Interrelationships between human capital,HRM and innovation in Belgian start-ups aiming at an innovation strategy

Research on the impact of human resource management (HRM) on firm performance has increased since the end of the nineties. Despite the pile of studies and results, critical assessments of this literature stream point to several empirical and theoretical gaps. We focus on two empirical gaps. First, there is a lack of attention to innovation as a measure of firm performance outcome. Most articles use financial (e.g., return on assets (ROA)), organisational (e.g., productivity) and employee related (e.g., commitment) performance measures. Yet, Western knowledge economies consider innovation to be a driving force of economic growth, and international competitive advantage. Moreover, innovation is a function of a firm's ability to create, manage and maintain knowledge. Because knowledge is created by and stored within individuals, human resources as well as HRM may play an important role as drivers of innovation. Second, HRM is considered to be a large company phenomenon. Yet, small businesses provide a great environment to study the HRM-performance relationship because of their transparent nature and the small distance between an individual's and a company's performance. Next, human resources and HRM are crucial to small businesses because they have less tolerance for inefficiency. We examine a sample of small start-ups that aim for an innovation strategy, but are not necessarily successful in terms of innovative output. We expect start-ups with superior human resources and HRM to produce more innovative output. The results show that both human capital (of owners/managers and employees) and HRM are important determinants of innovation in start-ups.     

Analyzing the underlying dimensions of firm profitability

In this paper we decompose a traditional measure for firm's performance, return on sales, into four components that capture the impact of productivity, price recovery, product mix and capacity utilization, respectively, on a firm's profitability. The new measures are used as an illustration to explain changes in the performance of firms in the US telecommunications industry following deregulation. Changes in the overall profitability margin of these firms are explained by substantial but offsetting changes in their productivity, price recovery ability, product-mix maximization and capacity utilization, that have occurred as a consequence of deregulation. The new measures enable us not only to illustrate relative differences between firms in a given cross-section but also to shed light on how changes take place over time in the different components that underlie firms' profitability.     

Environmental Responsibility and Firm Performance: The Application of an Environmental,Social and Governance Model

This paper investigates the way in which environmental responsibility impacts on corporate financial performance, measured by return on equity (ROE) and return on assets (ROA). Using a sample of Korean firms covering the period 2011–2012, and employing two different test methods, namely the OLS and 2SLS methods, we show that the relationships between environmental responsibility performance and firms’ ROE and ROA are positive and statistically significant. However, we show that research and development (R&D) intensity (expenditure) does not affect either environmental responsibility or corporate financial performance. The results of this analysis encourage further empirical analysis of the industries, as well as the use of more than one estimation method to determine environmental responsibility and corporate financial performance within firms. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Profit, productivity and distribution: Differences across organizational forms - The case of Spanish banks

We examine variations in financial and economic performance as a function of organizational form, and, over time. The forms we consider include Spanish commercial banks, savings banks, and financial cooperatives. We decompose multilateral variation in operating profit, our measure of financial performance, into price and quantity effects. We then decompose the latter into a margin effect and productivity change. Our measure of economic performance, productivity variation, is subsequently disaggregated into technical, cost efficiency, and scale. We find that deregulation and liberalization have acted to narrow performance gaps among organizational forms; this, despite less-than compelling evidence that increased competition has contributed to this convergence. For the Spanish banking system as a whole, the margin effect appears to deliver twice as much financial benefit as do improvements in productivity. Importantly, this finding does not vary across organizational form. Such regularity has an important implication: Incentives for growth are apparently provided by a positive margin rather than by the more elusive benefits of economies of scale and improved cost efficiency.     

