A longitudinal study of the characteristics, business creation process and outcome differences of Canadian female vs. male nascent entrepreneurs

This paper concerns a longitudinal study, of a random sample of nascent entrepreneurs in Canada (based on an initial screening sample of 49,763 households). We study gender differences, including number and type of gestational activities, the characteristics of the business created, and the status of the start-up effort after the 4th year of data collection. Logistic regression is used to predict the creation of an operating business from gender and other variables. Four of nine gender difference hypotheses were supported. Findings show that women who are members of a start-up team are six times more likely to achieve an operating business.

The motives of off-the-books entrepreneurs: necessity- or opportunity-driven?

In recent years, it has become common to represent entrepreneurs as either necessity- or opportunity-driven. Drawing upon face-to-face interviews in England with 70 entrepreneurs trading wholly or partially off-the-books, this paper evaluates critically this dichotomous representation. The finding is that squeezing the motives of off-the-books entrepreneurs into one side or the other of this dichotomy not only over-simplifies their rationales since both necessity and opportunity motives are often involved but also obfuscates how their motives change over time. The outcome is a call to replace this either/or depiction with a richer and more nuanced both/and understanding of off-the-books entrepreneurs that recognises their diverse and dynamic motives.

Legitimating behaviors and firm emergence: a resource dependence perspective

This study makes an attempt to understand some of the reasons why some nascent firms make the transition to new operational firms (a process called “firm emergence”) while others do not. Because of liabilities-of-newness, nascent firms face the daunting task of acquiring legitimacy from their immediate audience in order to emerge as new operational firm. This study claims and finds empirical evidence that through certain legitimating behaviors nascent firms can acquire legitimacy from their immediate audience and thus succeed in becoming new operational firms. The study will put forward more general propositions for future testing, and will draw implications for practitioners and entrepreneurship scholars.

Franchising and intellectual capital: A franchisee’s perspective

Various studies have focused on the reasons for franchising. Most studies have concentrated principally on the franchisors’ motivations for franchising, with only a few exploring franchising as a route to self-employment. This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework which examines the value of franchising to franchisees, employing an intellectual capital perspective. It is suggested that the (perceived) value of the franchise system is unlikely to remain static over time, and that the perceived benefits of franchise systems will vary according to both system and franchisee attributes.

Market entry of firms with different legal forms: an empirical test of the influence of institutional factors

Drawing upon institutional theory we develop a conceptual model and investigate the determinants of market entry for worker cooperatives, publicly traded and limited-liability companies. Our results show that formal institutional conditions (i.e., mercantile legislation) influence the start-up choice of entrepreneurs regarding the legal form of their new venture. In addition, we take into account the influence of informal institutional conditions (i.e., local corporate culture) on the market entry rate of firms with different legal structures. Findings show that, while market entry is sensitive to the general economic climate, entry rates of firms with a different legal structure respond differently to the same economic conditions.

Output and productivity growth in the education sector: comparisons for the US and UK

This paper considers the measurement of performance in public service provision in an international context by examining outcome-based measures for the education sector. It first sets out the measurement issues in general terms. The paper then applies these methods to comparing the UK experience with that in the US over the period 1979–2002. The results show higher labour productivity growth in the UK education sector than in the US over this time period, so that the UK eliminated the productivity gap with the US by the end of the Century.

Social responsibility: U.S. power plants 1985–1998

This study introduces an Environmental Performance Index (EPI) to assess the performance of firms that produce both good and bad outputs. In the one good output one bad output case, the EPI simplifies to the ratio of good–bad output for period t + 1 and period t. After deriving the index, data for U.S. coal-fired power plants from 1985 to 1998 are used to demonstrate insights that the EPI can provide. We find that power plants with units participating in Phase I of the Acid Rain Program experience a dramatic improvement in their EPI during 1994–1995.

Individual, organizational and environmental determinants of new firm employment growth: evidence from Latin America

New ventures are increasingly playing an important role in Latin American economies. However, little is known about the determinants of new firm growth in this context. The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the factors influencing new firm growth in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru. Individual, organizational and environmental factors are included in an empirical model, which is tested using data collected by face-to-face interviews with 582 entrepreneurs. Different specifications of employment growth and regression approaches are employed. Results suggest that growth strongly depends on the characteristics of the entrepreneur. National environment and firm-related factors are also important factors in determining growth.

Bias of distance functions estimates and Primont and Primont’s homotheticity test

The question of whether a technology exhibits particular properties such as radial input or output homotheticity is a crucial one for a producer since it should strongly impact on its reactions to market changes. Primont and Primont (Econ Lett 45:191–195, 1994) established that it can be tested using only weak assumptions. They further used their results to test for input homotheticity of an educational production technology (Primont and Primont, Can J Econ 29:587–591, 1996). In this paper, it is shown that if not implemented properly, the test can lead to biased results. Some ways to obtain unbiased results are also suggested.

The impact of patents and standards on macroeconomic growth: a panel approach covering four countries and 12 sectors

Based on the assumption that codified technological know-how contributes to economic growth, this paper presents the estimation of a Cobb–Douglas production function, pooling data from four European countries and 12 sectors. The empirical results confirm that both the stock of patents and the stock of technical standards contribute significantly to economic growth in the 1990s. Whereas the results of the country models are rather similar, we observe significant differences between the sector models, which indicate that standards are more important for growth in less R&D-intensive industries and patents in R&D-intensive industries.

