infonet-economy

We document two facts. First, during the Great Recession, consumers traded down in the quality of the goods and services they consumed. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods. When households traded down, labor demand fell, increasing the severity of the recession. We find that the trading-down phenomenon accounts for a…

Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most frequently adopted management tools and has received much attention in the literature. This study advances research on CRM by investigating the impact of the relative time according to which interventions are implemented in different areas (customer management, CRM technology, organizational alignment, and CRM strategy) on CRM…

Using data on corporate venture capital (CVC) investments by US corporations between 2001 and 2013, we analyze their CVC expenditures based on their positions in syndication networks and their financial resources. The generalized-method-of-moments models used show that these companies’ annual CVC expenditures depend on the number of co-financing relationships they have and their cash…

This paper suggests a tentative conceptual framework to study the internationalization of foreign/OECD-based SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) attracted by fast growing emerging markets, such as China and other Asian economies, and the supportive role of global cities as market gate focal points providing a wide range of financial and non-financial services facilitating…

In this paper, we examine the efficiency of the sort done by the Swiss lower secondary school tracking system, looking at students’ outcomes in dual vocational education and training (VET)—the most common education type at the upper secondary level in the country. We discuss a simple Ricardian model about the process of school tracking based on the absolute advantage (i.e., the…

The main challenge of microfinance institutions and social economy firms remains their survival, and to meet this challenge, MFIs need to be compet-itive. The poor performance of MFIs is usually attributed to their decision-making and operational processes. The governance of MFIs is therefore identified as one of their main risks. Despite this, governance is still little explored in…

This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the proximity to the all-pay auction. This allows, in particular, to provide simple conditions…

This paper introduces a nonlinear shrinkage estimator of the covariance matrix that does not require recovering the population eigenvalues first. We estimate the sample spectral density and its Hilbert transform directly by smoothing the sample eigenvalues with a variable-bandwidth kernel. Relative to numerically inverting the so-called QuEST function, the main advantages of direct…

This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students' grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor's gender, we find that women…