An Application of Constant Market Share Analysis for the Study of Firm Profitability

We propose a new decomposition of the return on investment (ROI) – the main accounting measure of firm profitability – to evaluate the contributions of its three components: the return on sales (ROS), the utilization (rotation) of working capital (RCC), and the utilization (rotation) of fixed capital (RCF). By using this decomposition we develop an original variant of the constant market share (CMS) analysis specifically for comparisons of firm average profitability between countries and over time. The proposed CMS methodology allows us to separate the variation of the average ROI over time (or its difference between two countries) in three components: a competitiveness effect – the difference of average ROI assuming the same reference structure for the two terms of comparison – a structure effect – the result of the difference in the internal articulation of the ROI by sector and by size structure within the two terms of comparison – and an adaptation effect, which takes into account the synergies between the two previous components. The decomposition of the ROI in the product of the three terms, ROS, RCC and RCF, plays an original role in the interpretation of the competitiveness effect. An application of the proposed methodology is carried out for the comparison of the average ROI in the industrial sector among Germany, Italy and France and over the years 2006-2008.constant market share analysis; return on investment; return on sales; rotation of invested capital; comparison over time; comparison over countries

Stable producer co-operatives in competitive markets

An argument often adopted to explain the relatively scarce presence of Producer Co-operatives (PCs) in Western capitalist economies is the instability that may affect this type of firm during the positive phases of the business cycle. In a nutshell the argument is that in profitable industries PCs can have an incentive to hire fixed-wage workers to replace the relatively more expensive firm's members. The paper shows that this phenomenon can fail to hold in very competitive and low barrier-to-entry markets in which, potentially, dismissed members have a chance to set up new firms. Furthermore, since some basic results on PC's stability are due to the assumption of an exogenous equilibrium wage as opposed to an endogenous PC's payoff, the paper attempts to remove this assumption. Two main insights are thus provided. Firstly, that workers possess an incentive to set up PCs only under specific circumstances. Secondly, that once PCs enter a market, conditions exist under which they are stable against the temptation to dismiss members to hire fixed-wage workers.Producer Co-operatives, Wages, Self-employment

The INTERNODES method for the treatment of non-conforming multipatch geometries in Isogeometric Analysis

In this paper we apply the INTERNODES method to solve second order elliptic problems discretized by Isogeometric Analysis methods on non-conforming multiple patches in 2D and 3D geometries. INTERNODES is an interpolation-based method that, on each interface of the configuration, exploits two independent interpolation operators to enforce the continuity of the traces and of the normal derivatives. INTERNODES supports non-conformity on NURBS spaces as well as on geometries. We specify how to set up the interpolation matrices on non-conforming interfaces, how to enforce the continuity of the normal derivatives and we give special attention to implementation aspects. The numerical results show that INTERNODES exhibits optimal convergence rate with respect to the mesh size of the NURBS spaces an that it is robust with respect to jumping coefficients.Comment: Accepted for publication in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineerin

Managers Compensation and Collusive Behaviour under Cournot Oligopoly

The aim of the present paper is to show that the existence of a concrete outside option for firms' executives can induce, under specific circumstances, every firm to adopt restrictive output practises. In particular, the paper characterizes the conditions for which, under Cournot oligopoly, existing firms behave more collusively than in a standard Cournot model. It is also shown that room exists for perfect and stable collusive agreements amongst firms. Other interesting findings are also twofold. Firstly, that the equilibrium executives' pay will usually be dependant upon the number of companies initially disposing of the technology and/or of the organizational knowledge required to set up the business. Secondly, that companies' procedures difficult to duplicate can constitute a beneficial form of competition policy in that they induce the firms to behave less collusively in the product market.Managers' Compensation, Oligopoly, Collusion, Outside Option

Bistable Clustering in Driven Granular Mixtures

The behavior of a bidisperse inelastic gas vertically shaken in a compartmentalized container is investigated using two different approaches: the first is a mean-field dynamical model, which treats the number of particles in the two compartments and the associated kinetic temperatures in a self-consistent fashion; the second is an event-driven numerical simulation. Both approaches reveal a non-stationary regime, which has no counterpart in the case of monodisperse granular gases. Specifically, when the mass difference between the two species exceeds a certain threshold the populations display a bistable behavior, with particles of each species switching back and forth between compartments. The reason for such an unexpected behavior is attributed to the interplay of kinetic energy non-equipartition due to inelasticity with the energy redistribution induced by collisions. The mean-field model and numerical simulation are found to agree qualitatively.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure

Spherically symmetric solutions of a boundary value problem for monopoles

In this paper we study spherically symmetric monopoles, which are critical points for the Yang-Mills-Higgs functional over a disk in 3 dimensions, with prescribed degree and covariant constant at the boundary. This is a 3-dimensional gauge-theory generalization of the Ginzburg-Landau model in 2 dimensions.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, LaTe