Application of a double bootstrap to investigation of determinants of technical efficiency of farms in Central Europe

The paper provides one of the first applications of the double bootstrap procedure (Simar and Wilson 2007) in a two-stage estimation of the effect of environmental variables on non-parametric estimates of technical efficiency. This procedure enables consistent inference within models explaining efficiency scores, while simultaneously producing standard errors and confidence intervals for these efficiency scores. The application is to 88 livestock and 256 crop farms in the Czech Republic, split into individual and corporate.

The Feldstein–Horioka puzzle in Latin American and Caribbean countries: a panel cointegration analysis

In this paper, the recently developed panel unit root and the Pedroni cointegration tests are applied to empirically examine the validity of the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle (F–H puzzle) for a heterogeneous panel of 14 Latin American and five Caribbean countries over the period, 1960–2002. The findings indicate that in these countries, the long-run solvency condition is maintained. Finally, employing the Pedroni panel group FM-OLS estimator (2000, 2001), it is found that the statistically significant estimated savings-retention coefficient for the panel is relatively small indicating that the F–H Puzzle is not valid and thus implying the prevalence of a moderate degree of capital mobility.

The productivity performance of Irish dairy farms 1984–2000: a multiple output distance function approach

This study measures productivity growth on Irish dairy farms over the period 1984–2000. A total factor productivity index is constructed for the dairy system and is decomposed into technical change, efficiency change, and changes in scale efficiency. This is achieved by estimating a stochastic output distance function model of the production technology in use on Irish dairy farms. Overall, productivity on Irish dairy farms grew by 1.2% per annum over the sample period.

A response to the critiques of DEA by Dmitruk and Koshevoy, and Bol

We here critique the articles by Dmitruk & Koshevoy (1991, J Econ Theory 55:121–144) and by Bol (1986, J Econ Theory 38:380–385) by showing how to solve the examples they erected to show the non-existence of functions for evaluating performance efficiencies in DEA. We also show that functions satisfying these criteria—and other important criteria as well—were already available prior to the publications of D&K and by Bol and have since been greatly extended to increase the power and scope of DEA.

Opening the black box: Finding the source of cost inefficiency

Parametric and nonparametric procedures are used to identify the apparent source of cost inefficiency in banking. Inefficiencies of 20–25% from earlier studies are reduced to 1–5% when, in addition to commonly specified cost function influences, variables reflecting banks’ external business environment and industry indicators of “productivity” are added. These productivity indicators explain most of the reduction in bank operating cost over 1992–2001 and was 5 times the reduction in the dispersion of inefficiency. Inefficiency appears stable over time because it is small relative to industry-wide cost changes occurring concurrently and because technology dispersion is imperfect.

Gender,Organizational Justice Perceptions,and Union Organizing

The authors examine the relationship between gender and organizational justice perceptions and the implications of this relationship for organizing women. They employ a survey study design to confirm expectations associated with the anecdotal literature on this topic, namely that women place greater value on interactional justice than on distributive or procedural justice. Results indicate that gender leads to valuing interactional justice more highly only in interaction with race. Specifically, in contrast to white women and both white and black men, black women give greater weight to being treated with dignity and respect than to the other two organizational justice dimensions.

Productivity and efficiency of state-owned enterprises in China

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the variations in SOE efficiency and productivity from the perspectives of macroeconomic fluctuations and systematic reform in China during 1986–2003. We use Data Envelopment Analysis to measure SOE efficiency. Subsequently, we use the Malmquist Index of Productivity change to measure productivity growth. The empirical results show that SOE efficiency and productivity exhibited obvious improvements during periods of strong systematic reform and a prosperous economy. The systematic reform after 1998 had a clear-cut impact on SOE performance.

A Model for Predicting Outcomes of Sexual Harassment Complaints by Race and Gender

Organizational scholars have studied the impact of sex on sexual harassment outcomes but left unexplored the influences of race. Thus, we use social identity theory to explore the role of race stereotypes and their influences on sexual harassment outcomes. We posit that stereotypes of African-American women tend to be much more negative than those of white women and this serves to marginalize their position both as victims of sexual harassment as well as complainants.

Do we estimate an input or an output distance function? An application of the mixture approach to European railways

In this paper, we estimate parametric input and output distance functions and discuss how to estimate a mixture/latent class model (LCM) involving the output and input distance functions in the context of multi-input and multi-output production technology. The proposed technique is applied to a panel data on European Railways (1971–1994). This model allows us to identify determinants of the efficiency orientation, thereby providing useful information that can help researchers to choose between the input and the output-oriented approaches. In addition, we develop cross-indices that can be used to compute input (output) technical inefficiency from the estimates of output (input) distance function.

Appearance-based Sex Discrimination and Stereotyping in the Workplace: Whose Conduct Should We Regulate?

Court treatment of sex discrimination and harassment claims based on appearance and gender stereotyping has been inconsistent, particularly where the facts involve reference to sexual orientation. Ironically, court willingness to allow such claims may turn on the choice of verbal or physical conduct by, or the sex or sexual orientation of, the alleged offenders. Because plaintiffs in such situations may assert retaliation claims to increase their chances of prevailing, employers should focus less on regulating aspects of personal appearance unrelated to job performance and more on problematic reactions by co-workers. Workplace civility policies may hold promise for limiting both legal liability and practical consequences in the absence of a legislative response.