Thin film solar cells offer several benefits over conventional first-generation technologies including lighter weight, flexibility, and a wider range of optoelectronic tunability. Their environmental ...impact however needs to be investigated comprehensively to provide a clear comparison point with the first generation photovoltaics currently dominating the market. The main objective of this review is to evaluate current Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies conducted on thin film solar cells, highlighting the key parameters considered including life cycle stages, impact categories, and geographical locations. This included both commercially available thin film solar cells (a-Si, CIGS, CIS, CdTe, GaAs and GaAs tandem) as well as emerging (PSC, PSC tandem, DSSC, OPV, CZTS, QD) ones. A critical assessment of the results of 58 LCA studies was conducted and compared with traditional silicon based solar cells. Results indicate that emerging thin film solar cells hold great promise, as they tend to perform better than commercially available ones in the specified indicators, especially for CZTS and OPV. The assessment demonstrated that overall thin film solar cells had less energy requirement and better environmental performance than conventional crystalline silicon solar cell systems. However, due to their lower efficiencies their energy payback time was higher. This review provides a benchmark for the environmental LCA of different thin film solar cell technologies in order to highlight the relevance of these devices for sustainable energy generation and to give manufacturers and LCA experts information and a basis for future evaluation of solar cells.
•Current life cycle assessment studies on thin-film solar cells were evaluated•Emerging thin-film solar cells performed better than commercially available ones•CZTS and OPV show the lowest environmental impact among other thin-film solar cells•Thin-films had better environmental performance than c-Si solar cells•Thin-films showed less energy requirement but longer EPBT due to lower efficiency than c-Si
The celebrated capital asset pricing model ('CAPM') brought numerous appealing insights and spawned a new theory of capital budgeting. One key intuition is that there is 'no penalty for diversifiable ...risk' - that is, any risky payoff that has zero-correlation with the wider economy, and hence zero-beta, is treated as 'risk-free'. Does that mean that managers can bet the firm on a spin of the roulette wheel without attracting a higher CAPM discount rate? Our re-interpretation of CAPM reveals that potential financial losses which are conventionally regarded as firm-specific 'unpriced' risks can bring a large increase in the firm's beta and CAPM cost of capital, despite having zero-beta and making only negligible difference at the aggregate market level. This mathematical result clashes with textbook expositions but is easily demonstrated and can be traced to authoritative but overlooked parts of the theoretical CAPM literature.
This study aims to investigate the interaction effects of marketing and R&D expenditure on brand competitiveness based on performance indicators. While many studies have investigated the individual ...effects of marketing expenditure and R&D expenditure on a company's brand value, competitive advantage, and performance, there has been limited research on the interaction effect of these two indicators on brand competitiveness. Longitudinal data were collected from 145 companies over seven years, including 1015 observations. The companies were selected using the systematic removal method from 485 companies on the Tehran stock exchange market. We used a generalised method of moments (GMM) to analyse the data. Findings demonstrate that marketing, when considered independently, had a significant effect on brand competitiveness (as reflected in market share) in the long run, while R&D demonstrated a marginally significant effect. In addition, this study revealed that the interaction effect between marketing expenditure and R&D expenditure on brand competitiveness was marginally significant. These results demonstrate that companies need to invest in marketing activities to leverage the benefits of R&D in order to improve their brand competitiveness. As most companies often face budget constraints, maintaining investments in marketing and R&D is recommended to ensure sustained competitiveness in the long term.
•Investing in both R&D and marketing may yield a synergistic effect that leads to higher brand competitiveness than the individual effects of each investment alone.•The interaction between marketing and R&D investments in enhancing brand competitiveness is intricate and may involve reciprocal relationships and feedback loops, underscoring the importance of considering their integrated effects.•Companies that invest in both marketing and R&D may have a higher market share than those that invest in only one of these areas.•Marketing and R&D can provide businesses with a competitive advantage on account of increasing consumer value and market share through innovation and effective branding.
Entry into platform-based markets Zhu, Feng; Iansiti, Marco
Strategic management journal,
01/2012, Volume:
33, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper examines the relative importance of platform quality, indirect network effects, and consumer expectations on the success of entrants in platform-based markets. We develop a theoretical ...model and find that an entrant's success depends on the strength of indirect network effects and on the consumers' discount factor for future applications. We then illustrate the model's applicability by examining Xbox's entry into the video game industry. We find that Xbox had a small quality advantage over the incumbent, PlayStation 2, and the strength of indirect network effects and the consumers' discount factor, while statistically significant, fall in the region where PlayStation 2' s position is unsustainable.
