The ultimate purpose of this work is to identify the relevant factors which intervened at the inception of a dispute, and during its subsequent evolution, which led to an international crisis of unexpected political and diplomatic aftermaths for these two neighboring South American countries with a long history of friendly relations. Another objective is to analyze the influence exerted on the course of events by an Argentinean environmental non governmental organization who invoked, at that time, scarcely disseminated social construct, the Social License to Operate, as the exclusive basis for rejecting both projects. This article is grounded on existing bodies of literature on conflict management, multiparty negotiations and third parties’ intervention. Our purpose is to extract lessons of academic and managerial relevance, for both public and private managers, and to define an area of research which we consider particularly pertinent: is it possible, or necessary, to adjust current conflict management methods –deeply embedded in Anglo-American political and managerial experience- to make them suit with different cultural and institutional traditions, as those prevailing in most of the Latin American countries, in order to solve development issues involving social constructs such as the Social License to Operate?

Until recently, managers around the world seem to have been satisfied with a financial or accounting based definition of performance: bottom-line profit was (and still is for many) the final judge! Most of the refinements that have been introduced to this bottom line definition of performance pertain to identifying the risk attached to an industrial sector (segment reporting) or to understanding its sensitivity to fluctuation in volume of sales (direct versus full costing). This focus on financial performance is driven by an external view of performance, often directly linked to the importance of a company’s share price (undoubtedly a plausible argument for the US and the UK). It also possibly reflects that, at least until the mid-seventies, western markets were far from competitive. Therefore there was no felt need to understand deeply how profit was generated and managers were satisfied with the limited analytical model provided by financial statements.

Se tratade una presentación informal interactiva en la que el Profesor Mäki nos brinda un mapa actual de la filosofía de la economía y de las corrientes económicas recientes a la luz de este enfoque filosófico.

La madurez no marca el final, sino el comienzo de un proceso de desarrollo que tiene a cada persona como protagonista y único responsable. Es posible que aprendamos como adultos, y lo es en mayor medida si logramos comprender cómo se produce el aprendizaje, qué factores inciden en él y qué podemos hacer para facilitarlo. A lo largo de estas líneas, descubriremos que aprender es mucho más que acumular conocimientos. Se trata de expandir nuestra capacidad de darle sentido a la realidad.

Valuation is at the center of finance theory. A significant amount of corporate decisions involve the valuation of financial and real assets, at the time that large amounts of money are exchanged every day based on value estimations. Even if we feel that we have a good understanding for dealing with this topic in the developed world, it is still difficult to use standard techniques where the corresponding assumptions fail to apply. Several peculiarities of emerging markets (henceforth, referred to as EMKs) influence valuation methodologies: EMKs differ from developed ones in terms of transparency, liquidity, governance, transaction costs and volatility, just to mention a few examples. For these and some other reasons, one cannot directly export valuation techniques that have been found to work somewhat properly in the developed world, and apply them face value to EMKs.

The purpose of this work is to study on compensation packages for top management teams. The analysis focuses on the annual pay plus change in equity portfolio value, how its level, pay-performance sensibility and structure vary across managerial categories, and the impact of these variations on corporate performance. Using a multilevel mixed-model approach on 589 companies from the S&P 1500 between 1998 and 2005, the evidence shows that CEO compensation packages are not isomorphic to those of non-CEO executives, while on average no significant differences are found between divisional and corporate executives. Despite this, the random effects show that differences between two categories vary across companies, with shareholder return been lower for companies where differences between corporate and divisional managers are greater

In this paper, we study organizations’ repeated engagement in exploration. Using an organizational learning perspective, we link repeated exploration to the existence and usage of exploration rules, and discuss two factors that affect exploration: the momentum of prior exploration(s) and the imprinting effect of early exploration(s). Our empirical work traces the investment decisions of US Venture Capital firms from 1962 to 2004, capturing the exploration of emerging, uncertain industries as they appear. We provide evidence that prior exploration increases the likelihood of future exploration, and that it decreases with the time elapsed since the last exploration. In addition, we find that VC firms that had explored early in their lives are more likely to do so again, and that this imprinting effect weakens as the number of prior explorations increases.

In this paper we study the capital structure determinants of Latin American firms using a comprehensive sample from 1996 to 2005 covering seven countries. We argue that ownership control is important for capital structure decisions in Latin America, where firms present a higher ownership concentration. We find a U-shape relation between ownership concentration and leverage. When ownership concentration is low its effect on leverage is negative, and when ownership concentration is high its effect on leverage is positive. This U-shape relation is consistent with the argument that ownership-concentrated firms avoid equity issuing because they do not want to share or to lose control, and this effect is contrary if the ownership structure has enough dispersion and losing control is not an issue. Consistent with the control argument, we also find that firms with more growth opportunities exhibit higher leverage. In addition, and consistent with previous literature on developed countries, we find that other factors that do not proxy for ownership control are important determinants of leverage. Firms that are larger, with more tangible assets, and that are less profitable are also more leveraged.

