Supply-side Characteristics Research Articles

Sweetening the Deal: The Political Economy of Land Redistribution in South Africa’s Sugar Sector

Under what conditions do land transfers occur under land reform? Theories of land redistribution focus on demand-side explanations for land transfers where the state allocates land in exchange for support from voters or rural elites. In this article, I argue that land transfers under market land redistribution are driven by supply-side characteristics of landholders. Using the case of South Africa’s sugar sector, I show that landholders chose to sell their land via redistribution when they had the economic incentive to preserve existing state-support frameworks and had collective capacity from centralized institutions. To understand when and why land redistribution occurs, one must pay attention to the landholders’ relationship to the state and their internal sectoral organization. In some cases, landholders may have an incentive to redistribute their land.

Gender Quotas in Hiring Committees: A Boon or a Bane for Women?

Women are underrepresented in many prestigious positions. Could increasing the share of women in hiring committees boost the rates at which women are hired into these positions? I use a difference-in-differences design to examine the effects of a French law on academic hiring committees that required each gender to represent a share of at least 40% of members. Contrary to the objectives of the law, I show that the reform backfired and significantly lowered women’s probability of being hired. Because the negative effect of the reform is concentrated in committees headed by men, this result seems driven by the reaction of men to the reform. I find little evidence that the reform affects supply-side characteristics, such as the likelihood of women applying. The results suggest that the underrepresentation of women is unlikely to be solved by simply increasing the share of women in hiring committees or interview panels. This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations. Funding: This work is supported by the ANR LIEPP [Grants ANR11LABX0091 and ANR11IDEX000502]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01637 .

Demand and supply effects on native-immigrant wage differentials: the case of Malaysia

This paper uses a matched employee-employer dataset using the Productivity and Investment Climate Survey 2007 to assess the relative effect of demand and supply-side characteristics on the wages of native and immigrant workers in Malaysia. In doing so, the study demonstrates noteworthy differences in the wage determination process. Individual supply-side characteristics are found to be a key determinant of wages for native workers, and are relatively more important in explaining the wage variation than demand-side effects. In contrast, individual supply-side characteristics are found to explain noticeably less of the wage variation for immigrant workers. Therefore, this study reveals that native and immigrant wages do not solely reflect the workers’ productivity, although this effect is far more pronounced for the migrant workers.

Gender gaps in power and control within jobs

Abstract This article investigates the gender differences in the tasks performed at the workplace using individual-level data representative of the French working population. In particular, we are interested in exploring gender gaps in power and control. Our findings reveal that, within the same job, women tend on average to be subjected to more forms of control than men even controlling for a wide set of supply-side characteristics, such as education, age and seniority. Moreover, these gender differences often exacerbate within male-dominated jobs, although they do not necessarily disappear as the share of women increases. We conclude that, within the same job, in the French labour market women tend to be in a more subordinated position compared with men.

INVESTIGATION ON ENTREPRENEURIAL VIABILITY OF INDIGENOUS INNOVATIONS IN KENYA. A SURVEY OF BARINGO AND NAKURU COUNTIES ON MURSIK MILK.

Indigenous innovations can aid developing nations embark on a cumulative path of positive growth by providing great opportunities to stimulate economic growth leveraged on indigenous knowledge, cultural practices and resources residing within native communities. Mursik is milk preservation traditional technology among Kalenjin community in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. The community is renown worldwide for producing dominant athletes in the world, especially in long distances races such as marathons. The trademark heroic welcome of these athletes is a sip of this prized Mursik. Over the years scanty businesses have attempted to market this milk in food outlets with a few also attempting to process and pack it. However, the success and commercial performance or future potential has remained unknown. This study therefore aimed at investigating on entrepreneurial viability Mursik so as to propose a framework model for its commercialization that can be generalized to other related indigenous innovations that abound in diverse communities in Kenya. Specifically, the study determined supply side characteristics, demand side characteristics, innovation€™s characteristics, and moderating effect of innovation promoters. Data was obtained using semi-structured questionnaires administered on a snow-balled sample of size of 59 accessed enterprises. However, only 35 of those enterprises completed the data collection adequately for analysis. The selected enterprises comprised caterers, hotels, foods outlets and processors where Mursik. Each provided one respondent who was the senior manager or entrepreneur of the enterprise. The findings obtained indicated that whereas there was huge supply of milk in the proximal catchment area the supply was not consistent and suppliers preferred delivering it to large milk processors who had not yet adopted Mursik as part of their line of products. Further, the consumption demand for Mursik was dominated by members of the indigenous Kalenjin community and who also preferred home brewed Murisk for better quality and its cultural associations. The innovation itself strongly possessed necessary characteristics for potential for massive adoption. It was also found to elicit a lot of interest with new users who were willing to try it. However, the knowledge and technology transfer capacity was very constraining. The traditional production process was also inevitably slow and would not be consistent with rapid production process associated with most milk products in fast moving consumer goods. The researcher therefore recommends an experimental study on technology improvement to enable rapid production and yet maintain quality and value attributed to the original Mursik product, and also determination of means of value packaging, promotion and distribution beyond the traditional users of the product.