We examine a period in which the in‐principle prohibition of share repurchases was relaxed in 2018 to allow for the repurchase of shares whose prices dropped materially or were below book value. We ...find that share‐loan pledges by controlling shareholders are significantly and positively associated with share repurchases for a sample of 3,531 Chinese firms. This finding is robust using entropy and propensity score matched samples, 2SLS IV regressions, regression discontinuity design (RDD), and two exogenous shocks (the China–US trade war in 2018 and the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020). The association remains robust but becomes less strong with state ownership and with above industry average firm agency problems, leverage ratios and financial constraints/distress (i.e., other share repurchase motives). Our findings highlight the importance of financial market regulations on share‐loan pledging and share repurchases in emerging markets during periods of heightened firm‐specific and systemic margin call risk and impending liquidation of share‐loan pledges.
In this paper, we show that, compared with no network externalities, firms always obtain higher profits and social welfare in the presence of positive network externalities, irrespective of the ...managerial delegation contracts. Furthermore, we show that whether the owner chooses market share delegation or sales delegation contracts relies on the type and strength of network externalities. If the network externalities are positive and strong enough, sales delegation dominates the market share delegation; otherwise, the owner will choose market share delegation. More importantly, we find that, if the network externalities are positive, the optimal interest rate of a loan commitment decreases with an increase of network externalities, and the firm's delegation behavior will benefit society regardless of the delegation contract types. On the contrary, the optimal interest rate increases with an increase of network externalities, and the firm's delegation behavior will harm social welfare in the presence of negative network externalities.
Sebagai salah satu Negara dengan penduduk muslim terbesar didunia, Indonesia merupakan pasar potensial bagi bisnis berbasis syariah termasuk industri keuangan syariah. Pemerintah Indonesia telah ...melakukan berbagai upaya agar industri keuangan syariah dapat berkembangan di Indonesia salah satunya adalah dengan membuat ketentuan diperbolehkannya bank konvensional melakukan konversi menjadi bank syariah. Kebijakan tersebut ternyata berdampak positif dalam meningkatkan market share industri perbankan syariah terhadap pangsa pasar industri keuangan di Indonesia. Pada tahun 2016-2017 market share industri keuangan syariah meningkat menjadi 5,3% dan 5,78% padahal pada tahun 2015 market share industri perbankan syariah hanya 4,83%. Meningkatkanya market share industri perbankan syariah, salah satunya disebabkan konversi bank Aceh menjadi bank Aceh Syariah pada tahun 2016. Konversi yang dilakukan oleh Bank Aceh secara umum berdampak positif terhadap market share industri perbankan syariah, namun bagaimana kondisi pada internal pada bank Aceh Syariah sendiri apakah ada perubahan signifikan bank Aceh Syariah dalam menjalankan fungsi intermediary? Guna mencari atas pertanyaan ini maka studi ini perlu dilakukan. Studi ini menggunakan analisis kuantitatif dengan pendekatan before after. Data penelitian yang digunakan adalah data skunder yaitu data laporan keuangan bank Aceh Syariah selama 18 bulan sebelum konversi dan 18 bulan setelah konversi. Analisis data menggunakan paired sample t-test dengan menggunakan software SPSS.21. Hasil dari studi ini membuktikan bahwa setelah melakukan konversi menjadi bank Aceh Syariah ada perbedaan yang signifikan dalam menjalankan fungsi intermediary baik dari sisi jumlah pembiayaan dan jumlah DPK. Hal ini menunjukkan bahwa perubahan brand bank Aceh menjadi Syariah berdampak positif dengan keputusan masyatakat untuk menggunakan produk bank Aceh Syariah.
Prices are typically used as proxies for countries' export quality. I relax this strong assumption by exploiting both price and quantity information to estimate the quality of products exported to ...the United States. Higher quality is assigned to products with higher market shares conditional on price. The estimated qualities reveal substantial heterogeneity in product markets' scope for quality differentiation, or their "quality ladders". I use this variation to explain the heterogeneous impact of low-wage competition on US manufacturing employment and output. Markets characterized by relatively short quality ladders are associated with larger employment and output declines resulting from low-wage competition.
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