This study explores the firm-specific, industry and country effects for firms competing in an emerging market context. For the whole sample, we find that the firm-specific effect is the most important and relatively the same in magnitude than that of developed countries. However, when analyzing the sub-sample of abnormal performers, we found that the firm-specific effect decreases and context-specific effects (i.e., industry and country effects) significantly increase. In addition, permanent effects are greater in high performers than in average performers. We understand these results as evidence of the importance of selecting the adequate strategic group in the industry and of establishing the correct fit between capabilities and positioning.

This paper provides an overview of the entrepreneurial leadership taken by the government of India's Andhra Pradesh state in promoting the IT sector and using it to improve the status of the state's economic position in the early years of the third millennium. The objective of the paper is to examine the planning and development of a successful technology park in India. *** En química, un cluster es un conjunto de átomos, conectados entre sí y con una cercana interacción con cada uno. Localizados con gran proximidad, los átomos ganan sinergia y “bonding” de la influencia mutua. De la misma forma, un cluster de tecnología se refiere a una concentración significativa de empresas innovadoras, de alta tecnología unidas generalmente alrededor de una institución de investigación importante, tal como una universidad o un laboratorio líder de investigación. Las interacciones entre estas organizaciones son sinérgicas y mutuamente beneficiosas, generando clusters que pueden tener implicaciones positivas muy significativas en la economía local y regional. Hoy en día muchos países han incluido en sus planes estratégicos de desarrollo la creación de cluster tecnológicos. En esta ponencia se expondrán lecciones aprendidas de la experiencia en India así como también las oportunidades y riesgos que estas iniciativas representan para Latino América.

The central thesis of this paper is that ends and practical reason are re-entering into Economics through the proposal of Amartya Sen of a capability approach (CA) to the analysis of poverty, equality and development. By focusing on capabilities, Sen reinserts the notion of ends into economics and economics into the practical area: capabilities are themselves ends. The CA has Aristotelian connections acknowledged by Sen. The paper maintains that these connections may be deepened and that this deepening helps to improve it and to overcome some problems and criticisms of it. One of these problems is incommensurability of ends. Sen points out the consequent limitations of standard economics to deal with ends, but he does not provide a specific answer to the problems that incommensurability raise. A concern among scholars has arisen about the operationality of Sen’s CA. This is one of the consequences of incommensurability and of applying practical reason in order to choose ends. Economists, however, are not used to practical reasoning. We should provide them with concrete indications. We need a determined definition of the specific goods that the government should provide to the citizens. It is a task that I develop highly relying on Aristotle’s ideas. In the paper, I first introduce the key concepts of the capability approach of Sen. Second, I present a balance of strengths and problems of it. Then I analyze the Aristotelian connections of the approach. Four, I deal with the problems and criticisms of the CA. I explain Sen’s answers and how the approach either would have to introduce changes or would provide answers to those problems and criticisms through a deeper Aristotelian perspective. Although practical science is inherently inexact, we could provide at least a set of principles that may orientate the policy work thus overcoming CA’s non operational character.

The present study tests the theoretical framework on how CEOs add value proposed by Carrera et al (2006). According to this model, CEOs must manage three main processes for accomplishing their mission of providing continuity to their organizations: Business, Management, and Institutional Configuration Processes. This study tests the model through a survey with 89 CEOs, from medium to large Argentine firms and multinational companies within Argentina. Research results backed up the theoretical framework. To a further extent the study evidences inconsistencies between CEOs perception of their main concerns and the actual allocation of time they do daily to their tasks. In addition, by sample segmentation (concerning age, experience, capital origin and type of organization analysed), some broad differences among CEOs arose.

There has been a sustained interest and a growing variety of approaches to the study of the phenomenon of diversified business groups in emerging markets. Ranging in theoretical undertakings from transaction cost theory, resource-based, relational and political economy perspectives, and agency theory, and in analytical treatment of horizontal and vertical connectedness of group members, the intention to date has been to identify ideal typical or generalizable behavior, structures or processes. The paper will present an in-depth discussion of author’s ongoing research project on diversified business groups in Russia. In the course of the presentation the intellectual motivations for undertaking the study and the key research questions will be posited alongside the theoretical framework which has been elaborated in the process of hypothesis formation. The research is mainly question, rather than theory, driven. However, in constructing our hypothesis we use an organization ecology framework underlain by new institutionalism, which simultaneously aggregates a dynamic capabilities perspective while using a social network analysis to investigate the processes of sociopolitical legitimation which form the cornerstone of the evolution of firm boundaries. The presentation will proceed in five sections. In the first section we introduce the issue by pointing to the stock of existing knowledge, outlining some of the main problems with the existing perspectives, highlighting our intellectual motivations and unpacking the key research questions that guide the project. In section two we provide an overview of relevant theories, extracting from these the relevant variables that have driven our hypothesis formation, as well as pointing to our hypotheses. Section three provides the historical context and institutional environment of Russia, highlighting four distinct periods of transition from state-socialism and the nature of the co-evolutionary dynamics this has entailed. Section four presents the sample and method – a longitudinal, population level study of group formation sequenced over the four periods, through the correlation of the variables of sociopolitical legitimation processes with network formation, network position, and network resources on the one hand and (firm and relational) capabilities on the other hand. We aim to show that the relative (and changing) diversification (measured by population of diversified business groups) is arrived at through the process of legitimation of key activities of the main organizations, which is prefaced by entry into networks, the establishment of specific network positions and the use of network resources as antecedents of boundary spanning firm, organizational and relational capabilities.

