Equilibrium youth unemployment

In a model with continuous entry and exit to the labor market, it is shown that workers exploit their monopoly power by adopting a seniority system implying youth unemployment or an age determined insider-outsider distinction. The incentives of young outsiders to unberbid are curtailed by their expectation of becoming insiders in the future.     

Information,endogenous uncertainty and risk aversion

The importance of incomplete information and risk aversion for the allocation of economic resources is shown to depend critically on whether uncertainty is exogenously imposed or endogenously related to the ability of the price system to aggregate and disseminate the information possessed by the agents in a decentralized market economy. The specific example analysed in this paper is a two-period exchange model with competitive markets and a homogeneous product.Comments and suggestions by anonymous referees, Jacques Drèze, Jan Rose Sørensen, and financial support from the Danish Social Science Research Council are gratefully acknowledged.     

Shocks and the Viability of a Fixed Exchange Rate Commitment

The incentive to renege on a commitment to a fixed exchange rate is shown to be state contingent. A fixed exchange rate policy is not viable under unusual circumstances, and the incentive to violate the commitment is larger in the case of contractionary shocks than in the case of expansionary shocks. The possibility that the exchange rate regime is changed in unusual circumstances has significant effects also under normal circumstances, implying systematic devaluation expectations, excessive real wages and (ex post) real rates of interest, lower output and loss of reserves, which in turn reduces the incentive to initiate a fixed exchange rate policy. Moreover, policyshifts may be contagious among countries.     

Perceptions that matter: perceptual antecedents and moderators of healthy food consumption

Unhealthy eating patterns present in most Western countries pose a serious threat to economic welfare and have severe consequences for the health and quality of life of the individual consumer. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a conceptual model for understanding how health authorities and marketers can affect consumption of healthy food – and ultimately body mass index (BMI) – by addressing perceptual antecedents of consumers' involvement and health competencies. A qualitative (n = 16) pilot study and a consumer panel survey (n = 599) assisted in completing this task. The obtained structural equation modelling results confirmed that increasing consumers' competencies concerning healthy food consumption may improve the healthiness of their food behaviour, and ultimately reduce their BMI. Notably, these effects may occur even for consumers who perceive healthy food consumption to be a challenge. Our results also revealed that it may be problematic to improve health competencies for food consumers who are less involved in healthy food consumption. However, our study shows that two perceptual factors, ‘personal food identity’ (the extent to which consumers believe that their health identity is linked to their food behaviour) and ‘unhealthy food taste belief’ (the extent to which consumers believe that unhealthy food is more enjoyable and tastier than healthy food), may assist health authorities and marketers in increasing consumers' involvement in healthy food consumption.     

Why Complementary HRM Practices Impact Performance: The Case of Rewards,Job Design,and Work Climate in a Knowledge‐Sharing Context

The strategic HRM literature suggests that HRM influences employees in combinations of practices that “fit” each other rather than as stand‐alone practices; however, it pays little attention to the underlying individual‐level mechanisms. In contrast, the HRM literature on knowledge sharing examines the influence of single practices on individual‐level knowledge sharing, but fails to include the influence of combinations of practices. We link the idea of fit between practices to employee motivation for knowledge sharing by arguing that rewards may be ambiguous and difficult to interpret, but that such ambiguity may be reduced if rewards are combined with other aligned HRM practices, notably job design and work climate. Thus, fit is established through the ambiguity‐reducing effect of combining specific HRM practices. Accordingly, we test for complementarities among rewards, job design, and work climate in the form of a three‐way interaction among these variables with respect to their impact on knowledge‐sharing motivation. Our analysis of 1,523 employees in five knowledge‐intensive firms shows that employees who are exposed to knowledge‐sharing rewards experience higher levels of autonomous motivation to share when they are simultaneously exposed to a noncontrolling job design and work climate that support knowledge sharing. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Productive and harmful entrepreneurship in a knowledge economy

This paper develops an endogenous growth model with productive entrepreneurial activities and rent-seeking. Our purpose is to link contributions to the entrepreneurial and the endogenous growth literature. We deal with complementarity between productive entrepreneurship and harmful rent-seeking activities leading to potentially multiple equilibra in the economy. The degree of rent-seeking is endogenous in our model and is influenced by the economy’s legal and institutional framework as well as capital market imperfections. Policy which establishes the legal environment and financial institutions dealing with capital market imperfections together decides which of the potentially multiple equilibria is chosen by the economy. This institutional choice implies the solution to a trade-off between high economic growth on the one and a high level of productivity on the other hand.     

Governance Mechanisms for the Promotion of Social Capital for Knowledge Transfer in Multinational Corporations

The aim of this paper is to extend social capital approaches to knowledge transfer by identifying governance mechanisms that managers can deploy to promote the development of social capital. In order to achieve this objective, insights from the micro‐level, knowledge governance approach are combined with theory on the determinants of social capital. Three governance mechanisms are identified: market‐based mechanisms, hierarchical mechanisms, and social mechanisms. The findings, based on data from two Danish MNCs, indicate that although the use of social governance mechanisms promotes positive assessment of social capital, hierarchical governance mechanisms constrain its development. The application of market‐based governance mechanisms has no significant effect. In addition, the findings provide evidence that social capital has a positive impact on knowledge transfer.     

Leadership and cooperation in growing teams

We study how the growth of teams affects leadership effectiveness and intragroup cooperation. We put experimental participants in two teams. In each team, the members voluntarily contribute to a club good. In one of the two teams, the members observe the contribution of a randomly chosen leader before they decide themselves. Two treatments allow for migration between the teams. In one of them, participants control access to their team with a voting process. By design, participants can achieve the efficient outcome only if they all move into one team. We compare the results with a leaderless setting as well as with four treatments which vary team size exogenously. The results show that high contributions of leaders encourage higher per-capita contributions of their followers which foster migration into their teams. In turn, larger teams experience even more courageous leadership and higher contributions, but the coordination effect diminishes. Nevertheless, the dismissal of potential newcomers in the treatment with voting suggests that team members see a trade-off between team size and contributions. They sacrifice economic benefits from potential entrants to maintain intrateam cooperation.