Lost in Categorisation? Employment Subsidies – Bringing the Beneficiaries Back In

AbstractEmployment subsidies are important active labour market policy (ALMP) tools, suited to a variety of labour market challenges. This paper engages with recent ALMP categorisation debates by appraising Cronert’s (2019) recent typology of employment subsidies. It uses empirical material to assess the typology’s explanatory power and produce insights to inform further typological development. The illustrative case of the British ‘Wage Incentive’ (2012-2014) is used to assess the typology’s analytical purchase. Cronert’s typology helpfully identifies key distinctions in the distributional profiles of employment subsidies, but further understanding of the category is impeded by the practice of defining them as demand-side interventions. The paper argues for a reappraisal of their supply-side characteristics, maintaining that the (potential) worker should be included in the analysis, and that employment subsidies’ relationship with training and job creation should be acknowledged. It proposes a redefinition of employment subsidies reflecting their real-world use, and suggests a framework for further exploring varieties of employment subsidy design from the perspective of beneficiaries.

Optimal Operation for Regional IES Considering the Demand- and Supply-Side Characteristics

A regional integrated energy system (RIES) is an electricity-centric multi-energy system that can realize the mutual conversion of electricity, heat, cold, and other energy. Through multi-flexible resource interaction and the transaction of multi-investment entities, the efficiency of energy utilization can be improved. To systematize energy-consuming entities and scale photovoltaic-based renewable energy in a distribution network, the energy-consuming behavior, energy-producing schedule, and trading strategy can be coupled. Considering the interaction between the energy-consuming behavior and the uncertainty of distributed photovoltaic output, an optimal operation method for RIES is proposed on the basis of social network theory and an uncertain evolutionary game method in this paper. From the perspective of the operator, the overall profits of RIES are maximized considering the entity characteristics of both the demand and the supply side. A case study shows that the proposed method can ensure the reasonable distribution of profit among the investment entities. A closer social relationship between energy-consuming entities or a lower transaction risk cost of energy-producing entities can increase the overall energy transaction profit.

Demand vs supply-side approaches to mitigation: What final energy demand assumptions are made to meet 1.5 and 2 °C targets?

Today’s climate policies will shape the future trajectory of emissions. Consumption is the main driver behind recent increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, outpacing savings through improved technologies, and therefore its representation in the evidence base will impact on the success of policy interventions. The IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR1.5) summarises global evidence on pathways for meeting below-2 °C targets, underpinned by a suite of scenarios from integrated assessment models (IAMs). We explore how final energy demand is framed within these, with the aim to making demand-related assumptions more transparent, and evaluating their significance, feasibility, and use or underutilisation as a mitigation lever. We investigate how the integrated assessment models compensate for higher and lower levels of final energy demand across scenarios, and how this varies when mitigating for 2 °C and 1.5 °C temperature targets through an analysis of (1) final energy demand projections, (2) energy-economy relationships and (3) differences between energy system decarbonisation and carbon dioxide removal in the highest and lowest energy demand pathways. We look across the full suite of mitigation pathways and assess the consequences of achieving different global carbon budgets. We find that energy demand in 2100 in the highest energy demand scenarios is approximately three to four times higher than the lowest demand pathways, but we do not find strong evidence that 1.5 °C-consistent pathways cluster on the lower end of demand levels, particularly when they allow for overshoot. The majority of demand reductions happen pre-2040, which assumes absolute decoupling from economic growth in the near-term; thereafter final energy demand levels generally grow to 2100. Lower energy demand pathways moderately result in lower renewable energy supply and lower energy system investment, but do not necessarily reduce reliance on carbon dioxide removal. In this sense, there is more scope for IAMs to implement energy demand reduction as a longer-term mitigation lever and to reduce reliance on negative emissions technologies. We demonstrate the need for integrated assessments to play closer attention to how final energy demand interacts with, relates to, and can potentially offset supply-side characteristics, alongside a more diverse evidence base.