Purpose; The objective of the CMP Research Program is to develop an understanding of how firms relate to their markets in a manner that integrates both traditional and more modern views of marketing, and incorporates an understanding of both the antecedents and consequences of different practices. Findings; Now a decade old, the Contemporary Marketing Practices (CMP) Research Program has undertaken research in over fifteen countries. It has made a unique contribution to marketing knowledge by bridging the gap between theory and practice. Originality/value of paper; By adopting a multi-paradigm philosophy and a multi-method approach, a broad perspective has been achieved that integrates the traditional managerial view of marketing with relational and process arguments. Viewpoint; In this article, we review the history of CMP research and its outcomes. Our assessment concludes with a discussion of the program’s contribution to marketing knowledge and some issues and challenges for future research.

Do consumers bolster products’ attributes evaluations to justify their choices? Study 1 shows that choosing a product may alter people’s products’ attribute preferences to make them consistent with prior choices. Study 2 shows that consumers tend to increase or decrease the importance of positive and negative features in a choice-supportive fashion based on their attributions regarding the features’ source (i.e., the chosen or the forgone option). These choice-supportive distortions only held when people were highly confident on their attributions about the features’ source. Study 3 suggests that these effects may happen only when consumers cannot find an external justification for not choosing properly.

Interlocking directorates is a widely studied, applied measure of governance practice. Most of the research has been limited to data from developed countries and studies interlocking as an independent variable explaining other governance constructs. This work studies interlocking as a rational decision of the owner of a company, as a dependent variable of board's design, and apply the concepts in an emerging market business environment. We found significant associations between interlocking and firm characteristics such as ownership structure, industry and regulation. We finally draw some conclusions on the direct application of corporate governance theories in developing countries.

Since Sandmo (1981), many articles have studied optimal tax-enforcement policies. Surprisingly, all assume that the enforcement costs are exogenously given. However, in practice, governments invest resources to modernize their tax administration and thus to reduce these costs. In a very simple model, we find an optimal fiscal policy that incorporates such investments. In order to completely characterize the optimal investment and to show how it interacts with the other components of the fiscal policy, we simulate the model.

This article uses a unique research design to statistically analyze how a firm’s “public-private” network can shape its upgrading capabilities.  Such a network includes a firm’s ties to other firms as well as to associations, cooperatives, schools, and publicly supported institutions that aim to help firms innovate.  We develop our argument through an examination of the transformation of the Argentine wine industry in two provinces that uses data from a unique field survey we designed and implemented in 2004-05 to statistically analyze the relative impact of firm-level factors, inter-firm networks, and ties to non-firm organizations and institutions.  While inter-firm networks are vital to upgrading, institutions bring value to firms in helping reconfigure socio-economic relationships.  First, they can help firms improve process and product upgrading capabilities and “graduate” them to more sophisticated inter-firm networks.  Second, linkages to institutions appear especially helpful to the extent they help the firm gain access to a variety of knowledge in different communities of producers.  Governments can aid upgrading and competitiveness, especially in emerging markets, by building public-private institutions that not only offer supply-side resources to firms but also act as bridges across regions.      

 This paper follows the Forum´s call for directly challenging “the great trade-off illusion” –that is, the belief that firms must sacrifice financial performance to meet societal obligations- by revisiting this paradigm from the standpoint of its assumptions in order to build alternative paradigms for a sustainable alignment between personal interests, firm goals, and societal needs. The basic argument is that making explicit the assumptions on human nature, human relationships, firm goals and societal needs of the dominant paradigm is the starting point for building models and making prescriptions for a sustainable alignment. After making explicit the assumptions of the dominant trade-off illusion dichotomy and their impact on practices and outcomes, this paper analyzes an alternative paradigm called “instrumental-alignment”. This paper concludes that neither of these paradigms allow a sustainable alignment given their restrictive assumptions. In particular, the latter paradigm is based on the assumptions of enlightened self-interest, profit maximization, societal material well-being, and a conflict between individual and collective rationalities, which create an inherent trade-off logic that make alignments not sustainable: they are just instrumental to personal, firm, or societal ends. In order to overcome the limitations of the instrumental-alignment logic, this paper proposes an “intrinsic alignment” paradigm based on the assumptions of excellence and practical or part-whole rationality. In this paradigm, both self-interest and others´ interests are taken into account as ends and therefore are not assumed to be object of trade-offs. Therefore, this paradigm allows a sustainable alignment between personal interests, firm goals, and societal needs because the alignment of interests has value in itself. This paper ends with implications for academics, managers, and policy makers at the level of assumptions, practices, and outcomes.

