infonet-economy

In response to the unusually high levels of price volatility during the world food price crisis of 2007/2008, US and EU regulators have introduced position limits that aim to protect commodity markets from exposure to excess speculation. Such regulatory initiatives presuppose that excess speculation is indeed responsible for excess volatility. Our results debunk this presupposition…

Online communities are attractive sources of ideas relevant for new product development and innovation. However, making sense of the ‘big data’ in these communities is a complex analytical task. A systematic way of dealing with these data is needed to exploit their potential for boosting companies' innovation performance. We propose a method for analysing online community data…

Sustainability remains high on the worldwide agenda in the cocoa sector as numerous problems threaten its viability. This study gives a broad picture of the Ghanaian cocoa sector and examines the initiatives of two Swiss chocolate manufacturers aiming at a more sustainable and future-oriented cocoa production in Ghana.
The study reveals many challenges the Ghanaian cocoa sector…

Ideas are essential for innovation and for the continuous renewal of a firm’s product offerings. Previous research has argued that online communities contain such ideas. Therefore, online communities such as forums, Facebook groups, blogs etc. are potential gold mines for innovative ideas that can be used for boosting the innovation performance of the firm. However, the nature of…

Purpose: This research presents a methodology to characterize life cycle impact data (LCIA) of alternative construction materials outside of the European context.
Methods: This methodology was based on the characterization of data and life cycle assessment (LCA) using geographic information systems (GIS), which has been proposed as an effective alternative for this purpose. The…

This study estimates the earning losses of workers experiencing an involuntary job separation. We employ, for the first time in the earning losses literature, a Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator with fixed effects that has several advantages with respect to conventional fixed effects models. The Poisson estimator allows considering the full set of involuntary separations,…