Digital Labor Market Inequality and the Decline of IT Exceptionalism

Several decades of expansion in digital communications, web commerce, and online distribution have altered regional IT labor market returns in the United States. IT occupations experienced similar wage growth as STEM occupations involving IT-related work activities, and wage inequality rose across locations and within MSAs. Supply side characteristics especially agglomeration and skilled labor pooling contributed to regional variation in IT wages since 2005. The size distribution of establishments in IT-using services industries increasingly drove IT wage inequality after 2012. While market concentration contributed to wage premiums across locations, establishment count contributed to within-MSA wage spread.

Voluntary assurance of sustainability reporting: evidence from an emerging economy

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the supply and demand side of sustainability assurance in Bangladesh.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on signalling theory, a logistic regression model is used for a sample of 100 of the largest Bangladeshi companies to study the relationships between assurance, sustainability disclosure, industry membership and reporting format.FindingsAuthors’ results show that companies which produce more sustainability information are more likely to get their sustainability assured, to be from non-carbon intensive industries, and are more likely to integrate their sustainability information with the financial annual reports. Authors’ results support the argument that organisations based in weaker legal environments are more likely to secure assurance as this adds to the credibility and reliability of sustainability reports.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper has limitations which raise some issues for future research. First, the authors have covered only large companies; therefore, future research could examine the differences between small and large companies in relation to assurance. Secondly, the authors’ data consist of company sustainability disclosure information in the fiscal year 2015. Longitudinal studies are recommended to extend this research. Finally, future research could examine the moderating effects of geographical location on the relationship between assurance (and its providers) and other variables.Practical implicationsThe findings of this paper will prove valuable to practitioners and researchers. Practitioners, including assurance providers and sustainability reporting managers will benefit from authors’ study as it covers both the demand and supply side characteristics of assurance. Researchers will benefit from the study as it investigates assurance practices in the developing country of Bangladesh.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine both the supply and demand sides of sustainability assurance in Bangladesh. Authors also introduce reporting format when measuring the relationship between assurance and its determinant factors at micro level. The study also links assurance to signalling theory.

The Impact of Distribution Channel Decisions and Repeated Stockouts on Manufacturer and Retailer Performance

Product availability is a critical aspect of customer service for retailers and manufacturers. When product is out of stock (OOS), both retailers and manufacturers may suffer depending on the demand-side characteristics, such as whether consumers are more loyal to the store or the brand. While both retailers and manufacturers contribute to OOS situations, the supply-side characteristics, such as whether the retailer or manufacturer is responsible for in-store fulfillment [i.e., traditional versus direct store delivery (DSD) distribution], may impact OOS performance. DSD involves the manufacturer bypassing the retailer's distribution center and delivering product directly to the retailer's individual stores. This paper considers demand- and supply-side issues simultaneously to determine the implications of stockouts for both retailers and manufacturers using an agent-based simulation. An agent-based simulation allows for consideration of these issues under repeated OOS situations to determine the overall impact to retailer and manufacturer performance.

Advancing understandings of housing supply constraints: housing market recovery and institutional transitions in British speculative housebuilding

The vicissitudes and volatilities of recent housing market cyclicality have restructured, reconfigured and reorganized housing systems and their supply demand characteristics. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to (re)examining supply side outcomes, much less the influencing effect of supply behaviour in response to demand-side change and their interactions. Indeed, one of the biggest unanswered questions in housing studies today is how supply side characteristics, specifically those of speculative housebuilders, have been affected by the turbulent, transitionary context presented by the global financial crisis. Addressing the gap, this paper presents a novel analysis of how Britain’s biggest housebuilders respond to significant institutional shock in their operating environment and considers how this enables and constrains housing supply outcomes in the post-recession context.

Product Availability, Consumer Stockpiling, and Hurricane Events: Empirical Evidence From a Natural Experiment