This study examines the behavior of firms’ above industry average returns establishing and empirically testing opposing predictions from different strategic management theories and concepts about the existence of sustainable abnormal returns for the case of emerging economies. On one side, exogenous shocks, which are frequent and most times unpredictable in terms of course and intensity in emerging economies, generate sudden changes in the business environment that negatively impact abnormal returns and dramatically erode sustainability of advantages, complementing the predictions of the Austrian School and the Hypercompetitive Model. On the other side, certain non-market practices common in lightly regulated economies, such as entrenchment, might support sustainability of certain advantages. Empirical results taking Latin America as a single unit of analysis indicate that sustainability is possible. Further analysis, isolating industries in certain countries, indicates that these results change substantially depending on the industry and the country.

Widespread breakdowns of contractual arrangements are the characteristic feature of some macroeconomic crises. Economies and political systems generate and must process the consequences of large-scale “broken promises” (Leijonhufvud, 2003). This paper discusses such phenomena, in the specific context of the fluctuations of the Argentine economy. That experience highlights themes which have been prominent in Leijonhufvud’s work, like the problems of intertemporal coordination, the potentially deviation-amplifying behavior of credit markets in the event of large disturbances, the relevance of the sequential decision-making of agents and the interrelated dynamics of policies, institutions and economic performance.

I estimate upper and lower bounds of the effect that a Lender of Last Resort has on banks’ liquidity demand. In December 1996 Argentina’s Central Bank signed with a group of international banks a contingent credit line agreement that enhanced its ability to act as a LLR. I run difference-in-difference regressions of the effect of the announcement of the insurance contract on banks’ liquidity holdings, using ownership status and size to identify the groups of treatment and control banks. Finally I find evidence of asymmetric responses in the interbank market participation of control and treatment banks. Both findings lead to an estimated range for the effect of a LLR on banks’ liquidity holdings of between 4.7 and 6.7 percentage points.

We build an alternative explanation of the book building process under the assumption that the issuer has a more precise estimate of the stock value than any outside investor. This asymmetrical information leads to adverse selection when the IPO game is played as a one-shot game using competitive auctioning. If the game is played repeatedly, repeated investors offer a truth-telling mechanism to an underwriter such that the underwriter certifies the firm value, which overcomes the adverse selection problem. The mechanism replaces competitive auctioning with an allocation procedure similar to the book building process. The underwriter gives allocation priority to the repeated (institutional) investors in order to expose herself to the mechanism incentives and thus gain credibility: This explains the documented discrimination among investors. The game’s continuation value for the underwriter is derived endogenously and the strategic relationship between the underwriter and repeated investors is fully characterized. When cash transfers are allowed, the model explains why the underwriter finds optimal to stabilize the secondary market at her cost. Optimally, the underwriter chooses to restrict the market stabilization benefits to repeated investors.

This paper develops a model that integrates the different phenomena implicit in previous theoretical and empirical work on clusters. It aims at reducing the gap between the increasing academic and policy interest in clusters and the conceptual and theoretical grounds upon which cluster research and policies are grounded. Its basic premise is that one of the obstacles for understanding the cluster phenomenon is the lack of integration of different assumptions, units and levels of analysis that are implicit in different conceptualizations that underlie current theoretical perspectives, empirical work, and public policies on clusters. The model makes explicit the different phenomena implicit in previous work and identifies the essential and contingent dimensions of clusters. This paper contributes a scholarship of integration approach for a better understanding of clusters, a new organizational context that is becoming an important line of research in management studies.

La presentación se basa en dos trabajos. En ambos se plantean juegos de competencia en precios bajo información incompleta y se comparan los equilibrios que ocurren en dos circunstancias: cuando ambos jugadores eligen simultáneamente y cuando uno de ellos cuenta con la prerrogativa de mover conociendo la decisión de su rival. El trabajo “The Effect of Corruption on Bidding Behavior in First-Price Auctions” se ocupa del caso en el que la competencia en precios toma la forma de una subasta, e interpreta a la capacidad de mover en segundo término como una ventaja derivada de un acuerdo corrupto entre el subastador y uno de los oferentes. El trabajo “Second-Mover Advantages in Bertrand Competition under Incomplete Information” (en elaboración) toma la competencia en un mercado oligopólico. En los dos casos se examinan fenómenos similares. Quien mueve primero, anticipando su desventaja, puede adoptar un comportamiento más o menos agresivo que en el caso de decisiones simultáneas, y se proveen condiciones suficientes para que cada una de estas posibilidades ocurra. Se evalúan, además, las consecuencias de pasar de un juego simultáneo a uno secuencial sobre el bienestar de los participantes y la eficiencia en el mercado

We carried out an empirical study of a salary negotiation involving the two major telecommunication companies in Argentina and a union by means of a detailed analysis of a number of time-sensitive dimensions. Drawing on Barbara Adam’s timescapes, an in-depth exploration of interweaved time-dimensions surrounding this negotiation was performed to further contribute to the understanding of time in conflict management literature. The timescape perspective acknowledges both the dynamics and the interplay of complex – and often colliding – time-dimensions which seem to be neglected or, at least, underestimated in popular conflict management forums. Implications for managers and negotiators stem from the analysis of this empirical study.

