Cuadernos de Economía y Dirección de la Empresa最新文献

In this paper we study the role of a firm's development of technological and marketing capabilities to explain the linkages between social capital and pioneer behaviour. We have applied a structural model on a sample of 224 firms of the Spanish footwear industry. This model allows us to detect a significant indirect effect of social capital on pioneer behaviour through the development of upstream technological and downstream marketing capabilities. The results obtained suggest that if firms are capable of taking advantage of linkages, confidence relationships and shared goals for the development of complementary capabilities, they will tend towards a pioneer behaviour. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of whether firms should manage their social networks to improve certain capabilities, which are necessary to gain first mover advantages.

This paper aims at analyzing the impact of technological relatedness between partners in R&D alliances on specific types of product innovation. After developing the conceptual framework based on organizational learning theory and dynamic capabilities, we carried out a longitudinal study of an international sample of pharmaceutical firms in order to test the hypotheses. The empirical research confirms that technological complementarity and similarity between partners influence differently on the creation of radical and incremental innovation. These evidences highlight the importance of designing a suitable portfolio of R&D alliances in order to develop different innovative capabilities.

The Open Innovation (OI) paradigm has emphasized the role of external knowledge in aiding internal R&D efforts. While most research based on this model has focused on high-tech sectors, this paper attempts to extend it to more mature industries. The study also analyzes a wide range of OI strategies and their relationships with different innovation outcomes. The empirical results, based on a large sample of Spanish manufacturing firms, show that OI strategies are highly effective tools for making internal R&D efforts more successful, both in high- and low-tech sectors. In addition, the study finds evidence that marketbased strategies are positively correlated to achieving process innovations, while partnering strategies have a similar relationship with product innovations. More formalized OI strategies, such as joint ventures, show positive relations with the achievement of patent results.

Analysing the factors that have an impact on workforce efficiency is a key point in the analysis of hotel management. Using a linked employer-employee dataset, this study estimates a production function for a hotel sample that establishes the main labour productivity determinants. This analysis investigates to what extent observable differences in productivity can be affected by the specific characteristics of both workers and the post they hold, as well as the actual characteristics of the establishments. Thus, the workers’ human capital has a positive impact on productivity, particularly the average employees’ tenure in the firm. Additionally, a negative relationship between workers’ educational mismatch and hotels’ performance has been detected.

The reputation has taken an important growth in both the academic and business communities in the last years. However, unanimity doesn’t exist with reference to its definition and its consideration like resource and capacity, provided that the developed great number of publications on the theoretical concept. This confusion demands a detailed study of the concept and its characteristics that help to clarify it and to identify its main benefits, the same way as its relationship with the managerial results.

In this paper we analyze the influence that the environmental institutional distance between countries has on the degree of environmental performance's similarity within the multinational enterprise (MNE). We break down the institutional distance between the host and the home country into distances in relation to the regulatory, cognitive, and normative dimensions of institutions. Building upon the institutional approach, we show that not all the national institutional dimensions have the same influence on the environmental performance's similarity within MNES. Whereas a high regulatory distance between countries leads MNEs’ units to have a different environmental performance according to each country's legal requirements, the cognitive and normative distances encourage these firms to standardize their environmental performance, independent of the countries where their units are based.

During the last ten years a large number of mergers between Spanish Cooperative Banks has taken place. The goal of this article is to analyze the effect that the mergers have had, that have been finalized during the first half of the first decade of the 21st century, on the levels of profit, efficiency, productivity and the strategic behaviour of these entities. Therefore we have chosen these completed mergers during this period and we have analyzed different variables comparing them to the average of the sector five years prior and five years after the merger had taken place. The study shows that the mergers have not improved the economic results of these banks, though they have altered the strategic behaviour.

Most empirical studies suggest that the Fisher effect, analysed through a cointegrating relationship between inflation and nominal interest rates, does not hold. Westerlund (2008) argues that this fact can be attributed in part to the low power of cointegration tests for individual countries, and that the use of panel data can generate more powerful tests. In the present study, we use, among others, two new panel cointegration tests proposed by that author that, unlike conventional panel cointegration tests, do not assume independence among crosssectional units (countries) and present better size and power properties. These tests are applied to a panel of quarterly data covering fifteen countries of the European Union between 1983:1 and 2009:1. Our results show that there is evidence for a cointegrating relationship between inflation and nominal interest rates for this panel, and that the two variables move one-to-one, as postulated by the full Fisher effect.