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The European Commission has recently launched a proposal for a Directive to promote repair. In this paper we critically analyse the drafting process in order to understand the resulting policy options. We consider that although the ambition of the Directive was low from the beginning given the limited policy options, it became even worse during the consultation period. The selection of barriers to repair was limited, and manufacturers pushed for a narrow and closed form of Right-to-Repair (R2R) that transferred all control over the potentially emerging repair market to them. Some information measures were proposed so as to increase transparency, potentially increasing the administrative burden on independent repairers, along with measures to encourage repair when under legal guarantee. This Directive fails to promote repair or help independent repairers overcome access barriers, nor does it allow member states to go beyond the limits imposed in the Directive itself.

This paper deals with the determinants of education-job match for higher-education graduates, using a logistic regression model to identify explanatory variables related to sociodemographic, academic trajectory and institutional characteristics. The empirical analysis is based on an anonymous online questionnaire administered to a sample of graduates, from 2014 to 2019, in Portuguese institutions, of which about five hundred observations were made. Although the boundaries between universities and polytechnics are less obvious today, there are still some differences between the two higher-education subsystems regarding education-job match. The main ones are related to the field of study, gender, and the need to move away from home to study and work. Factors that improve the probability of education-job matching, common to both subsystems, were also found, such as having i) studied ‘social sciences, commerce, and law’ and ‘engineering, manufacturing and construction’, ii) attained good final grades, and iii) participated in extracurricular activities involving complementary training.

This paper focuses on the relationship between the regional firm density and the growth of firms in the Portuguese textile and clothing industry to investigate how their geographic clustering influences said growth. Despite the concentration of this industry in the Northern region of Portugal in only four poles, our results show that the location of firms in the cluster is not relevant for growth when the whole industry is considered. However, disaggregate analysis shows that the clothing industry does exhibit both location externalities and cross-location effect, while textile manufacture exhibits neither. In addition, our empirical evidence reveals that the growth of firms located in the cluster is positively correlated with external finance. This result suggests that location becomes a solvency signal for firms, and, specifically, this might help to explain why textile manufacturers firms are located in the cluster. These findings are relevant for entrepreneurs and Portuguese policymakers, as it jeopardizes the optimal allocation of scarce resources in the Portuguese textile cluster.

Intangible assets (IAs) are fundamental for the creation of firm value. However, the literature is inconclusive regarding the relationship between IAs and profitability. This paper uses financial data from Colombian firms from 2005 to 2015 to determine if this relationship exists. Thirty dynamic panel models have been used to see whether IAs are related to Return on Equity, Return on Assets, Earnings Before Interest and Taxes, Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization, Gross margin, and Net margin. The results, despite a limited sample size and missing variables, are related to the literature in that they signal the negative relationship between IAs and profitability. Thus, the capitalized value of IAs seems to negatively affect Colombian firms' performance in the short and long term.