In this paper the analytical framework outlined by James Buchanan and Yong J. Yoon (2000) to explore the symmetric “tragedies of the commons and the anti-commons” is generalized to deal with the study of the relationship between institutions and corruption. A simple game theory model is built to show that corruption produces a “tragedy of the anticommons” and that it can be discouraged by the introduction of competition among corrupt agents to turn it into a “tragedy of the commons”. It is also shown that coordinated corruption or “maffia” behavior produces a better allocation of resources than uncoordinated corruption and that punishment of corruption based on earnings collected from bribes produces a better allocation of resources than sanctions based on the number of corrupt acts committed.

There is a suspicious scarcity of insider trading prosecutions in Latin America. When illegal insider trading goes unpunished, controlling groups can periodically confiscate minority shareholders in a politically low-cost way by using their privileged access to information to trade on it. In this paper, a simple theoretical model rationalizes the relationship between corporate governance and insider trading decisions through reputational arguments. We compute probabilities of private information-based trading (PIN) for the universe of liquid stocks from Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, and Colombia, trading both at home and as ADRs. We next apply these to address corporate governance questions. We find substantial heterogeneity of PIN within a given institutional environment. Nevertheless, we can identify significant differences in mean PIN across volume ranges, countries, and security types. PIN has an intuitively appealing correlation with some (but not all) of the country-wide investor protection variables used in the literature. Importantly, the stocks of firms with ADR programs have less PIN than those without, and countries with better information-related investor protection legal variables tend to have lower PIN. Panel regression analysis indicates that PIN is priced in the market: companies with higher PINs fetch lower Tobin.s qs. To check the robustness of PIN as a measure of private information trading, we analyze whether it peaks just before material corporate announcements are disclosed to the market. We find that this is true in general, although the magnitude and the lead of the anticipation seem higher for acquisition and divestiture announcements than for earnings and cash-dividend announcements. We conclude that the private information-based trading probability proxies for unobservable corporate governance quality as the heterogeneity of firm behavior seem to be recognized by the market and priced accordingly.

A considerable proportion of the authors engaged in the field of philosophy of economics and in economic theory has been explicitly or implicitly claiming for a reconsideration of ends within the subject-matter of economics. This line of inquiry suggests a considerable challenge to economic science. The logical structure of the rationality of ends differs from the one of means. This paper intends to explain the differences between both rationalities and some of the consequences of incorporating this new emphasis on ends. Is this reconsideration of ends legitimate? Is it positive? Is it necessary? Is it possible? Does it affect the use of maximization and optimization in economics? In this paper Sen’s ideas will be considered in this regard.

As a result of the enhanced competitiveness that characterizes the global market, multinational corporations have been forced to develop international purchasing strategies to purchase from foreign suppliers, that involve price reductions, increased access to technologies, better quality controls, and the introduction of competition at the domestic supply base. As a result, companies have been forced to pursue internationalization strategies for their purchase management in order to effectively support their globalization process through supplies. According to companies’ evolution in their globalization processes, literature studies reveal a strong link between the two key dimensions of international purchasing strategy: supply source –i.e., the level of supply globalization as related to MNC’ s worldwide operating needs- and purchase location – i.e., the level of centralization in relevant purchasing decisions. Our research, based on the study of a sample of seven Italian MNC’ s that have expanded their operations to the MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market) area, explores the process of purchasing strategy definition and development, focusing on the relationship between the two key dimensions and identifying key drivers, as well as their impact on decision-making processes.

We revisit the self-interest view on human behaviour and its critique, and propose a framework, called self-love view, that integrates self-interest and unselfishness and provides different explanations of the relationship between preferences, behaviour, and outcomes. Proponents of self-interest as the only valid behavioural assumption argue for simplified assumptions and clear models in order to propose precise prescriptions, while critics to this self-interest view argue for realistic assumptions and rich descriptions in order to reach better explanations. This debate inhibits theoretical development because it faces the problem of incommensurability of standards for choosing among paradigms. We propose the concept of self-love, or the inclination of human beings to strive for their own good and perfection, to remove the assumption self-interest vs. unselfishness. Self-love distinguishes between the object and the subject of motivation and therefore creates a bi-dimensional motivational space. This framework replaces the one-dimensional continuum self-interest - unselfishness, specifies eight interrelated motives, and provides different expected relationships between preferences, behavior, and outcomes. We show that a better understanding of motivational assumptions, their embodiment in theories, and their influence on the very behaviors these theories assume provides managers and policymakers more alternatives for the designing of motivational contexts than in the case of assuming either self-interest or a permanent conflict between self-interest and unselfishness.