The provision of essential supplies is a key service provided by retailers when demand spikes due to consumer stockpiling during environmental emergencies. Moreover, it is important for retailers to quickly recover from these events by replenishing the stock of essential supplies to meet the continuing needs of local residents. As exogenous events, hurricanes provide natural experiments to test retail operational performance in the face of environmental emergencies. The main purpose of this research is to determine how consumer stockpiling (or precautionary buying) behavior, as well as storm and retail characteristics, impact the availability of essential supplies at retailers following a hurricane. We study consumer stockpiling behavior prior to the onset of hurricane landfalls, and determine the impact of this behavior on in-store product availability for various formats of retail store outlets. Specifically, we focus on the bottled water product category, an essential emergency category in hurricane preparedness. On average, consumers stock 58% more bottled water than regular purchases before hurricanes approach. This study combines an event analysis methodology with econometric models using archival retail scanner data from 60 U.S. retail chains located in 963 counties and real-time data from four recent U.S. continental hurricanes. We find that supply-side characteristics (retail network and product variety), demand-side characteristics (hurricane experience and household income), and disaster characteristics (hazard proximity and hazard intensity) significantly affect consumer stockpiling propensity as the hurricanes approach. The increased consumer stockpiling has immediate and longer-term impacts on retail operations, namely, in-store product availability. Among various retail formats, drug stores are associated with the highest consumer stockpiling propensity before hurricanes, while dollar stores and discount stores are associated with the lowest in-store product availability following hurricanes. Our study points to the need for retailers and policymakers to carefully monitor factors affecting consumer stockpiling behavior that will allow for better allocation of critical supplies during the hurricane season.

Skill mismatch comparing educational requirements vs attainments by occupation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to overcome the problems that skill mismatch cannot be measured directly and that demand side data are lacking. It relates demand and supply side characteristics by aggregating data from jobs ads and jobholders into occupations. For these occupations skill mismatch is investigated by focussing on demand and supply ratios, attained vis-à-vis required skills and vacancies’ skill requirements in relation to the demand-supply ratios.Design/methodology/approachVacancy data from the EURES job portal and jobholder data from WageIndicator web-survey were aggregated by ISCO 4-digit occupations and merged in a database with 279 occupations for Czech Republic, being the only European country with disaggregated occupational data, coded educational data, and sufficient numbers of observations.FindingsOne fourth of occupations are in excessive demand and one third in excessive supply. The workforce is overeducated compared to the vacancies’ requirements. A high demand correlates with lower educational requirements. At lower occupational skill levels requirements are more condensed, but attainments less so. At higher skill levels, requirements are less condensed, but attainments more so. Educational requirements are lower for high demand occupations.Research limitations/implicationsUsing educational levels is a limited proxy for multidimensional skills. Higher educated jobholders are overrepresented.Practical implicationsIn Europe labour market mismatches worry policy makers and Public Employment Services alike.Originality/valueThe authors study is the first for Europe to explore such a granulated approach of skill mismatch.

Sustainability Tensions in Supply Chains: A Case Study of Paradoxes and Their Management

The comprehensive coverage of sustainability issues in a supply chain incurs goal conflicts—i.e., sustainability tensions—and is often limited by market characteristics, such as the availability of sustainable materials and services. While the mainstream business is prioritizing economic goals, a number of entrepreneurs are trying to move forward to more sustainable business practices for their own company and their supply chain. Fairphone represents such a case in the electronics industry, which is openly communicating its sustainability efforts and shortcomings. This communication is content-analyzed in this study by applying the theoretical lenses of paradox sustainability tensions and sustainable supply chain management. Findings of this analysis reveal the limitation of sustainability efforts by supply side characteristics, while Fairphone is innovatively using the demand side of its supply chain to drive sustainability. The resulting tensions among both sides are addressed via pro-active and direct supplier and stakeholder engagement by Fairphone at their suppliers’ mines and factories. The systematic identification of tensions and practices by which they are addressed is adding to our understanding of sustainability practices and goal conflicts in supply chains.

Mortgage supply, LTV and risk pricing

This paper focuses on mortgage supply and its contribution to the loan-to-value (LTV)-ratio. The paper starts by finding the optimal LTV-ratio for a profit-maximising mortgagee that supply mortgages using housing as collateral. As the LTV-ratio represents the mortgagee's risk exposure, the optimal LTV-ratio is one where the mortgagee is paid for its actual risk exposure. Thinking in terms of social welfare, the profit-maximising LTV-ratio is also optimal for society in our supply side framework. When including additional characteristics from the supply side of the mortgage market, the paper shows how the profit-maximising LTV-ratio varies according to moral hazard, risk pricing, funding structures, lending volumes and collateral values. The supply side characteristics create a wedge between the profit-maximising LTV-ratio and the LTV-ratio optimal for society. The model helps understand the role of mortgage supply in the period preceding the financial crisis, where LTV-ratios increased considerably. Consequently, it also allows for straightforward arguments regarding macro-prudential policy. Highlighting risk exposure, the paper continues by analysing the risk pricing response to falling house prices and an LTV-ratio that exceeds the LTV-ratio at origination. The paper finds a kinked-relation between the mortgage rate and the LTV-ratio ex post, separating risk pricing ex ante and ex post.

