Best paper awards August 2022

Last month, FEB staff members have won best paper awards for research they published in journals in 2021.

FEB professor Robert Inklaar and co-authors Daan Freeman & Erwin Diewert won the Kendrick prize 2021 during the 37th IARIW General Conference. Their paper titled ‘Natural Resources and Missing Inputs in International Productivity Comparisons’ was judged to be the best paper published in the Review of Income and Wealth in 2021.

Assistant professor Aline Seepma (FEB), professor Dirk Pieter Van Donk (FEB) and their co-author Carolien de Blok have won the 2021 JSCM Best Paper Award during the 82nd Academy of Management Conference. Their paper titled ‘On publicness theory and its implications for supply chain integration: The case of criminal justice supply chains’ was found to be the best paper that was published in the Journal of Supply Chain Management (JSCM) in 2021.?

Aline Seepma, Dirk Pieter van Donk and Carolien de Blok win JSCM Best Paper Award

The paper for which Aline Seepma, Dirk Pieter van Donk and Carolien de Blok won the JSCM Best Paper Award is part of the line of research Seepma started during?her PhD?on investigating supply chain management principles in public settings, specifically in the criminal justice context. Seepma obtained her PhD at the Faculty of Economics and Business in 2020, where she is now an Assistant Professor. Dirk Pieter van Donk (Professor in Operations Management at FEB) and Carolien de Blok (senior researcher at Rekenkamer Metropool Amsterdam) were Seepma′s PhD supervisors.

In their paper, the authors answer the following questions: Is supply chain integration as understood in a private setting applicable in a pure public context such as criminal justice? Is supply chain integration used for similar purposes? Is supply chain integration shaped by the specific interorganizational characteristics of criminal justice supply chains, and if so, how? Through these questions, the authors extend publicness theory to its application at the interorganizational level.

Robert Inklaar, Daan Freeman and Erwin Diewert win the 2021 Kendrick prize

In rankings of the richest countries around the world, we see resource-rich countries such as Qatar or Saudia Arabia rank very high. Much of this high income is generated from exploiting those natural resources. Yet studies comparing the productivity of countries would typically ignore natural resources, such as oil, gas, iron or gold as an input. The contribution of the paper by Robert Inklaar, Daan Freeman and Erwin Diewert is that it proposes and implements a method to do so. Inklaar is Professor in economics of productivity and welfare at the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB). Daan Freeman was a PhD candidate at FEB and is now a researcher at the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). Erwin Diewert is Emeritus Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia.

In their paper, the authors redefine productivity by including natural resources in the set of inputs to calculate a country’s productivity. Productivity here is defined as the amount of output that a country generates (GDP) relative to the inputs that it uses. The standard set of inputs generally cover labour and capital (buildings, equipment, etc), but not natural resources. A methodological difficulty in expanding the set of inputs is that not every country has every type of natural resource—some extract iron, others oil and gas and in some countries natural resource extraction is minimal. They resolve this problem by putting a reservation price on natural resources, a notional price relevant for countries that do not extract a particular resource, to make a valid comparison of productivity. The authors make the argument that the world price for the extracted resource (a barrel of oil, a ton of iron ore) is a good reservation price. They then implement their proposed method and show that comparative productivity levels of resource-rich countries are notably lower than when inputs of resources are ignored.