What happens to the Spence signaling model under two dimensional asymmetric information? With two types of productivity and noise, the equilibrium remains separating if an extended single-crossing condition is satisfied; if not, there are partially pooling equilibria. In the partially pooling equilibria only extreme types can be distinguished, and supplementary information is needed to sort intermediate types. Over time, on-the-job interaction gives employers private information on productivity. Sticky wages force, through dismissals, public revelation of this private information. However, flexible wages do not, allowing employers to do cream skimming. Beyond the 2x2 case, employment relationships never lead to full revelation of productivity. Consequently, education is valuable as a life-time job market signal for high-productivity workers.

This paper examines the diffusion of a DIY chain store firm in Argentina. Its objective is to explore the growth of this new retail format from its inception in 1993 until 2000 when it first faced competition from a direct competitor. To that aim it uses survival analysis techniques to examine the factors that explain the duration of time before which the firm opens a store in a particular market. The results indicate that the hazard of entry is positively influenced by population size and the number of rudimentary dwellings while negatively related to the distance from the firm’s headquarters and the level of income. The findings suggest that there remain potential attractive markets for first entry strategies

El trabajo analiza la evolución de los retornos a la educación en Argentina durante el período 1974 – 2002 y cómo éstos se vieron afectados por el desempleo. Al evaluar los retornos a la educación no se debería considerar como beneficio simplemente el diferencial de ingresos sino también la mayor probabilidad de tener un trabajo, ya que los retornos son mayores si se los corrige teniendo en cuenta el desempleo por edad y por nivel educativo. Este análisis es particularmente relevante en Argentina, que pasó de tener tasas de desempleo cercanas a 5% durante la década del ochenta a tener tasas de desempleo de dos dígitos a fines del siglo XX y comienzos del siglo XXI.

This paper examines the effect of control changes on efficiency and productivity in the banking industry of Argentina. This industry represents an interesting case study as banks underwent corporate changes of different types including privatization, foreign acquisition of domestic banks and mergers and acquisitions among local institutions. Bank productivity is measured and decomposed into the effects due to returns to scale, technical progress and efficiency, while bank efficiency is related to a set of variables controlling for changes in bank ownership. The evidence suggests that control changes due to privatization had a positive short-term effect on productivity as a result of efficiency gains, which were the effect of returns to scale and that mergers and acquisitions had a positive impact on productivity mostly as a result of long-term efficiency effects.

This study explores a motivational justification to stakeholder theory. This methodological perspective is different and complementary of previous ones that impose normative considerations for stakeholder theory. Focusing on the entrepreneurial process, it analyzes the mechanisms that explain stakeholders’ actions and stakeholders’ alignment. The main argument is that stakeholders’ act motivated by both, the external output of their actions and the realization of the process. The process by itself, as a central motivation, provides individual and collective identity, what ultimately explains stakeholders’ alignment. This argumentation has managerial and normative implications.

How organizations create, transfer, and retain knowledge has been the focus of intensive investigation by management researchers. However, one aspect of the dynamics of knowledge—organizational forgetting— has received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we draw on an exploratory, multiple-case study of learning in international strategic alliances to explore how and why organizations forget. Based on our case study, we develop a theory of organizational forgetting, discuss the role of forgetting in the dynamics of organizacional knowledge, and present a typology of types of organizational forgetting.

This paper explores the determinants of privatisation revenues of generation and distribution assets in the electricity sector of 14 Latin American and Caribbean countries between 1992 and 2002. Three individual regressions reveal that government commitment to reforms and the choice of regulatory policy influence the valuation of assets. In the region, investors favour gradual entries into new markets. The auction process within countries is found to exhibit statistically significant dynamics of momentum and informational cascades. Apart from domestic factors, levels of regional stock market indices and US stock market volatility have an impact on the investors’ bids, too. The paper suggests that investors use international capital markets as an authoritative reference for the valuation of acquisitions, and concludes that during the decade of the 1990s Latin America has become part of a wider movement of the globalisation of power markets and the transformation of the electricity supply from a strategic, domestic infrastructure service into an internationally traded commodity.

This paper seeks to expand on two topical strands in Government Finance and Political Science literature, rent-seeking and the soft-budget constraint, so as to bring forth a strong linkage between them in corporate governance environments. It hopes to accomplish this target by setting up a distinctive framework of analysis that hinges on incremental cash flows. Firstly, it claims that both rent-seeking behavior and the soft-budget constraint are worthy of being applied to corporate governance learning and practice. Secondly, the paper contributes to focus on cash-flows reliability and managers’ accountability. Thirdly, it is shown how conflicts of interest underlie rent-seeking behavior, and how the latter relates to the soft-budget constraint.

Secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development. The evaluation of the causal effects of land titling, however, is a difficult task as the allocation of property rights is typically endogenous. We exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles to overcome this identification problem. More than twenty years ago, a group of squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of Buenos Aires. When the Congress passed a law expropriating the land from the former owners with the purpose of entitling it to the occupants, some of the original owners accepted the government compensation, while others are still disputing the compensation payment in the slow Argentine courts. These different decisions by the former owners generated an allocation of property rights that is exogenous in equations describing the behavior of the squatters. We find that entitled families increased housing investment, reduced household size, and improved the education of their children relative to the control group. However, effects on credit access are modest and there are no effects on labor income.

Financial planning books and academic papers in the U.S. have since long analyzed the horizon e¤ects that arise in domestic investment. The common knowledge in the subject is that the longer the time period over which you can hold on to your investments, the greater should be the share of common stocks in your portfolio. This paper is an attempt to search for horizon e¤ects in international portfolio allocation. In the case of international investments, the pre- dictability of returns is given by the long-run mean reversion that real exchange rates show among developed countries. We estimate and introduce a long memory (fractionally integrated) real exchange rate process - accounting for slow mean reversion - into an optimal portfolio allocation model where a representative investor can access domestic and international stocks, considering both .buy and hold.and .dynamic rebalancing strategies. Preliminary results show that risk-averse investors should hold more international equities the longer the time period over which they can hold on to their investments. Results depend upon the value of the initial real exchange rate against its long run mean. We .nally argue that our results can shed some light into the home bias puzzle.

There are three main streams of literature on the impact of firms’ innovativeness on business performance, one regarded to market orientation, other focused on innovation, and the last one related to National Innovation Systems. All the perspectives agreed upon the importance of innovation to business performance and focus on how internal and external factors influence on business performance. In spite of this widespread interest, relationship between a company’s innovation capacity and both internal and external facilitating factors is found to be of limited study. Findings suggest that firms with higher research and development budget and/ or relationship with research institutes have a higher degree of innovation. Even more, the ones that do develop this relationship are technology driven companies. Although we find a low degree of implementation of best practices, those with a higher degree of implementation were more innovative. Finally, we found that more innovative firms have better performance in terms of sales growth. Our study focuses on Argentine small and medium sized companies from the following industries: Software, Home Appliances, Electronics, Metallurgist, Iron & Steel, Metal Mechanics, Machinery and Food & Beverages.

The aim of this paper is to explore how different underlying worldviews in marketing affect the perception of the environment and how these impact the choice between transactional or relational offerings. Furthermore, we aim to show that not only positivistic and interpretivist paradigms are present in all of the management disciplines, in strategy, in organizational theory, in marketing, etc, but also that managerial disciplines seem to be moving from the reign of the positivistic schools, towards the emergence of the interpretativist schools, and finally towards a pluralistic approach. The analysis of the underlying worldviews is important for relationship marketing in practice because it may provide another, deeper-level explanation for the choices that managers make regarding transactional, relational and pluralistic offerings. At the theoretical level, it may help explain how and why the new RM paradigm developed in the marketing discipline.

organizational performance with the aim of creating a general framework as a management tool; however, little has been done to show how HR professionals add value to the overall performance of their firms in different contexts. Ulrich, Brockbank, Yeung and Lake (1995), this dissertation extends empirical research on the impact of HR dimension on Business Unit Performance in different change contexts. The methodology applied consists on three basic steps. First, analysis of a unique sample of business units from the third edition of “Human Resource Competencies Study” (HRCS) – conducted by the University of Michigan Business School. Second, statistical testing to find significantly different HR dimensions between the four above-mentioned groups. Third, statistical confirmations of these differences by comparing each pair of groups. The main finding is that in high performing business units immersed in high change contexts, HR stands our in the delivery of certain HR dimensions. In such firms, the HR function is much focused on strategic issues and it plays an important role as Strategic Partner and Change Agent. Furthermore, HR professionals in these firms are seen as specialists in delivering staffing, organization design, setting the direction of change, managing organizational culture and understanding external issues. Therefore, in high performing firms in high change contexts, HR professionals keep track of market information while aligning the human organization to meet external requirements and improve business performance. What makes this finding more interesting is that these HR dimensions show no significant differences between HR departments and HR professionals of the other three groups-high performers in low change, low performers in high change and low performers in low change-.

This paper studies the trade receivables policy of distressed firms as the trade off between the firm’s willingness to gain sales by financing their clients’ purchases and the firm’s need for cash. We find that firms increase trade receivables when they have profitability problems prior entering financial distress, but reduce trade receivables when they have cash flow problems in financial distress. We also find that cuts in trade receivables account for as much as 7% of the 30% average drop in sales and stock returns experienced by a firm in financial distress. Moreover, the performance decline of a firm in financial distress is significantly higher if the firm cuts trade receivables than if it does not.

