It is widely accepted that environmental and demographic changes will significantly influence the future of our society. In recent years, an increasing number of studies has analyzed the interlinkages among economic growth, environmental factors and a specific demographic variable, namely life...

Firms often use acceptance sampling to monitor the quality of the raw materials and components delivered by suppliers. In this paper, we use numerical methods to examine how a risk averse supplier produces and delivers a quality level that maximizes the supplier's expected utility. We examine...

In this paper we provide a generalization of the standard models of the diffusion of a new product. Consumers are heterogeneous and risk averse, and the firm is uncertain about the demand curve: both learn from past observations. The attitude towards risk has important effects with regard to the...

This paper examines endogenous quality provision by firms with market power when social influence plays a role in consumers' purchasing decisions. A monopolist chooses price and quality of a single product to sell to consumers with unit mass. Quality has two dimensions: m-quality, which...

In a complex and dynamic business environment, managers widely appeal to modern methods and techniques that would help them cope with the competition and offer their customers new, attractive, good quality products and services and at competitive prices. In this context, total quality management...

I compare certification and self-regulation, two widely used quality assurance mechanisms in markets where consumers do not observe the quality of goods. Certification is a mechanism in which an external firm offers a certificate to producers who undergo a testing procedure, issues the...

This paper proposes a novel method to estimate productivity and quality at the firm-product level, together with transformation function and demand parameters. The method relies on firm optimization conditions to obtain a one-to-one mapping between observed data and unobserved productivity and...

The dynamic effects of Foreign Direct Investment in Portugal allowed for a structural shift in exports towards technology-intensive activities. However, since 2000, several factors, largely triggered by the global financial crisis, led to a drop in industrial output along with a reduction in FDI...

Since the mid-twentieth century, the Portuguese economy converged vis-à-vis with the EU average, due to backwardness advantages. At the same time, the dynamic effects of Foreign Direct Investment allowed for a structural shift in exports towards technology-intensive activities. However, in the...

This paper reviews the relationship between natural resources and economic growth, and stresses how natural capital tends to crowd out foreign capital, social capital, human capital, andphysical capital, thereby impeding economic growth across countries and presumably also over time....