Work,employment and engagement conditions in a female‐dominated public service occupation after restructuring/outsourcing

Most research on the phenomenon of public service restructuring/outsourcing focuses on lower skilled work in peripheral activities and typically provides an overview of effects on work, employment and employment relations. Through an in‐depth case study of probation, the intention of this article is to explore professional worker experiences of the restructuring/outsourcing of a core public service activity where the workforce is female dominated. The article highlights three dimensions of job quality that all suffered deterioration—work, employment and engagement. The case of probation adds to evidence demonstrating that employees experience adverse effects even though transfer regulations and union agreements supposedly protect workers. Probation also stands as an exemplar of impoverishment processes in a female‐dominated occupation which reinforces the view that public services can no longer be relied upon to provide high‐quality jobs for highly qualified women.     

Career Management in High‐Performing Organizations: A Set‐Theoretic Approach

The aim of this study is to investigate the elements of organizational career management (OCM) that can lead to strong organizational performance. The growing unpredictability of careers requires a different organizational approach of careers. Yet, new career models all focus on the individual as the central actor, leaving the role of the organization rather underdeveloped. Based on a combined perspective integrating insights from the literature on careers, high performance work systems, and idiosyncratic deals (I‐deals), we address four dimensions of OCM: supportive and developmental practices, development I‐deals, individual responsibility, and consensus. We study their relationships with company performance, thereby including the firm's human capital composition. Surveys were administered to the HR directors of 293 organizations. We apply a relatively new method, fsQCA (fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis), and complement this with more conventional structural equation modeling (SEM). The SEM analyses suggest that only supportive and developmental practices are positively associated with high performance. However, based on the fsQCA, three configurations are identified in which OCM is associated with high performance. The most prevalent configuration combined supportive and developmental practices with I‐deals and individual responsibility for career management. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings, and address the utility of adopting a configurational approach in career research. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An evolutionary approach to the delimitation of labour market areas: an empirical application for Chile

An evolutionary approach to the delimitation of labour market areas: an empirical application for Chile. Spatial Economic Analysis. Labour market areas (LMAs) are argued to represent a more appropriate policy framework than administrative units for the analysis of spatial labour market activity. This article develops LMAs for Chile by applying an evolutionary computation approach. This innovative approach defines LMAs through an optimization process by maximization of internal cohesion, subject to restrictions of minimum levels of self-containment and population. To evaluate the appropriateness of the LMAs, comparative analyses are performed between alternative delimitations based on different parameter configurations of the proposed method versus administrative boundaries and the most widely used method for official LMA delimitation, the travel-to-work areas method.     

May business mentors act as opportunity brokers and enablers among university students?

Networks are recognized as a central component of the entrepreneurial process, in particular with regard to opportunity identification and exploitation. In this study, we specifically analyze the role of mentors who are in business as opportunity brokers and enablers among university students with entrepreneurial intentions. Our investigation on 1022 students from 13 French-language universities based in Canada, France, Belgium and Algeria indicates that mentors in business, contrary to other mentors, support opportunity identification and exploitation among university students. Although student gender, entrepreneurial experience and education have a more pronounced effect, mentoring is the only element that can be controlled for through the creation of formal support programs. These results call on public authorities, and universities in particular, to implement formal mentoring programs to support students who are interested in starting their own business, and who would not otherwise have access to business mentors in their environment.     

Priority-driven behaviors under the Boston mechanism

We study school choice markets where the non-strategy-proof Boston mechanism is used to assign students to schools. Inspired by previous field and experimental evidence, we analyze a type of behavior called priority-driven: students have a common ranking over the schools and then give a bonus in their submitted preferences to those schools for which they have high priority. We first prove that under this behavior, there is a unique stable and efficient matching, which is the outcome of the Boston mechanism. Second, we show that the three most prominent mechanisms on school choice (Boston, deferred acceptance, and top trading cycles) coincide when students’ submitted preferences are priority-driven. Finally, we run some computational simulations to show that the assumption of priority-driven preferences can be relaxed by introducing an idiosyncratic preference component, and our qualitative results carry over to a more general model of preferences.     

Valuation of default-sensitive claims under imperfect information

We propose a valuation method for financial assets subject to default risk, where investors cannot observe the state variable triggering the default but observe a correlated price process. The model is sufficiently general to encompass a large class of structural models and can be seen as a generalization of the model of Duffie and Lando (Econometrica 69:633–664, [2001]). In this setting we prove that the default time is totally inaccessible in the market’s filtration and derive the conditional default probabilities and the intensity process. Finally, we provide pricing formulas for default-sensitive claims and illustrate in particular examples the shapes of the credit spreads.      

¿Hay evidencia de ciclo político-económico en el empleo sectorial de México, 1998-2013?

This paper looks for evidence of political-business cycles associated to the presidential elections in the Mexican sectorial employment over the period 1998-2013. By estimating panel data models, and controlling for the effects of the major determinants of employment, no evidence consistent with the predictions of the theoretical opportunistic model is found, i.e. whereas employment shows an expansion before and during the elections periods, the estimates are neither statistically significant nor robust. Furthermore, employment does not experience contractions after the elections or the office taking periods. Notwithstanding, the evidence suggests that employment is positively and negatively affected by output and real wages, respectively.     

Influencia de los sistemas de información en los resultados organizacionales

Over the last years, information systems (IS) have constituted the main focus of research in the business organization literature. This has created the need to identify their entrepreneurial value. The paper presents a theory-based model that was developed to assess the degree of IS success in SMEs. The aim of the proposed model is to determine the influence of IS on organizational performance. To achieve this aim, the Partial Least Square statistical technique is used to analyze data from 133 questionnaires administered to businesses across the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. The results show that those enterprises that are more concerned with the improvement of the systems’ quality, information quality and the informatics service enhance the organizational outcomes. The present study contributes to the body of literature on the assessment of IS success in the context of an emerging country. In particular, the study provides a thorough assessment of the IS effectiveness and their impact on organizational performance.