In this brief paper we revise the original motivations of Rolf Mantel to pursue a proof of Sonnenschein's conjecture. We contend that his work on computational models of general equilibrium lead him to seek an alternative to the usual fixed point theorems used in proofs of existence. Confronted with a paper of Uzawa and his own experience in programming a national planning system he found that the use of theorems like Brouwer's and Kakutani's was unavoidable. To check out whether Uzawa was right he sought to find out whether the only properties required of excess demand functions to ensure the existence of equilibria in competitive markets were continuity, homogeneity and Walras' law. In 1974, he found that this was actually the case. We will see that this result and his interpretation were informed by Mantel's interest in economic development and planning.

Marketing scholars have addressed the influence of spatial correlation on consumers’ preferences and companies’ market shares, but no study has yet looked at the influence of spatial dependencies on consideration set membership. We investigate the explanatory power of spatial correlation (i.e., spatial proximity across buyers) for consideration probabilities. Our modeling approach builds upon the spatial probit model developed by Smith and LeSage (2004). We parsimoniously account for the impact of observable and unobservable heterogeneity as well as unobservable spatial dependencies on consideration set membership probabilities. We apply our model to stated consideration set data for new car buyers. We investigate the impact of the spatial interaction on the consideration probability for vehicle types (e.g., pickup trucks) and makes (e.g., Chevrolet). We find a significant spatial interaction in consideration set probabilities for type but not for makes. The magnitude of this correlation coefficient varies by the scale of geographical aggregation. Furthermore, we find that the impact of spatial correlation changes depending on the amount of heterogeneity explained by other model variables. Our findings allow managers to better understand multi-market competition and to customize the product and promotional offers based on geographical area.

Previous research has proposed mutual forbearance in multimarket interactions among firms. But the empirical analyses of this hypothesis have taken place in 'exploitation' rather than in 'exploration' type contexts and it is unclear if such arguments also apply to the latter. A key distinction between exploitation and exploration contexts is the higher level of uncertainty in the latter case since it deals with future markets rather than present revenue streams. We derive alternative hypotheses based on mutual forbearance and imitation perspectives. We test these implications in the context of biotech investments made by pharmaceutical firms during 1989-99. Unlike many previous studies we analyze entry as well as exit patterns in such investments, and extend the arguments to the case of “partial” investments. We find support for imitation behavior, but not for mutual forbearance. Additionally, we find that when firms enter uncertain markets through partial investments, the effects of multimarket contact are mitigated. Our study has important implications for the limits of the mutual forbearance approach in exploration, as well as for the development of alternative hypotheses in multimarket contacts.

This paper intends to contribute to the (bounded rationality) foundations of trust. After reviewing the extant definitions, I establish the formal structure of situations involving trust. In that context, I examine the paradoxical situation of (calculative) trust in simple settings. Then I show how bounded rationality provides a rationale for a concept of trust that goes beyond that calculative notion. Value systems and possible inconsistency of time preferences are shown to be crucial elements.

Los sistemas de comercialización prepago de servicios públicos constituyen una solución innovadora al problema de facilitar las posibilidades de pago de los usuarios. A pesar de su amplia difusión en países de Europa y Africa, el uso de estos sistemas es aún controvertido. Este trabajo contribuye a ese debate porque emplea un análisis costo-beneficio para examinar la adopción del sistema prepago de energía en Carmen de Areco, uno de los distritos administrativos de la provincia de Buenos Aires. Los resultados resaltan la potencialidad del sistema prepago de energía como herramienta tendiente a incrementar el bienestar social y permite identificar sus consecuencias para cada uno de los grupos afectados. Los resultados también destacan el papel de los descuentos en las tarifas, el costo de la inversión inicial y las características socioeconómicas de la población, por lo que contribuyen a la definición de las políticas regulatorias que afectan la adopción de mecanismos de prepago.

In this paper we study the value capture challenges firms face when introducing innovative goods. We will link the concepts of ‘technological change’ with ‘value capture’ in order to explain the profitability challenges that firms face in introducing innovative products into the market. This is, we will examine the value concept from a technology-based firm outlook and its capacity to be become profitable, more than from consumers or the society’s perspectives. After reviewing the literature related with technological change and value capture, we will follow by distinguishing the different value capture sources for systemic and stand-alone innovations. We will finish proposing a typology of innovative products, linked to different value capture mechanisms for distinctive types of innovative products.

What are the conceptions of human beings implicit in the practice of economic policies? Do they have some impact on their results in contemporary societies? These are the central questions addressed in the second section of the paper. But in order to give more precise answers to them we thought it would be better to begin with some synthetic references to the conceptions of human beings implicit in the economic science per se that, most of the times, inspires economic policy making. Our analysis will be focused on the mainstream of (Occidental) economic science, i.e., the so called neoclassic-Keynesian synthesis. Only minor references to more “heterodox” economic policies will be included. At the end of the paper, a concluding section aims to link the two first parts. Its central question is if some agenda could be devised in order to avoid the negative consequences arising from could be the main mistakes of the implicit conceptions of human beings dealt with in the paper.