Who are the Self-employed? A New Approach

Modelling the incidence of self-employment has traditionally proved problematic. Whilst the individual supply side characteristics of the self-employed are well documented, the literature has largely neglected (or misspecified) demand side aspects. In this paper we present results from an econometric framework that allows us to separately, and simultaneously, model the supply and demand side characteristics that determine employment outcomes. We show that whilst individual characteristics are important determinants of the type of employment contract that individuals hold, there are also important contract specific factors that influence the nature of the contract an individual is employed under. Our results suggest that workers may be “captive” to a particular type of employment because of the sector in which they work, the number of hours they prefer to work and their ethnicity. The results are based on a new estimator, the parameterised DOGEV model, which allows for ordering and correlation in the observed alternatives, and for captivity within an observed alternative.

The role of dedicated freighter aircraft in the provision of global airfreight services

In 2014, over 51 million tonnes of cargo, valued at over US$6.8 trillion, was flown around the world. Approximately 56% of this total (by global revenue tonne kilometres (RTKs)) was flown on dedicated freighter aircraft which were either manufactured specifically for this purpose or converted from passenger use. The remaining 44% (by total global RTK) travelled as belly-freight in the holds of passenger flights or on combi (combination) or QC (quick change) aircraft that can accommodate both passengers and freight. Although both sources of capacity offer the same basic service – the aerial carriage of time sensitive and/or high value-to-weight goods – they exhibit different cost structures, operating characteristics and spatial patterns of demand and supply. Using empirical data on the contemporary scale and scope of global freighter operations, this paper examines the role of dedicated freighter aircraft in the provision of global airfreight services and identifies a range of exogenous and internal factors which may affect the demand and supply side characteristics of all-cargo air services in the future.

Combined energy hub optimisation and demand side management for buildings

The deployment of innovative energy management (EM) approaches based on systematic modelling and optimisation techniques has received an increasing amount of attention in the last decade. This has been often prompted by more stringent energy policy objectives aiming at reducing carbon emissions, phasing out nuclear plants and promoting overall energy efficiency, while containing both capital and operating costs. In this respect the energy hub concept has proven to be a popular approach for operating technologies and units comprising diversified energy carriers, small-scale production units, storage devices and converter systems. Additionally, developments in communication network and control infrastructure afford the possibility, at least in principle, to actively steer and adjust the load on the demand side of the energy balance, leading to the formulation of demand side management (DSM) techniques. This paper proposes an EM solution that combines the features and advantages of both of the aforementioned approaches, i.e. the energy hub framework and DSM methods. The key idea is to combine the supply-side characteristics of energy hubs with the demand side flexibility yielded by the deployment of DSM schemes. This combined approach is validated on an existing building complex by formalizing its energy supply system as an integrated hub and by modelling its heating demand based on thermodynamic principles. Numerical results based on this experimental setup are presented, illustrating that the combined approach can lead to overall savings typically exceeding 10% compared to a baseline scenario where no EM solution is applied, i.e. where only a rule-based heuristic is employed to control the available energy assets, and underscoring the advantages brought by a systematically integrated modelling and optimisation approach. The proposed solution is thus of interest for a broad host of installations in the residential and commercial domain, and for the latter a specific real-world example has been explicitly considered and analysed. The obtained results are encouraging and warrant further analysis and investigation.

Location decisions of inward FDI in sub-national regions of a host country: Service versus manufacturing industries

Built on the differences between services and manufacturing sectors, this study examines the general proposition that service and manufacturing multinational enterprises (MNEs) have different responsiveness to location-specific characteristics when conducting foreign direct investment (FDI), and that these differences influence their final locations in the sub-national regions of a host country. Using a full population of 1,212 and 6,199 inward FDI projects conducted by MNEs in manufacturing and services sectors, respectively, across 234 sub-national regions in Korea between 2000 and 2004, it finds that the location decisions made by service MNEs are more likely to be driven by demand-side considerations, whereas those made by manufacturing MNEs are more likely to be influenced by supply-side characteristics of sub-national regions. In addition, it shows that sub-national location decisions made by both high-tech and low-tech manufacturing MNEs consider the availability of local strategic assets within a focal region more importantly than that from its neighboring regions, suggesting the importance of intra-regional effects. Sub-national location decisions made by location-bound service MNEs exhibit the same intra-regional effects for local market potential; however, those by non-location-bound service MNEs consider the local market potential from neighboring regions more importantly than that within a focal region, suggesting the existence of inter-regional effects.