Search results for "Economics and business"
showing 10 items of 4393 documents
Professional stakeholders' views of the use of digital technologies in Spanish long-term care
2018
Demographic change in Europe has resulted in an aging population, which presents new challenges for implementing and managing long-term care (LTC) systems. One solution aims to increase the efficiency of LTC by using digital technologies. This article focuses on professionals’ opinions of the use of digital technologies in the administration of Spain’s long-term care law (Law 39/2006, December 14, LAPAD). This qualitative research is part of SoCaTel, an H2020 project on the co-creation of LTC services in Europe. Ten focus groups were held with health professionals, care-taking relatives, and care workers, and six semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with care recipients in Cata…
Towards a virtual factory prototype
2015
International audience; A virtual factory should represent most of the features and operations of the corresponding real factory. Some of the key features of the virtual factory include the ability to assess performance at multiple resolutions and generate analytics data similar to what is possible in a real factory. One should be able to look at the overall factory performance and be able to drill down to a machine and analyze its performance. It will require a large amount of effort and expertise to build such a virtual factory. This paper describes an effort to build a multiple resolution model of a manufacturing cell. The model provides the ability to study the performance at the cell l…
Outward Investments and Productivity: Evidence from European Regions
2016
Castellani D. and Pieri F. Outward investments and productivity: evidence from European regions, Regional Studies. Using a novel data set on international investment projects, this paper builds measures of outward foreign direct investments (FDIs) for 262 regions of the European Union. This allows as estimation to be made of regressions of productivity growth over the 2007–11 period as a function of the number of FDIs. The number of outward FDIs in manufacturing activities is negatively associated with productivity growth in the home region, but investments in sales, distribution and marketing are associated with a boost in local productivity. This is driven especially by investments toward…
Does EU cohesion policy work? Theory and evidence
2017
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of European Cohesion Policy in the regions of 12 EU countries in the period 1991–2008, on the basis of a spatial growth model, which allows for the identification of both direct and indirect effects of EU funds on GDP per worker growth. We find that “Objective 1” funds are characterized by strong spatial externalities and a positive and concave effect on the growth of GDP per worker, which reaches a peak at the ratio funds/GDP of approximately 3 percent and becomes non-significant after 4 percent. “Objective 2” and “Cohesion” funds have nonsignificant effects, while all the other funds exert a positive and significant effect, but their size is very lim…
Shelf life-based inventory management policy for RF monitored warehouse
2018
Post-harvest losses of perishable products strongly depend on inefficiencies of the entire supply chain. In particular, these inefficiencies can be reduced by optimizing the warehouse management, taking into account the remaining shelf life of the product, and matching it to the requirements of the subsequent part of the handling chain. The replacement of First In First Out picking rule with Last Shelf Life First Out policy has been proved to improve the overall performance of the supply chain. The practicability of such approach is related to the possibility of monitoring the deterioration rate of the products and of predicting the residual shelf-life, that is mainly influenced by harvesti…
Exploring the application of blockchain to humanitarian supply chains: insights from Humanitarian Supply Blockchain pilot project
2021
PurposeSome studies and reports have recently suggested using blockchain technology to improve transparency and trust in humanitarian supply chains (HSCs). However, evidence-based studies to display the utility and applicability of blockchains in HSCs are missing in the literature. This paper aims to investigate the key drivers and barriers of blockchain application to HSCs and explore whether evidence could support that the application of blockchain improves transparency and trust in HSCs.Design/methodology/approachThis paper puts forward a two-stage approach to explore the blockchain application in HSCs: an initial exploration of humanitarian practitioners and academicians interested in b…
Pricing Sovereign Contingent Convertible Debt
2016
We develop a pricing model for sovereign contingent convertible bonds (S-CoCo) with payment standstills triggered by a sovereign's credit default swap CDS spread. One innovation is the modeling of CDS spread regime switching which is prevalent during crises. Regime switching is modeled as a hidden Markov process and is integrated with a stochastic process of spread levels to obtain S-CoCo prices through simulation. The paper goes a step further and uses the pricing model in a Longstaff-Schwartz. American option pricing framework to compute state contingent S-CoCo prices at some risk horizon, thus facilitating risk management. Dual trigger pricing is also discussed using the idiosyncratic CD…
Applying System Dynamics Modelling to Strategic Management: A Literature Review
2016
System dynamics (SD) has been proved to be a useful methodology to support both understanding and learning processes of complex systems and phenomena. Since its origin, SD has been successfully applied to many different fields of studies (e.g. climate change, physics, engineering, environmental sciences, economics, management, etc.). Among these, strategic management (SM) has a particular relevance as testified by several streams of research that originate from the combination between SD modelling and SM. The aim of this paper is to explore and discuss the theoretical and empirical development of SD in the SM field through a systematic analysis of the literature in order to highlight the ma…
Tabu Search to Plan Schedules in a Multiskill Customer Contact Center
2006
International audience; We have studied a realistic case of scheduling problem in a customer contact center, dealing with multiskill agents. Our model combines the last two steps of the standard approach by determining shifts and by assigning them to agents at the same time (scheduling and rostering). Moreover, we have considered realistic vacations, according to legal constraints and preferences of agents. We have envisioned entire weeks of work, with variable meal times and meal durations, without overtime. In this paper, we define the problem and describe a Tabu search based solution.
Model Co-creation from a Modeler’s Perspective: Lessons Learned from the Collaboration Between Ethnographers and Modelers
2018
This paper reports on the authors’ ongoing collaboration on model co-creation, a process that involves not only the reconciliation of methodologies (qualitative vs. quantitative), but also of epistemologies (empirical vs empirical/rationalist) and ontologies (observable referent vs. abstracted referent). The co-creation process has taken place over several months, from early 2017, both in person, teleconferencing and via email. The result was an ethnographic model of the refugee situation in Lesbos, Greece. The qualifier “ethnographic” means that the simulation’s purpose was to capture the problem situation described by ethnographers in a manner that resembles their observations, not to ans…