nep-ppm New Economics Papers
on Project, Program and Portfolio Management
Issue of 2014‒08‒09
nine papers chosen by
Arvi Kuura
Tartu Ülikool

  1. The legacy of public subsidies for innovation: input, output and behavioural additionality effects By Stephen Roper; Nola Hewitt-Dundas
  2. Can Electronic Procurement Improve Infrastructure Provision? Evidence From Public Works in India and Indonesia By Sean Lewis-Faupel; Yusuf Neggers; Benjamin A. Olken; Rohini Pande
  3. Sustainable Project Finance, the Adoption of the Equator Principles, and Shareholder Value Effects By Eisenbach, S.; Schiereck, D.; Trillig, J.; Flotow, P. von
  4. Innovation, innovation strategy and survival By Stephen Roper; Helen Xia
  5. Aid, environment, and climate change in Africa: The case of Senegal By Ngaido, Tidiane
  6. The future of soft loans as an instrument of development finance: An assessment By Fritz, Livia; Raza, Werner
  7. Constructing regionalism in South America: the cases of transport infrastructure and energy within UNASUR By Giovanni Agostinis
  8. Bidding for Conservation Contracts By Author-Name: Luca Di Corato; Cesare Dosi; Michele Moretto
  9. How to share it out: The value of information in teams By Alex Gershkov; Jianpei Li; Paul Schweinzer

