LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN THE LONG RUN: JAPAN, 1600–1909

This article examines long-term labour productivity change in Japan from the early seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. We constructed sectoral labour force estimates based on the methodology presented in a previous study, who provided a sectoral GDP series covering the Tokugawa period. Our results show the industrial structure in the Tokugawa period remained relatively stable in comparison with the economy after the Meiji Restoration. Nevertheless, the estimates of sectoral labour productivity suggest expansion of the market economy in Tokugawa Japan influenced the development of industrialisation after the Meiji Restoration.     

Revitalising serial entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa: insights from a newly emerging economy

In light of the growing national priority to develop and revitalise entrepreneurship in emerging economies, our understanding of barriers to serial entrepreneurship (SE) in such a context warrants further scholarly attention. Using insights from Ghana, an integrated framework of endogenous and exogenous barriers to SE is advanced. The study identified factors such as stigmatisation of business failure, fear of failure, successive governments’ suspicion of the private sector and lack of a clear national policy as barriers to the development of SE. By creating conditions for de-stigmatising of failure, countries would be able to create conditions for more serial entrepreneurs to emerge and flourish. The analysis also indicates that reinvigorating entrepreneurship by providing space and opportunity for failed entrepreneurs to re-emerge would enable such countries to enhance entrepreneurial activities and improve economic development. The implications for technology analysis and strategic entrepreneurship literature are identified and examined.     

Listen to their heart: Why does active listening enhance customer satisfaction after a service failure?

A service employee’s active listening plays a crucial role in restoring a damaged customer relationship. However, previous studies reveal little about how listening to customer complaints operates in recovering a service failure. The purpose of this research is to explore when and why the employee’s active listening has a positive influence on customer response. We define active listening as (1) listening to customers’ concerns before apologizing and (2) verbally acknowledging them. Using scenario-based experiments, we demonstrate that active listening improves customer satisfaction, which in turn increases tip size (Study 1). Moreover, we find that active listening fosters customers’ perceptions of preferential treatment, which lead to greater customer satisfaction (Study 2). Yet, such positive effects of active listening diminish when customers are unexpectedly offered a complimentary service such as a room upgrade. The implications for academic researchers and marketing managers are discussed.     

土质边坡分析中的极限平衡法与有限元强度折减法的研究

介绍边坡分析的极限平衡法与有限元强度折减法原理,比较两者优缺点。对均质土坡分别采用有限元强度折减法与极限平衡法进行计算,得到相应的安全系数和潜在破坏面,得到两种方法所得安全系数和破坏面一致的结论,应用有限元强度折减法计算是合理可行的。     

存款保险制度在我国的实行和相关配套政策

存款保险制度的建立和实行对我国银行业的发展具有极其重要的作用.主要结论有:一、现行银行制度在其承担流动性保险功能时有其固有的脆弱性,存款保险制度则可以为类型存款人取款提供一种有效的制度保障;二、我国隐性"超级"存款保险制度的现状加剧了道德风险,亟待出台显性存款保险制度;三、风险预警机制替代市场监控能较好地解决存款保险制度无法解决的信息不对称问题,为存款保险降低道德风险创造条件.     

Failure prevention and management in business incubation: practices towards a scalable business model

How support systems such as a business incubator deal with failure, a common phenomenon in new venture creation, is less understood. Employing a value creation perspective helps us to understand failure, the inability of an entrepreneurial team to build a scalable business model. Based on case studies at nine Swedish business incubators, we develop a dynamic process model towards understanding failure prevention and management in business incubation. We find business incubation practices towards failure prevention and management to be a mix of predictive and non-predictive strategies. These practices could help prevent and mitigate failure at personal, organisational and social levels towards value creation for the startups and their stakeholders and channel the effects of failure towards social benefit.     

The educational and labor market returns to preschool attendance in Austria

Preschool attendance is widely recognized as a key ingredient for later socioeconomic success, mothers’ labor market participation, and leveling the playing field for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is still relatively scarce, particularly in Europe. Using data from the 2011 Austrian European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we contribute to this literature by studying the effects of having attended preschool for the adult Austrian population. We find strong and positive effects of preschool attendance on later educational attainment, the probability of working full time, hourly wages, and the probability that the mother is in the labor market. Full time workers at the bottom and the top of the distribution benefit less than those in the middle. Women in particular benefit more in terms of years of schooling and the probability of working full time. Other disadvantaged groups (second generation migrants; people with less educated parents) also often benefit more in terms of education and work.     

Optimal harvesting of a spatial renewable resource

In this paper we investigate the optimal harvesting of a renewable natural resource. While in most standard approaches the resource is located at a single point, we allow the resource to be distributed spatially. Consequently, an agent who exploits the resource has to travel from one location to another. For a fixed planning horizon, we investigate the speed and the path of harvesting chosen by the agent. We show that the agent adjusts this speed so as to visit each location only once, even in the absence of travelling cost. Since the agent does not return to any location for a second harvest, it is optimal to fully deplete the resource upon arrival. A similar type of bang–bang solution results when we drop the assumption of a constant harvesting rate: allowing for a variable harvesting rate, the agent chooses to fully exploit the resource either in the last or in the first travelling period. A society interested in conserving some of the resource thus has to take measures to limit the exploitative behaviour of the agent.     

Understanding homophily of service failure within the hotel guest cycle: Applying NLP-aspect-based sentiment analysis to the hospitality industry

Online complaints have become increasingly influential on the purchasing behavior of customers in recent years. In an effort analyze large quantities of textual complaints and detail the various aspects of them, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis was looked to as an ideal framework to take on the task. This study set out to synthesize specific service failure items and categorize them into the groupings related to the hotel guest cycle and the corresponding operations, then compare the patterns of expression used by Asian and Non-Asian guests as the related their hotel experiences. A total of 390,236 online complaint terms posted about 353 hotels in the UK by hotel guests from 63 nations were manually derived from TripAdvisor for analysis. With consideration given to the homophily theory, we posited that Asian and non-Asian guests would exhibit similarities and differences with respect to the service failures they encountered when presented with various items of service. The results confirmed this as Asian guests were shown to encounter more service failures with respect to the engineering segment of operations (e.g. hotel room equipment issues), while non-Asian guests encountered more service failures on the housekeeping end of operations (e.g. toilets, public areas, cleanliness, and bedding). By organizing the failures according the four stages of the guest cycle, it was observed that approximately 80% of the service failures occurred during the occupancy period. This study contributes to the existing literature on hotel guest satisfaction both with respect to the methodology it uses and the new findings it presents on differences in perceptions of service failures members among different cultures.