Abstract
This study investigates the impact of Technology Balance of Payments (TBP) on countries' international competitiveness. Using dynamic panel data estimations for 26 OECD countries over the period 2000-2017, the estimations unambiguously show that a TBP surpluses significantly foster countries' international competitiveness, regardless of how this latter is measured.

Abstract
The literature focusing on rural and urban entrepreneurship has so far overlooked the conditions in which different institutional contexts can affect firms' performance. The present study addressed this gap by investigating the extent to which institutional factors impact distinctively the performance of rural and urban newly created ventures. Based on data gathered through a direct questionnaire, we obtained 408 responses from newly created ventures located in Portuguese business incubators and science parks. Resorting to econometric binary (logit) models, we found that certain institutional factors, namely EU policy support, financial support from other sources than not banks, business advice for starting up/ ongoing activities, and collaboration to access new markets, are critical for new venture export performance, particularly those located in rural settings. To a larger extent than for urban, rural new venture economic-related performance positive and significantly depend on central government policy support, close relatives' role models, and technological support at the R&D collaboration level. Given the relevance of embeddedness-related factors in rural municipalities, public authorities should follow strategies that involve a growing connection between rural entrepreneurs and a variety of actors from industry, academia and the public and private sectors in order to foster newly created venture performance.

Abstract
In the last decade, a growing number of studies have addressed the ongoing debate about whether corruption "sands" or "greases" the wheels of business at the firm level. This study revisits this debate and proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework to test whether corruption harms or boosts firm performance, as well as the extent to which this relationship is mediated by the countries' institutional settings, the size and strategic behaviour of the firms, and market competition. Based on a sample of 21,250 firms located in 117 emerging and developing countries, and resorting to instrumental variable (IV) estimations, three main results were found: (a) regardless of the proxy used for corruption and firm performance, the former clearly harms the latter; (b) corruption "greases the wheels" of business for African firms but it "sands the wheels" for firms in Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Southern Asia; and (c) the negative impact of corruption on performance is mitigated for larger and exporting firms.

Abstract
Film consumers are continuously online and active in various social platforms. This phenomenon has led over-the-top (OTT) providers - empowered by social computing technologies - to establish a social media presence and incorporate elements drawn from social media into their services. However, little is known about existing OTT interfaces and their key social features. This study sought to provide a structured categorisation of the most salient social media features of the best-known applications in the OTT video business. In addition, a new social content network model, Avids, was proposed to connect individuals socially through films. Avids reaches beyond more fixed, functionality-based approaches applied in the development of OTT video sites and focuses on components related to sociality. This approach ensures a unified system in which the overall social media setting is embedded in every functional area of the platform's architecture, thereby allowing applications to trigger and support social behaviours absent from traditional OTT providers. A purpose-built international online survey was administered to 479 film lovers to assess how Avids' main features compare with traditional OTT video providers. The questionnaire was based on the technology acceptance model. The results confirm the critical role of sociality in film viewing-related activities.

Abstract
Scientific publications tend to influence policymakers significantly. Despite the scientific and social importance of poverty today, the attention the top economic journals (American Economic Review; Econometrica; International Economic Review; Journal of Economic Theory; Journal of Political Economy; Quarterly Journal of Economics; Review of Economic Studies) pay to the matter is not clear, particularly in the so-called "Blue Ribbon" journals (and Review of Economics and Statistics). On the basis of bibliometric techniques, we analyzed all 27,322 articles published in the "Blue Ribbon" journals from 1970 to 2018. This is the first study on the scientific attention paid to poverty by the most influential journals in the field of economics. Two main findings can be highlighted: (i) the scientific attention paid to poverty in the Blue Ribbon journals is relatively meager, but it has observed a positive trend, increasing from a modest 0.36 percent of the total articles published in the 1970s to 1.92 percent of total publications in the 2010s; and (ii) the relative weight of specific poverty subtopics has significantly changed over the last 50 years, shifting from a focus on defining and measuring poverty in the earlier decades to policy-related issues in the most recent period (2000 onward).

Abstract
Whether research output significantly impacts on economic growth, and which research areas/fields of science matter the most to improve the economic performance of countries, stand as fundamental endeavors of scientific inquiry. Although the extant literature has analyzed the impact of research output on economic growth both holistically and by field, the impact of academic knowledge as a capital good (hard and social sciences) versus a final good (medical and humanities) has been largely neglected in analyses involving large sets of countries over a broad period of time. Based on a sample of 65 countries over 36 years (1980 to 2016), and employing system GMM dynamic panel data estimations, four main results are worth highlighting: (1) holistic research output positively and significantly impacts on economic growth; (2) both the academic knowledge of scientific areas that most resemble capital goods (physical sciences, engineering and technology, life sciences or social sciences) or final goods (base clinical, pre-clinical and health or arts and humanities) foster economic performance; (3) the global impact of research output is particularly high in the fields of engineering and technology, social sciences, and physics; and (4) the impact of research output on economic growth occurs mainly through structural change processes involving the reallocation of resources towards the industrial sector.