Stocks,bonds, money markets and exchange rates: measuring international financial transmission

Understanding the complexity of the financial transmission process across various assets—domestically as well as within and across asset classes—requires the simultaneous modeling of the various transmission channels in a single, comprehensive empirical framework. The paper estimates the financial transmission between money, bond and equity markets and exchange rates within and between the USA and the euro area. We find that asset prices react strongest to other domestic asset price shocks, but that there are also substantial international spillovers, both within and across asset classes. The results underline the dominance of US markets as the main driver of global financial markets: US financial markets explain, on average, around 30% of movements in euro area financial markets, whereas euro area markets account only for about 6% of US asset price changes. Moreover, the methodology allows us to identify indirect spillovers through other asset prices, which are found to increase substantially the international transmission of shocks within asset classes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Macroeconomic shocks and fluctuations in African economies

We estimate a monetary DSGE model to examine the role of macroeconomic shocks in generating fluctuations in ten African countries. The model is estimated with the Bayesian technique using twelve macroeconomic variables. The findings indicate that both the internal and external shocks significantly influence output fluctuations in African economies. Over a four quarter horizon, internal shocks are dominant and over eight to sixteen quarter horizons, external shocks are dominant. Among the external shocks, external debt, exchange rate, foreign interest rate and commodity price shocks account for a large part of output variations in African economies. Money supply and productivity shocks are the most important internal shocks contributing to output fluctuations in African countries.     

The risk-return trade-off in human capital investment

In this paper, we analyze investments in human capital in a way which is standard for financial assets, but not (yet) for human capital assets. We study mean-variance plots of human capital assets. We compare the properties of human capital returns using a performance measure and by using tests for mean-variance spanning. Fields differ strongly not only in common rates of return, but also in return per unit of risk. We identify a range of educations that are efficient in terms of investment goods, and a range of educations that may be chosen for consumption purposes.     

Productivity changes in pre-crisis Western European banks: Does scale effect really matter?

Insofar as the completion of the Single Market for Financial Services, it has presented new challenges for European Banking industries. In this study, we use a recently developed generalized metafrontier Malmquist productivity index (gMMPI) to provide insights on productivity growth. We extend the gMMPI to broaden the index's capacity by decomposing various sources of productivity change in the metafrontier context. The sample contains commercial banks from 12 Western European countries prior to the recent financial crisis. A key advantage of our extension is that it introduces the role of scale effects. The empirical results show that an average bank's productivity growth arises mainly from technical changes and scale effects. Moreover, smaller and larger banks grow faster than medium ones. In addition, conservative banks tend to grow faster. These findings suggest that a more competitive and integrated financial market induced by financial deregulation is indeed able to improve banks’ productivity.     

Spillover effects in oil-related CDS markets during and after the sub-prime crisis

This paper investigates the return and volatility spillover effects across oil-related credit default swaps (CDSs), the oil market, and financial market risks for the US during and after the subprime crises. The empirical analysis is based on monthly return and realized volatility data from February 2004 to April 2020. We estimate both static and dynamic generalized dynamic spillover measures based on vector autoregressive (VAR) models. Our full sample empirical findings show that the oil market is the primary source of risk transmission for all the oil-related credit default swaps, while the bond market is the highest source of risk transmission to the stock market and vice versa. We also provide evidence that the regulated monopoly US utility sector has the least role in volatility transmission. Furthermore, the bailout program conducted by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve helped stabilize the US financial market through the purchase of toxic assets after the subprime financial crisis. We find strong evidence that the federal funds rate hike cycles lessen total risk transmission throughout the US bond market. Finally, our findings assert that oil price shocks have a significant effect on the oil-related CDSs in some sub-periods via the demand and supply transmission channels.     

Upside/Downside spillovers between oil and Chinese stock sectors: From the global financial crisis to global pandemic

This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, recent oil price fall, and both global and European financial crises on dependence structure and asymmetric risk spillovers between crude oil and Chinese stock sectors. Using time-varying symmetric and asymmetric copula functions and the conditional Value at Risk measure, we provide evidence of positive tail dependence in most sectors using copula and conditional Value-at-Risk techniques. We can see the average dependence between oil and industries during the oil crisis. Moreover, we find strong evidence of bidirectional risk spillovers for all oil-sector pairs. The intensity of risk spillovers from oil to all stock sectors varies across sectors. The risk spillovers from sectors to oil are substantially larger than those from oil to sectors during COVID-19. Furthermore, the return spillover is time varying and sensitive to external shocks. The spillover strengths are higher during COVID-19 than financial and oil crises. Finally, oil do not exhibit neither hedge nor safe-haven characteristics irrespective of crisis periods.     