  1. By: Stephen Roper (Warwick University Business School); Nola Hewitt-Dundas (Queen's University Belfast)
    Abstract: In many countries significant amounts of public funding are devoted to supporting firms’ R&D and innovation projects. Here, using panel data on the innovation activities of Irish manufacturing firms we examine the legacy effects of public subsidies for new product development and R&D. We examine five alternative mechanisms through which such effects may occur: input additionality, output additionality, and congenital, inter-organisational and experiential behavioural additionality. Tests suggest contrasting legacy effects with R&D subsidies generating legacy output additionality effects while new product development subsidies have legacy congenital and inter-organisational behavioural additionality effects. Our results have implications for innovation policy design and evaluation.
    Keywords: innovation policy, additionality, evaluation, Ireland
    JEL: O32 L1 O38 Q34 L26
    Date: 2014–07–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:enr:rpaper:0021&r=ppm
  2. By: Sean Lewis-Faupel; Yusuf Neggers; Benjamin A. Olken; Rohini Pande
    Abstract: Poorly functioning, and often corrupt, public procurement procedures are widely faulted for the low quality of infrastructure provision in developing countries. Can electronic procurement (e-procurement), which reduces both the cost of acquiring tender information and personal interaction between bidders and procurement officials, ameliorate these problems? In this paper we develop a unique micro-dataset on public works procurement from two fast-growing economies, India and Indonesia, and use regional and time variation in the adoption of e-procurement across both countries to examine its impact. We find no evidence that e-procurement reduces prices paid by the government, but do find that it is associated with quality improvements. In India, where we observe an independent measure of construction quality, e-procurement improves the average road quality, and in Indonesia, e-procurement reduces delays in completion of public works projects. Bidding data suggests that an important channel of influence is selection -- regions with e-procurement have a broader distribution of winners, with (better) winning bidders more likely to come from outside the region where the work takes place. On net, the results suggest that e-procurement facilitates entry from higher quality contractors.
    JEL: H57 O12 O53
    Date: 2014–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20344&r=ppm
  3. By: Eisenbach, S.; Schiereck, D.; Trillig, J.; Flotow, P. von
    Date: 2013
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dar:wpaper:61937&r=ppm
  4. By: Stephen Roper (Warwick University Business School); Helen Xia (Loughborough University)
    Abstract: Innovation has a recognised effect on survival. Undertaking more risky innovation, for example, may increase the risk of business failure, while more incremental innovation may reduce failure risk. Here, we investigate how firms’ innovation strategy choices – which may reduce the riskiness or costs of innovation and/or increase the innovation rewards – moderate the innovation-survival relationship. Our analysis is based on UK Community Innovation Survey data matched with survival data from firms’ published accounts. We are able to match nearly 80 per cent of UK CIS respondents. Contrary to expectations we find that innovation partnering and intellectual property protection have little or no moderating effect on the innovation-survival relationship. However, receiving public support for innovation has significant positive moderating effects. This suggests the notion of “survival additionality”, i.e. firms receiving public support derive more persistent benefits from innovation than firms which did not receive public support. Specifically, firms which receive public support for innovation are 2.7 per cent more likely to survive for eight years than firms which innovate but without public support. This result is strongest for product and service rather than process change, with implications for innovation policy design and evaluation.
    Keywords: Innovation, survival, strategy, public support, additionality, UK
    JEL: O32 L1 O38 Q34 L26
    Date: 2014–02–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:enr:rpaper:0017&r=ppm
  5. By: Ngaido, Tidiane
    Abstract: The paper reviews the dynamics of the financing baseed its analysis on the rich dataset of AidData ranging over 1993-2010, with around 9,077 observations on projects funded in Senegal by various multilateral as well as bilateral donors. The study started
    Keywords: aid, biodiversity, climate change, environment, financing
    Date: 2014
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp2014-005&r=ppm
  6. By: Fritz, Livia; Raza, Werner
    Abstract: Within the framework of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, discussions on Financing for Development and the future of ODA have intensified recently. Amongst the many financial instruments that are potentially under review, are soft loans. Combining tied aid with concessional financing, soft loans are of a hybrid nature, involving both export promotion interests and development objectives. A recent ÖFSE research project took a closer look at the institutional evolution and the current status quo of soft loan financing in Europe. Upon that basis, scenarios for the future use of soft loans as an instrument of development finance are presented. --
    Date: 2014
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:oefsep:112014&r=ppm
  7. By: Giovanni Agostinis
    Abstract: This paper seeks to contribute to the study of contemporary South American regionalism focusing on the emergence and development of sectoral cooperation and policy coordination within the Union of South American Countries (UNASUR). To do so the paper analyzes two policy areas ?transport infrastructure and energy integration? from the inception of cooperation in 2000 until 2014, addressing two questions: (i) why regional cooperation has emerged despite the absence of economic interdependence and market-driven demand for economic integration, and (ii) why policy outcomes are evident in some areas (i.e., transport infrastructure) while limited in others (i.e., energy). Bringing together insights from rationalist and constructivist approaches in IR and IPE, it is argued that the emergence of regional cooperation as well as the sharp variation in policy outcomes between areas can be largely explained by the articulation of a regional leadership and its effect on the convergence of state preferences. The paper shows how the Brazilian leadership, incentivized by the effects of the US-led FTAA negotiations and the financial crises that hit the region in the late 1990s, made state preferences converge towards a regionalist project encompassing all South American countries by making visible the mutual benefits of cooperation on transport infrastructure and energy. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how in spite of significant changes in South American states’ cooperation preferences the Brazilian leadership was able to adapt the cooperation process in the transport infrastructure sector to the new circumstances of regional politics permitting not only the institutionalization of sectoral cooperation, but also the implementation of several infrastructure transnational projects. In the case of energy, instead, the emergence of a second regional leadership project –pursued by Chávez’s Venezuela – and the deep divergence of state preferences led energy cooperation into a gridlock.
    Date: 2014–06–24
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:erp:euirsc:p0393&r=ppm
  8. By: Author-Name: Luca Di Corato (Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden); Cesare Dosi (Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova and Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario sull’Economia Pubblica (CRIEP), Italy); Michele Moretto (Department of Economics and Management, University of Padova, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) and Centro Studi Levi-Cases, Italy)
    Abstract: Contracts providing payments for not developing natural areas, or for removing cropland from production, generally require long-term commitments. Landowners, however, can decide to prematurely terminate the contract when the opportunity cost of complying with conservation requirements increases. The paper investigates how this can affect bidding behavior in multi-dimensional auctions, where agents bid on both the conservation plan and the required payment, when contracts do not provide for sufficiently strong incentives against early exit. Integrating the literature on scoring auctions with that which views non-enforcement of contract terms as a source of real-options, the paper offers the following contributions. First, it is shown that bidders’ expected payoff is higher when facing enforceable project deadlines. Second, that failure to account for the risk of opportunistic behavior could lead to the choice of sellers who will not provide the contracting agency with the highest potential payoff. Finally, we examine the role that eligibility rules and the degree of competition can play in avoiding such potential bias in contract allocation.
    Keywords: Conservation Contracts, Scoring Auctions, Non-enforceable Contract Duration, Real Options
    JEL: C61 D44 D86 Q24 Q28
    Date: 2014–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2014.65&r=ppm
  9. By: Alex Gershkov; Jianpei Li; Paul Schweinzer
    Abstract: We study the role of information exchange, leadership and coordination in team or partnership structures. For this purpose, we view individuals jointly engaging in productive processes -- a 'team' -- as endowed with individual and privately held information on the joint production process. Once individual information is shared, team members decide individually on the effort they exert in the joint production process. This effort, however, is not contractible; only the joint output (or profit) of the team can be observed. Our central question is whether or not incentives can be provided to a team in this environment such that team members communicate their private information and exert efficient productive efforts on the basis of this communication. Our main result shows that there exists a simple ranking-based contract which implements both desiderata in a wide set of situations.
    Keywords: Moral hazard, Adverse selection, Leadership, Teams
    JEL: C7 D7 D8 L2
    Date: 2014–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:yor:yorken:14/08&r=ppm

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