Dimensional effects of Korean SME’s entrepreneurial orientation on internationalization and performance: the mediating role of marketing capability

This study examines how three different dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation (proactiveness, innovativeness, and risk-taking) each determine internationalization strategies and enhance international performance among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the mediating role of marketing capabilities. An integrative theoretical framework built on international entrepreneurship and a resource-based approach was tested in the context of Korean SMEs. Analyses of 401 survey data collected from Korean exporting SMEs revealed the differential effects of each entrepreneurial orientation and the mediating effect of marketing capability on internationalization strategies and performance. Proactiveness and risk taking appeared to function as significant antecedents of marketing capability. Marketing capability, in turn, significantly decreased internationalization scope and increased the financial performance of Korean SMEs, though it did not influence internationalization scale. This study further confirms that the mediating role of marketing capability in entrepreneurial orientation-performance relationships vary by entrepreneurial orientation dimensions. Taking the direct and indirect roles of the entrepreneurial orientation dimensions together, this study recommends the critical prioritization of risk-taking over proactiveness. It extends previous approaches to the triad of resource–capability–performance. Theoretical contributions and insightful managerial implications are also provided.     

The design and development of creative instructional materials: the role of domain familiarity for creative solutions

The design and development processes of instructional materials might be considered simple and clear because the pre-established instructional goals can lead the way. However, in practice, there are lots of issues to be considered during these processes. The quality of the material, appropriate visual design, usability, and acceptable amount of cognitive load are some of these issues. On the other hand, an instructional material needs to be as original as possible. In this study, we focused on the creativity of the instructional materials designed and developed by second year students from the Computer Education and Instructional Technologies (CEIT) department. We divided students into two groups: (1) CEIT students designing and developing materials about Information Technology (IT); (2) CEIT students designing and developing materials about Math. The main aim of this study is to understand how CEIT students’ instructional materials differ when they design and develop materials, which are out of their field of experience. In other words, we tried to compare how the creativity of materials change when students create materials with familiar domain (IT) in comparison to unfamiliar domain (Math). Students worked on ten instructional materials such as digital story, animation, and worksheet for 14 weeks. The materials of students were evaluated in terms of creativity, and then they were interviewed. The students worked in groups of 4–5, and during the material development period, we as researchers observed and took notes about the whole process. The findings indicated that materials developed in familiar domain were higher in creativity than those of the unfamiliar. Students’ explanations of creativity and their evaluations about the process helped us to understand the reasons of the produced materials’ creativeness. Technical skills, authentic contributions, material type, and the boundaries of the content or familiarity were found as the primary factors affecting the design and development of creative instructional materials.     

Interethnic relations,informal trading networks,and social integration: imitation,habits, and social evolution

The ethnically homogeneous middleman groups (EHMGs), which are informal trading networks, are ubiquitous in less-developed economies where the legal infrastructure for contract enforcement is not well developed. This paper develops a formal model of social interaction among members of the EHMG as well as in more general situations in a multi-ethnic or multi-cultural society consisting of identifiable ethnic or linguistic groups. Behavioral patterns are transmitted between generations and altered via imitation in social contacts. The model demonstrates how different discriminatory behavioral patterns can evolve and persist over time. One result is that the trust between such groups can increase due to a higher frequency of inter-group contacts. In concluding the paper, we speculate about how the model can be expanded to include changes in legal structures, especially contract law. This could lead to an increase in the trust between the different groups.     

Mehr Schutz vor ausländischen Direktinvestitionen?

Currently, there is no comprehensive legal framework at EU level to screen foreign direct investments (FDI) into the EU. In September 2017, the European Commission proposed a framework for screening foreign direct investments into the European Union. The reform will likely come into force at the end of 2018. This paper describes the political background and key concepts of the FDI screening framework and analyses potential economic effects of the new regulation.     

How many educated workers for your economy? European targets,optimal public spending,and labor market impact

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the total employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to three different public taxation strategies. We calibrate our model using evidence from thirteen European countries, and compare our results with the target from the Europe 2020 Agenda for achievement in higher education. We show that, with current labor market characteristics, the target set by governments seems compatible with the social surplus maximization objective for some countries, while being too high for other countries. For all countries, maximizing employment would imply higher educational spending than that required for the social surplus to reach its maximum.     

Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement within the working day: A multilevel study

In this diary study, we examined a theoretical model in which the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and safety serve as mechanisms through which the work context during discrete situations within the workday influences “state” engagement. We further theorised that a person's “trait” level of engagement would exert cross‐level effects on the state level relationships. Multilevel analyses based on a sample of 124 individuals in six organisations and 1,446 situational observations revealed that meaningfulness and availability (but not safety) mediated the relationships between perceptions of the work context and state engagement. High levels of trait engagement strengthened the within‐person relation between availability and state engagement, yet weakened the within‐person relation between meaningfulness and state engagement, suggesting two different processes may be at play. Overall, the findings advance our understanding of engagement as a multilevel and temporally dynamic psychological phenomenon and promote a contextually based HRM approach to facilitating engagement.     

On Measurement of Economic Growth

This article continues the discussion raised in the pages of the journal on the methodological problems of justifying economic policy [1]. Problems of measuring the inflationary component of economic growth and in product competitiveness in the internal market and external markets are considered. A procedure to measure economic growth, taking into account the balance of interests of the current and future generations, is proposed.     

Aufdeckung von Versicherungsbetrug bei Kfz-Schäden mit Hilfe des Benford-Tests

The German Insurance Association estimates a yearly amount of damage of € 1.5?bn to German motor vehicle insurance companies because of systematic fraud by insurance holders. It is supposed that about 10% of submitted claim applications contain manipulated data, therefore insurance companies are forced to complete a detailed and cost intensive case-by-case review of each single application. An alternative method to detect fraud in empiric data is the method of digital analysis based on Benford’s law. The Benford method uses a mathematical law of specific logarithmic distribution attributes of first digits. According to this approach, the data of a Benford set confirm with the expected digit distribution, if the data is not manipulated, whereas fraudulent interventions lead to a deviation from Benford’s law. Hence, until now there has not been any investigation whether the Benford method can also be applied on insurance data. The present article analyses a dataset consisting of more than 120,000 damage claim applications to answer this question as well as to identify the impact of specific characteristics on the probability of fraud contained in claim applications, such as the repair of the vehicle in a franchised or an independent workshop, the vehicle brand or the examination by insurance companies experts. Indeed it could be shown that Benford’s Law is only applicable on second digits of insurance data, but delivers very strong results here: All results of the considered characteristics could be verified by plausible arguments. For this reason insurance companies can benefit from making use of the Benford method to identify those claim applications with a high probability of fraud, which should then be reviewed in more detail so that resources can be allocated in a much more cost efficient way.     

An experimental analysis of tax avoidance policies

Policies to reduce aggressive tax avoidance are increasingly being implemented or discussed in many countries around the world. Tax authorities hope that such policies will generate new tax revenue by increasing overall tax compliance. We present an experimental design to investigate the effect of a stylized anti-avoidance tax policy on tax compliance behavior. We highlight that anti-avoidance tax policies that reduce tax avoidance can also induce an increase in tax evasion (“substitution effect”), which limits the additional tax revenue these policies will generate. We show that the degree of substitution depends crucially on behavioral factors such as tax morale. Policymakers therefore also need to consider behavioral features while designing such policies and estimating their potential effects.