Browsing by Author "Reyes Torres, Tomás Hernán"

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    When Being Large Is Not an Advantage: How Innovation Impacts the Sustainability of Firm Performance in Natural Resource Industries
    (MDPI, 2022) Sevil, Angel; Cruz Novoa, Alfonso; Reyes Torres, Tomás Hernán; Vassolo, Roberto Santiago
    This paper provides an in-depth study of how incremental innovation, a ubiquitous factor, affects the sustainability of performance of small- and large-sized firms differently. Specifically, this work examines the sustainability of firm growth in natural resource industries. In these industries, innovation is mainly based on processes in the form of incremental changes, and the adoption of innovations has significant sunk costs. We argue that, before incremental process innovation, firm performance is directly proportional to firm size. However, in the presence of incremental innovation events, firm performance is inversely proportional to firm size since smaller firms pose higher strategic flexibility and can adopt innovations faster. Our empirical findings highlight the relevance of incremental innovation as an inflection point of firm performance, creating a competitive opportunity window for small firms and a sustainability threat for large firms.
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    When RateMyProfessors meets Google Scholar: Student Reviews, Appearance, and Research1
    (2023) Chumacero, Romulo A.; Paredes Molina, Ricardo Daniel; Reyes Torres, Tomás Hernán
    We take more than a million student evaluations of almost 200,000 professors from the RateMyProfessors website and link them with information on the research productivity of almost 3,000 professors in Google Scholar to provide a systematic characterization of the relationship between student evaluations and the characteristics of the classes, universities and professors concerned and to test whether students’ appreciations are conditionally related to research productivity. The study concludes that although how “easy” and “interesting” students consider a course to be are the most important determinants of their evaluations, there is a “looks” or “beauty” premium, with no systematic racial, age or gender component. Surprisingly, research productivity is either not significant or is negatively related to the assessment of a professor’s teaching abilities