Agile, Stage-Gate, And Their Combination: Exploring How They Relate to Performance in Software Development

This exploratory study investigates the relationship of plan-driven Stage-Gate and flexible Agile models with new product development performance through an original conceptualization that focuses on their underlying principles for managing uncertainty and the resulting changes. While Stage-Gate attempts to control uncertainty up-front to avoid later changes, Agile seeks to adapt to uncertainty and accommodate changes for a longer proportion of the development process. In addition, we examine the interaction effects of combining the two models. The analysis of survey data on 181 software developers shows that the adoption of Stage-Gate principles is negatively associated with speed and cost performance. For Agile, the use of sprints is positively related to new product quality, on-time and on-budget completion, while early and frequent user feedback would seem to prolong time-to-market. Finally, the results highlight a nuanced interaction between Stage-Gate and Agile, both positive and negative depending on the principles considered

No man is an island : the impact of heterogeneity and local interactions on macroeconomics dynamics

We develop an agent-based model in which heterogeneous firms and households interact in labor and good markets according to centralized or decentralized search and matching protocols. As the model has a deterministic backbone and a full-employment equilibrium, it can be directly compared to Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models. We study the effects of negative productivity shocks by way of impulse-response functions (IRF). Simulation results show that when search and matching are centralized, the economy is always able to return to the full employment equilibrium and IRFs are similar to those generated by DSGE models. However, when search and matching are local, coordination failures emerge and the economy persistently deviates from full employment. Moreover, agents display persistent heterogeneity. Our results suggest that macroeconomic models should explicitly account for agents’ heterogeneity and direct interactions

Convergences des structures productives et synchronisation des cycles industriels dans l'Union européenne

Nous analysons la convergence des systèmes industriels de l'Union européenne (UE) et la comparons à la synchronisation des cycles industriels. L'article présente d'abord plusieurs indicateurs de performance économique pour les sept économies majeures de l'UE : l'Allemagne, l'Autriche, l'Espagne, la France, l'Italie, les Pays-Bas et le Royaume-Uni. Ces indicateurs mettent en exergue une hétérogénéité prononcée. D’un côté, l’Autriche, l’Allemagne et les Pays-Bas sont apparemment « guéris » de la Grande Récession. De l’autre, l’Espagne et l’Italie présentent toujours des symptômes inquiétants avec de faibles gains de productivité du travail et un PIB qui n’a pas encore recouvré son niveau d’avant-crise. L'économie française se situe entre ces deux groupes. En utilisant des méthodologies statistiques récentes permettant de quantifier la similarité des structures productives des pays, nous examinons ensuite la question de la convergence – ou de la divergence – des pays de l'UE. Conformément aux indicateurs de performance industrielles de base, nous trouvons une fracture Nord/Sud qui s'affirme au cours du temps. Ces résultats corroborent les prévisions de Krugman (1993), selon lesquelles l’un des effets de l’initiative européenne est d'accroître la spécialisation régionale et d'augmenter les divergences de croissance entre pays. En fait, tout se passe comme si la réduction des coûts de transaction dans l'UE accentuait la concentration de l'activité industrielle hautement spécialisée en Allemagne, au détriment de ses voisins européens. En outre, en raison de l’inclusion des économies d'Europe de l'Est et du groupe des pays de Višegrad, l’économie allemande a réussi à externaliser les activités industrielles peu qualifiées, accentuant ce faisant son rôle déjà central dans l’ensemble de la chaîne de valeur européenne. Certes, ceci a généré la fracture Nord/Sud européenne. Toutefois, les effets positifs sont observables en termes de plus grande intégration économique de l’ancien bloc de l’Est, qui est maintenant bien synchrone avec l’économie allemande. Nous affirmons que cette hétérogénéité des tendances économiques et des schémas de spécialisation, couplée avec l'absence de synchronisation entre les principaux pays de l’UE, représentent un défi majeur en termes de politiques macroéconomiques. Les réformes institutionnelles, fiscales et monétaires doivent être conçues de manière à atteindre des niveaux plus élevés de coordination et d’intégration, afin de recouvrer un processus de convergence nécessaire à la stabilité économique de l'U

Italy : escaping the high debt and low-growth trap

With its public debt amounting to 132.1% of GDP and its negative productivity growth over the last twenty years, Italy appears to be the sick man of the European Union. In this Policy brief, we focus on its two main plights: high public debt burden on the one hand, sluggish GDP and productivity growth on the other hand. Both issues are intimately related: a slow growth limits the budgetary margins and casts doubts on public debt sustainability; the reduced fiscal space in turn weighs on growth and public investment. The first part is dedicated to describing the history and causes of Italian public debt. A first phase, from the 1960s to the 1980s, was characterized by a positive but moderate growth of debt. A second phase saw the explosion of public debt, from 54% of GDP in 1980 to roughly 117% in 1994. The budget law of the Amato's government in 1992 initiated a third phase, marked by a significant fiscal consolidation effort, and the decrease of the public debt to GDP ratio. The Great Recession interrupted this consolidation era and a last phase began from 2008 on, when the public debt-to-GDP ratio consequently increased. In the second part, we review some of the structural weaknesses of the Italian economy. We notably emphasize the specialization bias towards low tech sectors, the “nanism” of Italian firms, the misallocation of talents and resources, the North-South divide and its related labor market consequences. We conclude with four policy recommendations for a revival of growth in Italy. Our first proposal is technical and proposes a new European fiscal golden rule which would remove specific public investments from the computation of structural primary balance. Our second and third proposals are related to the regulation of the labor market, with the introduction of a minimum wage on the one hand, and the facilitation of retraining policies on the other hand. Last, we call for a revival of industrial policies in order to foster knowledge accumulation and firm learning. Our view is that Italy's fate is inextricably related to Europe's and that Italy needs more rather than less Europe

