This study investigates the connection between the duration of financial contracts and that of labour contracts. Workers with long-term contracts have incentives to invest in training. This makes ...them attractive to the entrepreneur. Furthermore, this behaviour will be reinforced if financial contracts are long-term, because it reduces the probability of an early liquidation as well as the dismissal of trained workers. As a conclusion, significant increases in the length of financing contracts should be accompanied by corresponding increases in the length of labour contracts. Support for this theoretical contention is found by testing it on a dataset composed of Spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1991-2000.
We investigate the relation between segment disclosure and earnings quality. Using a US sample for the period 2001–2006, we find a positive relation between earnings quality and the quantity of ...segment disclosures. We use lead-lag tests to examine the flow of causality, and our results show that current segment disclosure is positively related to prior levels of earnings quality, while current earnings quality scores are not related to prior levels of segment disclosure. Thus, the causality flows from earnings quality to segment disclosure. Our results hold for both business and geographic segment disclosure.
We argue that a recently appointed operations manager deploys a higher variability inventory policy than a high-tenure operations manager does. This contention is supported by the idea that the ...former manager determines the production schedule by focusing on the current-period demand for information, while the latter also incorporates her expectations over future demand shocks. A second theoretical outcome of this study is that the variability of inventory and of the number of firm's employees are positively correlated, especially in firms with a recently appointed operational manager. Such managers use cojointly inventory and temporary workers to buffer demand shocks more often than high-tenure managers. Empirical support for these propositions was gathered from two databases of Spanish manufacturing firms.
In this paper, we study the effect of different financial contracts on the firm's inventory policy. Doing so will allow to define the best financial instruments to diminish the stock variability of a ...profit-maximizing firm in a given economic environment (expansion or recession), and for a given market structure. We show that in periods of recession (expansion), reducing (increasing) the amount of short-term debt is an optimal strategy independently of the market structure.
We explore the interaction between public support for R&D and appropriability using a dataset constructed from the Spanish Community Innovation Survey, for the period 2000-2005. We find that public ...support policy is less able to stimulate privately financed internal R&D in firms where appropriability mechanisms are more effective. On average, the effect of public support for R&D is three times larger for those firms reporting a level of appropriability below the median vis-à-vis those firms for which appropriability is above the median level. Furthermore, for supported firms with the highest degree of appropriability, crowding out cannot be ruled out. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers
En este trabajo se razona que la decisión de emitir deuda negociable por parte de las empresas genera una reducción en los costes financieros de origen bancario que éstas soportan. Fundamentamos este ...hecho a partir de tres argumentos: i) la posible delegación en el mercado de la supervisión que deberían llevar a cabo los bancos, con lo que se abaratan los costes de supervisión de estos últimos; ii) el incremento en el poder de negociación de las empresas emisoras de deuda respecto de los bancos, al utilizar las primeras canales de financiación alternativos al bancario; iii) la posibilidad de que la emisión de deuda sea interpretada como una señal positiva sobre la calidad de la empresa. Asimismo, argumentamos que dicho efecto es menos importante en las emisiones de deuda sucesivas, especialmente si son a corto plazo.
Contrastamos empíricamente este y otros resultados afines utilizando la base de datos SABE para el período 1993-1998 y comprobamos que las hipótesis teóricas tienen un respaldo empírico.
This article examines, on the one hand, the impact of the cooperation between universities and industry on the performance of innovative activities conducted by pharmaceutical firms in Spain and, on ...the other hand, the article assesses the impact of universities as a source of information for the innovative activities of the Spanish pharmaceutical industry.
Data were drawn from the panel of technological innovation, based on the innovation surveys from 2003 to 2005. The survey included 132 pharmaceutical firms and information was available on the firms' innovative outputs (four indicators), cooperation with universities, and the firms' assessment of the importance of universities as an information source for innovative activities. Firm size, R&D expenditures and the use of biotechnology were used as control variables.
The impact of cooperation with universities was found to be positive and significant (p > 0.01). Moreover, the results show a positive impact of both the use of biotechnology and the use of universities as a source of information on firms' innovative performance (p < 0.01).
Pharmaceutical firms that cooperate with universities are more likely to apply for patents and to be granted them. Moreover, the share of sales from new products is larger among firms that have cooperated with universities than among those that have not.
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