An Investigation Into Religious Peer Effects

The communal nature of religion suggests peer effects exist in religiosity, potentially through positive spillovers in religious participation and social formation of religious beliefs. Using seven measures of religiosity, we estimate positive and negative peer effects in each case using peer group composition. We use a simultaneous equation model to account for self-selection into religious peer groups, and while we find positive peer effects are insignificant, there are significant negative peer effects operating through non-religious friends. This suggests peers affect social formation of religious beliefs, rather than through positive spillovers in religious participation.

A Take-Home Message: Spillovers from Workplace Food Waste Campaigns to the Home

Understanding how workplace food waste campaigns impact behaviours at home can help promote broader lifestyle change than piece-meal behavioural interventions. Using a quasi-experimental field study and a survey of workers in the hospitality sector, we quantify the worker’s responses to pro-environmental food waste campaigns. We find evidence that efforts to reduce food waste at work is associated with food saving actions at home, pointing to positive spillovers across these contexts.

The cloud and its silver lining: negative and positive spillovers from automotive recalls

Product recalls hurt the sales of non-recalled products in the category because of negative spillovers. Recently, there has been some evidence of positive spillovers from recalls on the sales of non-recalled products. We focus on spillovers from brand- (i.e., same brand), firm- (i.e., same firm, but not same brand), and country-level (i.e., same country-of-origin, but not same firm) recalls on the sales of non-recalled products. Furthermore, we examine how advertising and price of non-recalled products interact with brand-, firm-, and country-level recalls to affect their sales. We use data on 124 cars in the USA in 2006–2015. Results indicate that brand-level (country-level) recalls hurt (benefit) the sales of non-recalled products. Higher advertising and price of non-recalled products weaken the negative effect of brand-level recalls, while lower advertising and price strengthen the positive effect of country-level recalls. Finally, firm-level recalls result in positive spillovers when advertising is high.

Research Insights: Can Struggling Primary School Readers Improve Their Reading through Targeted Remedial Interventions?

This paper assesses the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at improving the reading skills of struggling third-grade students in Colombia. In a series of randomized experiments, students participated in remedial tutorials conducted in small groups during school hours. Trained instructors used structured pedagogical materials that can be easily scaled up. Informed by the outcomes of each cohort, the intervention tools are fine-tuned for each subsequent cohort. The paper finds positive and persistent impacts on literacy scores and positive spillovers on some mathematics scores. The effectiveness of the program grew over time, likely because of higher dosage and the fine-tuning of materials.

ECO-INNOVATION PATHS: CONVERGENCE OR DIVERGENCE?

Eco-innovations comprise new or modified processes, techniques, practices, systems and products allowing environmental harms to be avoided or reduced. They are employed in order for specific social and environmental objectives to be achieved, hence their environmental, social, and institutional significance relating to the achievement of long-term sustainable growth patterns. As a consequence, eco-innovation has great amount of focus from many countries. Adding to the current literature which focuses mainly on the drivers and effects of eco-innovation in the context of developed and developing countries, this paper tries to find an answer to the question about the absolute β-convergence of eco-innovation. We also consider the spillover effects in the analyses. Our sample consists of 38 countries and relates to the years 2012−2017. We apply the spatial panel models to verify the research hypotheses. The results confirm that there is the absolute β-convergence in the sample countries. Moreover, we find evidence of positive spillovers of eco-innovation.

Research Insights: Does R&D Activity Stimulated by Chile’s FONDEF and FONTEC Programs Lead to Knowlege Spillovers?

Chile's FONDEF and FONTEC R&D grant programs both boost the productivity of direct beneficiaries, increasing total factor productivity (TFP) by around 4.2 percent. However, spillover effects are contingent on program design. Only FONDEF funded projects (requiring collaboration between firms and research centers) generate positive spillovers. FONTEC projects, which fund R&D within the firm, do not. Spillover effects are nonlinear according to the share of firms within a sectorregion receiving subsidies. Positive knowledge spillovers dominate when the share of treated firms is small. However, if the program supports a large share of a firms rivals, spillovers decline as a result of a business-stealing effect.

Does Chinese Inward Foreign Direct Investment Improve the Productivity of Domestic Firms? Horizontal Linkages and Absorptive Capacities: Firm-Level Evidence from Ethiopia

Publicized as a global call for action in 2015, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has forwarded an agenda of resolutions to achieve the goals of sustainable development by 2030 (SDGs). Due to the specific challenges of funding gaps and the lack of advanced technology, the majority of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are still behind the standard of world development. Since foreign direct investment (FDI) has the potential to bring much-needed capital and efficient technology, FDI has often been considered as a vigorous source of development, even for sustainable development for under-developing economies experienced today. Conspicuously, Chinese outward FDI (OFDI) into SSA has seen a strong upward trend in the 21st Century, after China proclaimed its “go global” strategy. Ethiopia is one of the favored destinations of the trend of Chinese OFDI, which also substantially continues through the SSA region. The hosting economy of Ethiopia expected that Chinese inward FDI comes with capital, efficient technology, and knowledge to contribute innovations through directly improving productivity and competitiveness via technological diffusion to domestic industries and eventually for sustainable development. Against this backdrop, this study utilizes firm-level panel datasets from Ethiopia to address the following couple of research questions. The first question is: are there any productivity differences between the establishment of Chinese-affiliated and domestic firms in the manufacturing industry in Ethiopia? The second is, does the presence of Chinese-affiliated firms provide productivity spillovers for domestic firms in the same industry level for socio-economic development? The investigation was carried out using 2554 manufacturing firm census data, from which 15.04% were Chinese firms operating in Ethiopia. We used the ordinary least squares (OLS) and generalized-method-of-moments (GMM) two-step approaches for estimations. Our findings revealed that, generally, Chinese firms were more productive than local firms and their presence can bring positive potential productivity spillover effects for domestic firms. Specifically, we found that local firms have gained significant positive spillovers when they had a high absorptive capacity, whereas low-absorptive capacity firms suffered negative spillovers. We also found that non-exporting domestic firms experience significant positive spillovers from the presence of Chinese firms.

Economic upgrading in global value chains

This paper has critically documented a vast literature addressing the multi-layered outcomes associated with participating in global value chains (GVCs). In particular, this paper reviews and synthesizes the definitions and quantitative measures of one particular dimension of the GVC analysis that is two-fold: the economic and social upgrading. More specifically, we discuss the economic perspective of upgrading, which is usually associated with “moving into higher value-added stages”, and it is commonly assumed to be followed by positive spillovers regarding technology and productivity. This paper emphasizes the important diversity of definitions and measures within the GVC literature, considering it as a reflection, to a certain extent, of the absence of a systematic theoretical apparatus in the GVC literature. The paper concludes with some considerations on the role of policymakers in promoting social upgrading as an important topic in the GVC research agenda.