Italy : escaping the high debt and low-growth trap

With public debt amounting to 132.1% of GDP and negative productivity growth over the last twenty years, Italy appears to be stuck in a high-debt and low-growth trap. We focus on the causes of Italy's two main economic plights and discuss how they are intimately related: a slow growth limits the budgetary margins and casts doubts on public debt sustainability; the reduced fiscal space and the tight fiscal rules in turn weighs on growth and public investment. In the first part, we discuss the roots of the explosion of Italian public debt, the country's consolidation attempts in the 1990s and early 2000s and finally, the effects of the Great Recession and fiscal austerity. In the second part, we identify the structural weaknesses of the Italian economy. We notably emphasize the specialization bias towards low tech sectors, the “nanism” of Italian firms, the misallocation of talents and resources, the North-South divide and its related labor market consequences. We conclude with some policy recommendations for a revival of growth in Italy. Our first proposal calls for industrial policies which foster knowledge accumulation and firm learning. The second proposal envisages a new European fiscal golden rule which would remove specific public investments from the computation of structural primary balance. Our third proposal is instead related to labor market regulation, and advocates for the introduction of a minimum wage on the one hand, and the facilitation of retraining policies on the other hand. Our fourth proposal highlights the need to complete the banking union and to solve the issue of non-performing loans in order to improve the robustness of the Italian banking sector. Lastly, we conclude that Italy's fate is inextricably related to Europe's and that Italy needs more rather than less Europe to escape its high-debt and low-growth tra

Financialization in the EU and its consequences

Building on ISIGrowth research, in this policy brief we present empirical evidence on the patterns of increasing financialization in the EU in the last two decades, an analysis of its possible adverse effects on several objectives of the EU 2030 agenda, including inclusive growth, innovation, inequality and financial stability. We conclude by providing some policy insights and recommendations. The notion of financialization reflects, on the one hand, the engagement of non-financial firms into financial activities not directly related to production, and, on the other hand, the relative size of the financial sector with respect to the overall economy. Several empirical indicators show that financialization has been increasing in the Euro Area in the last two decades. This finding is important because while financialization has been so far mostly considered to be a driver for growth and innovation, there is today a wealth of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence pointing to the detrimental effects of excessive financialization for growth, innovation, inequality and financial stability. First, excessive financialization depresses economic growth because it implies that a larger fraction of credit is directed toward unfruitful investment projects, possibly generating economic crises (e.g. via housing price bubbles). Second, financialization has negative impact on innovation because the separation between actors taking risks from innovation and actors extracting rents from innovation implies lower share of reinvested profits (e.g. via short-termism and share buy-backs). Third, financialization contributes to inequality by strengthening top earners’ bargaining power in terms of higher wages and lower taxation, as well as by burdening public budgets with fiscal assistance to financial institutions in time of crisis. Fourth, financialization may lead to financial instability by increasing both the leverage of interconnected financial institutions and the risk of mispricing of large asset classes (e.g. the dynamics of leverage and mispricing of mortgage backed securities in the run of the 2008 financial crisis). We suggest some countermeasures that could help containing excessive financialization, including: (i) fostering the demand in the real sector; (ii) establishing mission-oriented programs by going beyond the traditional conceptual framework to fix market failures and aim to create markets where they may not exist at all; (iii) encouraging the alignment of top managers’ compensation schemes with long-term profit and corporate social responsible goals; (iv) studying the possibility of setting a minimal ratio on banks for lending to the real economy (to non-real estate sectors); (v) studying the possibility of setting a maximal level of intra-financial leverage for financial institutions

The Janus face nature of debt : results from a data-driven cointegrated SVAR approach

In this paper, we investigate the causal effects of public and private debts on US output dynamics. We estimate a battery of Cointegrated Structural Vector Autoregressive models, and we identify structural shocks by employing Independent Component Analysis, a data-driven technique which avoids ad-hoc identification choices. The econometric results suggest that the impact of debt on economic activity is Janus-faced. Public debt shocks have positive and persistent influence on economic activity. In contrast, rising private debt has a milder positive impact on gross domestic product, but it fades out over time. The analysis of the possible transmission mechanisms reveals that public debt crowds in private consumption and investment. In contrast, mortgage debt fuels consumption and output in the short-run, but shrinks them in the medium-run