Using history to help refine international business theory: ownership advantages and the eclectic paradigm

In John Dunning’s eclectic paradigm firms need to have ownership, location, and internalisation advantages in order to cross borders and engage in foreign direct investment. By drawing on historical evidence on the evolution of a group of leading marketing-based multinationals in consumer goods, this paper claims that, despite its richness, the eclectic paradigm, and in particular the concept of ‘ownership advantages’, needs to be revised and extended, to take into account different levels of institutional analysis. For the eclectic paradigm to give a rounded view of the internationalising firm it needs to acknowledge the critical importance of firm-specific ownership advantages such as the role of the entrepreneur.

A cyclic time-dependent Markov process to model daily patterns in wind turbine power production

Wind energy is becoming a top contributor to the renewable energy mix, which raises potential reliability issues for the grid due to the fluctuating nature of its source. To achieve adequate reserve commitment and to promote market participation, it is necessary to provide models that can capture daily patterns in wind power production. This paper presents a cyclic inhomogeneous Markov process, which is based on a three-dimensional state-space (wind power, speed and direction). Each time-dependent transition probability is expressed as a Bernstein polynomial. The model parameters are estimated by solving a constrained optimization problem: The objective function combines two maximum likelihood estimators, one to ensure that the Markov process long-term behavior reproduces the data accurately and another to capture daily fluctuations. A convex formulation for the overall optimization problem is presented and its applicability demonstrated through the analysis of a case-study. The proposed model is capable of reproducing the diurnal patterns of a three-year dataset collected from a wind turbine located in a mountainous region in Portugal. In addition, it is shown how to compute persistence statistics directly from the Markov process transition matrices. Based on the case-study, the power production persistence through the daily cycle is analysed and discussed

Shifting Patterns in Marks and Registration: France, the United States and United Kingdom, 1870-1970

This paper looks at trademarks and brands, beyond the conventional interests of marketing and law, as a way to explaining the evolution of international business and economies in general. It shows that the perspective defended by many scholars such as Chandler (1990), Wilkins (1991, 1994) and Koehn’ (2001), about the Anglo-Saxon countries, and in particular the United States, leading the transition to modern trade-marks is narrow in its focus. Instead of the United States standing out as historically on the leading edge of innovation in the law and practice of trade marking, it appears from several directions to have been on the trailing edge. France and Britain have a more enduring interest in trademarking. The paper also looks at one particular subset of trade mark registration data – non durable consumer goods. These, and in particular food, are the dominant sectors in the three countries in terms of trademarking, reflecting the character of the sectors where imagery associated with the products is so central in competition. The paper relies on original data from three countries, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, in particular trade mark registrations, and the analysis spans for a period of one hundred years period 1870-1970.trade marks, brands, international business history, intellectual property rights, trademark law

Using third-party endorsements to build a brand’s reputation: The case of British chocolate

Cadbury and Rowntree built lasting reputations without investing heavily in marketing in their early days, writes Teresa da Silva Lope

The shading sign: is it exclusive of endometriomas?

To investigate if the shading sign is an exclusive MRI feature of endometriomas or endometrioid tumors, and to analyze its different patterns. Three hundred and fourty six women with adnexal masses who underwent 1.5/3-T MRI were included in this retrospective, board-approved study. The shading sign was found in 56 patients, but five cases were excluded due to lack of imaging follow-up or histological correlation. The final sample included 51 women. The type of tumor and the pattern of shading were recorded for each case. Thirty endometriomas and five endometrioid carcinomas were found. The remaining 16 cases corresponded to other benign and malignant tumors. The overall sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were 73%, 93%, 59%, and 96%, respectively. Restricting the analysis to cystic lesions without solid or fat component, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were 73%, 96%, 94%, and 80%. Five shading patterns were identified: layering (15.7%), liquid-liquid level (11.8%), homogenous (45.1%), heterogeneous (11.8%), and focal/multifocal shading within a complex mass (19.6%). No significant correlation was found between these patterns and the type of tumor. The shading sign is not exclusive of endometriomas or endometrioid tumors. Homogenous shading was the most prevalent pattern in endometriomas and half of the cases with focal/multifocal shading within a complex mass were endometrioid carcinomas.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Economic policy uncertainty and return on financial assets: the G7 case

This dissertation aims at understanding the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the stock and bond market returns of the group of seven. We test the hypothesis that higher uncertainty levels cause decreases on these financial assets returns. We analyse the impact that the economic policy uncertainty index and previous returns have on current returns and if an increase of economic policy uncertainty lead to an increase of conditional volatility. This research relies on the EPU Index, developed by Baker et al. (2016), and employs daily data averaged into monthly time series for G7 stock and bond markets, covering the period from January 2000 to December 2016. Concerning the stock market, we find evidence of a significant impact of EPU on current returns for most of the countries. Canada and Italy are the exceptions. Concerning conditional volatility, we report that the EPU has impact on United States (U.S.), United Kingdom (U.K.), Canada, Germany and Japan. EPU does not show significant results to France and Italy. In the bond market and in contrast with previous returns, EPU does not have a great impact on the current returns for most of the countries. In what concerns conditional volatility, the previous returns have no influence for the entire sample and EPU presents significant results for U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan.Esta dissertação tem como objetivo compreender o impacto da incerteza económica nos retornos do mercado de ações e obrigações do grupo dos sete. Testamos a hipótese de que um maior nível de incerteza económica conduz à diminuição dos retornos destes ativos. Analisamos o impacto que o índice de incerteza económica e os retornos passados têm nos retornos atuais e se aumentos da incerteza económica se podem traduzir em aumentos da volatilidade condicional. Esta pesquisa recai sobre o índice EPU, desenvolvido por Baker et al. (2016), e compreende dados diários transformados em séries temporais mensais para os mercados de ações e obrigações do G7, entre Janeiro de 2000 e Dezembro de 2016. No que concerne ao mercado de ações, existe evidência de um impacto significativo da EPU nos retornos atuais, para a maioria países. Canadá e Itália são as excepções. Relativamente à volatilidade condicional, informamos que a EPU tem impacto nos Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, Canadá, Alemanha e Japão. A EPU não apresenta resultados significativos para França e Itália. No mercado das obrigações e ao contrário dos retornos passados, a EPU não apresenta impacto nos retornos atuais para a maioria dos países. No que respeita à volatilidade condicional, verifica-se que os retornos passados não têm influência nesta variável, ao contrário da EPU que apresenta valores significativos para os Estados Unidos, Canadá, Alemanha, Itália e Japão

The Identified Skeleton Collection of Évora: importance for forensic science and bioarchaeology in the southern inland of Portugal.

The importance of reference osteological collections is unquestionable. However, the development of methodologies is more reliable the closer the collection is socioeconomically, demographically, and genetically to the population under study. The purpose of this study is to characterize and contextualize a new Portuguese reference collection. The collection of identified skeletons from the University of Évora comprises 201 adults of both sexes and seven non-adults, deceased between 1870 and 1993 and born between 1790 and 1969. It consists almost exclusively of individuals who were born and died in inland Alentejo, being the only Portuguese collection with this characteristic. The collection was built following all current legal and ethical obligations. Due to its characteristics, the collection constitutes a fundamental tool for forensic and bioarchaeological research in the inland regions of Portugal. In addition to the possibility offered to develop and validate methodologies in both sciences, the available complete hospital archives for research make this collection unique for health studies before, during, and after the epidemiological transition