Venting Out: Exports during a Domestic Slump

We study the relationship between domestic-demand shocks and exports using data for Spanish manufacturing firms in 2002–2013. Exploiting plausibly exogenous geographical variation caused by the Great Recession, we find that firms whose domestic sales declined by more experienced a larger increase in export flows, controlling for firms’ supply determinants. This result illustrates the capacity of export markets to counteract the negative impact of local demand shocks. By structurally estimating a heterogeneous-firm model of exporting with nonconstant marginal costs of production, we conclude that these firm-level responses accounted for half of the spectacular increase in Spanish goods exports over the period 2009–2013. (JEL D22, E32, F14, L60)

Film as the Engine for Learning

Film has been used for education ever since educators recognized its powerful potential for learning. But its educational application has been criticized throughout the decades for underuse of the distinctive potential of film: to raise interest. To understand more fully film’s potential for learning, we propose a dynamic model of viewer interest and its underlying cognitive and emotional mechanisms (film’s interest raising mechanisms or FIRM model). In addition, we present an analysis method for assessing the interestingness of films in learning contexts. Our model marries interest theories from cognitive film theory and educational psychology and captures the dynamics of interestingness across a film as depending on a balance between challenge posed and coping potential provided.

Environmental Compliance and Enterprise Innovation: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Enterprises

This paper embeds environmental compliance factor and compliance cost factor into the M-O monopolistic competition and multi-product firm model to construct a theoretical model applicable to environmental compliance and enterprise innovation. In addition, we also construct a new environmental compliance index. We use the random-effects Tobit model and the double hurdle model to empirically test the micro-data from the Database of China Industrial Enterprises from 1998 to 2013, then we use the Generalized Propensity Score Matching (GPSM) to conduct a robustness test. The robustness conclusion is that environmental compliance has a significant U-shaped relationship with enterprise innovation, which means, environmental compliance will inhibit enterprise innovation on the left of the inflection point of environmental compliance (0.669), while environmental compliance on the right of the inflection point will promote enterprise innovation. The sub-sample regressions show that, enhanced environmental compliance of state-owned enterprises, mature enterprises, core area enterprises and export enterprises with low level of the environmental compliance, makes the greater inhibition to enterprise innovation, and enhanced environmental compliance of above enterprises with high level of the environmental compliance, makes the greater contribution to enterprise innovation. To this end, the government should adopt the policy, from the shallower to the deeper, to promote the construction of environmental compliance, and identify the inflection point of the environmental compliance on enterprise innovation to stimulate the role of environmental compliance in promoting enterprise innovation.

Coordination of verification activities with incentives: a two-firm model

In systems engineering, verification activities evaluate the extent to which a system under development satisfies its requirements. In large systems engineering projects, multiple firms are involved in the system development, and hence verification activities must be coordinated. Self-interest impedes the implementation of verification strategies that are beneficial for all firms while encouraging each firm to choose a verification strategy beneficial to itself. Incentives for verification activities can motivate a single firm to adopt verification strategies beneficial to all firms in the project, but these incentives must be offered judiciously to minimize unnecessary expenditures and prevent the abuse of goodwill. In this paper, we use game theory to model a contractor-subcontractor scenario, in which the subcontractor provides a component to the contractor, who further integrates it into their system. Our model uses belief distributions to capture each firm’s epistemic uncertainty in their component’s state prior to verification, and we use multiscale decision theory to model interdependencies between the contractor and subcontractor’s design. We propose an incentive mechanism that aligns the verification strategies of the two firms and using our game-theoretic model, we identify those scenarios where the contractor benefits from incentivizing the subcontractor’s verification activities.

Trade and Management

We study how management practices shape export performance using matched productiontrade-management data for Chinese and American firms and a randomized control trial in India. Better managed firms are more likely to export, sell more products to more destinations, and earn higher export revenues and profits. They export higher-quality products at higher prices and lower quality-adjusted prices. They import a wider range of inputs and inputs of higher quality and price, from more advanced countries. We rationalize these patterns with a heterogeneous-firm model in which effective management improves performance by raising production efficiency and quality capacity.

Can ‘Civil Enterprises’ survive in the market? Some game theoretical considerations on the one-shot game

Civil enterprises (CEs) are firms whose main goal is to produce benefits for the community, working according to a logic of reciprocity. In this paper we discuss, from a game theoretical perspective, as to what extent it is possible for such enterprises to survive in competition with profit-maximizing firms in the marketplace, since market competition might take the form of a prisoner’s dilemma game, where the public good at stake is the commitment to moral rules. In those games cooperative strategies are strictly dominated by the defective behavior of the players, i.e. CEs would not survive while retaining their values. We argue that market competition is more appropriately modelled as an n-firm model and show that, given a sufficient number of CEs in the market, they can survive despite having to interact with for-profit firms, even when the game is played only once.

Adaptive Real-Time Routing Protocol for (m,k)-Firm in Industrial Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Many applications are able to obtain enriched information by employing a wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) in industrial environments, which consists of nodes that are capable of processing multimedia data. However, as many aspects of WMSNs still need to be refined, this remains a potential research area. An efficient application needs the ability to capture and store the latest information about an object or event, which requires real-time multimedia data to be delivered to the sink timely. Motivated to achieve this goal, we developed a new adaptive QoS routing protocol based on the (m,k)-firm model. The proposed model processes captured information by employing a multimedia stream in the (m,k)-firm format. In addition, the model includes a new adaptive real-time protocol and traffic handling scheme to transmit event information by selecting the next hop according to the flow status as well as the requirement of the (m,k)-firm model. Different from the previous approach, two level adjustment in routing protocol and traffic management are able to increase the number of successful packets within the deadline as well as path setup schemes along the previous route is able to reduce the packet loss until a new path is established. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes are able to improve the stream dynamic success ratio and network lifetime compared to previous work by meeting the requirement of the (m,k)-firm model regardless of the amount of traffic.