Family firm’s management composition: the role played by family members’ age in TMT and supervisor levels

Quality & Quantity - Family firms (FFs) are the backbone of entrepreneurial fabric in many countries. Management of such businesses is complex because of their features: the overlap between...     

The Credit Default Swap market contagion during recent crises: international evidence

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We test the hypothesis that underwriters set higher gross spreads and deeper offer price discounts in seasoned equity offers of firms exhibiting weak...     

What Drives Fraud in a Credence Goods Market? – Evidence from a Field Study

This paper investigates the impact of competition on an expert firm's incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market. Controlling for the competence of car repair shops, their financial situation, and reputational concerns, we use and complement the data set from a nationwide field study conducted by the German Automobile Association that regularly checks the reliability of garages in Germany. We find that more intense competition lowers a firm's incentive to defraud its customers.     

Re‐Examining Advances in Occupational Licensing Research: Issues and Policy Implications

Much has changed in the realms of occupational licensing since BJIR last ran a special issue on the subject in 2010. The number of occupations subject to licensing has been growing, the data available to investigate the incidence and effects of licensing have improved immeasurably, and the policy environment surrounding licensing has changed. This issue reflects these changes with eight papers from North America and Europe covering the incidence of licensing, and its effects on wages, inequality, employment, quality of service provision and rent extraction by the organizations who undertake licensing.     

Contagion of network products in small-world networks

We formulate a model in which agents embedded in an exogenous social network decide whether to adopt a new network product or not. In the theoretical part of the paper, we characterize the stochastically stable equilibria for complete networks and cycles. For an arbitrary network structure, we develop a novel graph decomposition method to characterize the set of recurrent communication states, which is a superset of stochastically stable equilibria of the adoption game presented in our model. In the simulation part, we study the contagion process of a network product in small-world networks that systematically represent social networks. We simulate a generalization of the Morris (Rev Econ Stud 67(1):57–78, 2000) Contagion model that can explain the chasm between early adopters and early majority. Our numerical analysis shows that the failure of a new network product is less likely in a highly cliquish network. In addition, the contagion process reaches to steady state faster in random networks than in highly cliquish networks. It turns out that marketers should work with mixed marketing strategies, which will result in a full contagion of a network product and faster contagion rates with a higher probability.

     

Learning patterns in early stage R&D projects: empirical evidence from the fibre raw material technology project in the Netherlands

Past research has reported that learning processes in early stage R&D are either chaotic, or absent. We challenge this finding by elaborating Van de Ven et al.’s trial‐and‐error learning model and explore an alternative conceptualization. We explored the combinations of positive and negative outcomes and action course continuation and modification. We use data gathered in an R&D setting of a 4‐years pre‐competitive knowledge generation project in the Dutch paper and board industry. Whereas the Van de Ven and Polley (1992) approach applied on our data also would lead us to conclude that ‘no learning’ would happen, our decomposed model identified three distinct learning patterns: (1) a virtuous pattern of positive outcomes resulting in continuations of action courses; (2) a vacuous pattern of negative outcomes resulting in modifications of action courses; and (3) a verification pattern of positive outcomes resulting in modifications of action courses. We observed the virtuous and verification patterns during the first 2 years and virtuous and vacuous learning in the second 2 years. These results might be useful for R&D managers since they provide insight into how an early stage R&D project can develop and where managers might intervene and adjust action courses.     

Machine learning for financial transaction classification across companies using character-level word embeddings of text fields

An important initial step in accounting is mapping financial transfers to the corresponding accounts. We devised machine-learning-based systems that automate this process. They use word embeddings with character-level features to process transaction texts. When considering 473 companies independently, our approach achieved an average top-1 accuracy of 80.50%, outperforming baselines that exclude the transaction texts or rely on a lexical bag-of-words text representation. We extended the approach to generalizes across companies and even across different corporate sectors. After standardization of the account structures and careful feature engineering, a single classifier trained on 44 companies from 28 sectors achieved a test accuracy of more than 80%. When trained on 43 companies and tested on the remaining one, the system achieved an average performance of 64.62%. This rate increased to nearly 70% when considering only the largest sector.     

Strategic Dilemmas: How Managers Use HR Practices to Meet Multiple Goals

Contrary to the classic assumptions in the business and human resource (HR) strategy literatures, real‐world organizations often pursue multiple and potentially contradictory performance goals. They may adopt ‘hybrid’ strategies to maximize both differentiation and low cost — leading middle managers to face dilemmas in how to achieve different goals using the same HR practices. We link employee‐level surveys of HR practices to establishment‐level data on service quality, labour efficiency and profitability to examine the effects of HR practices on these outcomes. We find that establishments with greater use of high involvement practices have significantly higher service quality, which mediates the relationship between HR practices and profitability. Findings for labour efficiency are positive, but generally not significant. These findings also have implications for the quality of jobs.     

The Great Recession,Austerity and Inequality: Lessons from Ireland

The advent of the Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and its effects. We examine how the distribution of income in Ireland—a country which experienced one of the most severe economic contractions—has evolved over the years 2008 to 2013. Standard cross‐sectional analysis of the income distribution shows broad stability in the Gini coefficient and in decile shares, with one main exception: the share of the bottom decile fell sharply, with the largest fall in average incomes being for that group. Longitudinal analysis shows that the falls in the average income for the bottom decile were not due to decreasing income for those remaining in the bottom decile, but to falls in income from those initially located in higher deciles. The extent of redistribution through taxes and transfers increased strongly, as measured by the Reynolds‐Smolensky index, which rose from 0.20 before the onset of the crisis to 0.27 in 2013. Analysis indicates that about three‐quarters of this increased redistribution is due to automatic stabilisers and one‐quarter to discretionary policy changes.