Impact of R&D and Technology Diffusion on Productivity Growth: Empirical Evidence for 10 OECD Countries

This paper examines the empirical evidence on the impact of performed R&D and of R&D embodied in intermediate and capital goods on productivity performance in 10 major OECD countries over the last two decades. To quantify intersectoral and international technology flows, industry-level embodied R&D variables were constructed from an input–output (IO) R&D embodiment model. The productivity variables used are discrete Divisia growth indexes of total factor productivity (TFP), which were estimated from an IO growth accounting model. The results from pooled regressions indicate that the rates of return of the R&D variables were positively significant and increasing in the 1980s. In particular, embodied R&D is an important source for TFP growth in services, indicating very high social returns of the flows of capital-embodied technology into this sector. Moreover, the information and communi-cation technology (ICT) cluster of industries played a major role in the generation and cquisition of new technologies at the international level.     

Analysis of regional productivity with capital as a quasi-fixed factor

Most existing studies of regional productivity growth do not incorporate the effect of variations in capacity utilization on changes in output. By failing to do so, their factor productivity estimates are biased. To overcome this shortcoming, we adjust multifactor productivity growth measure for changes in capacity utilization. Our technique recognizes that capital is a quasi-fixed factor which implies that capital in the short run can be either under- or over-utilized by a firm. Our results from 1974 to 1978 show that capacity adjusted multifactor productivity growth measure exceeds capacity unadjusted multifactor productivity growth measure for the nine census divisions. The bias in the capacity unadjusted measure of multifactor productivity growth is approximately 8 percent in East North Central and over 33 percent in Mountain. We find that the aggregate factor productivity growth is slowest in the traditional manufacturing belt (Middle Atlantic and East North Central divisions). The level of aggregate factor productivity in the manufacturing belt, however, is almost 33 percent higher than in regions in the south.     

Extent of diversification and company performance: The New Zealand evidence

This paper confirms the relative superiority of related-diversification in terms of the financial performance of New Zealand companies, companies which are much smaller and less diverse than those which normally feature in this literature. To facilitate comparisons with other studies, financial performance is measured in three ways: return on equity; return on assets; and sales growth. Other independent variables controlled for are company size; risk; leverage; technological opportunity; and industry concentration. The effective rates of protection afforded manufacturing industries (export subsidies and import tariffs) are also confirmed as having had some positive bearing on company performance.     

Does it pay to be green? A disaggregated analysis of U.S. firms with green patents

The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between environmental performance and financial performance on a sample of 361 U.S. firms over the 2007–2016 period. We contribute to the literature by considering firms active in sustainable innovations by obtaining green patents. We also contribute to the literature by using disaggregated measures of environmental performance collected from the Bloomberg ESG database, including environmental disclosure score, greenhouse gas emissions, waste emissions and water use. Panel data regressions' results show that environmental transparency positively influences current accounting and stock market performance, but negatively influences the return on capital employed. Furthermore, lower pollution emissions tend to improve the current return on assets, while being harmful for the efficiency of long‐term capital employment at the same time. The empirical results also indicate that the Global Financial Crisis (2007–2010) increased the environmental transparency of firms with green patents but negatively impacted their price to earnings ratio. At the same time, lower waste disposal diminishes stock valuation while the opposite is true with water use. Taken together, our results suggest that environmental transparency and greenhouse gas emissions generally appear to be the most important environmental variables influencing financial performance, with increasing importance attributed to them by the market after the global crisis period.     

Environmental self-regulation for sustainable development: Can internal carbon pricing enhance financial performance?

Internal carbon pricing is an innovative self-regulation mechanism where companies set their own carbon prices on business operations to mitigate climate risk and achieve sustainable development. While internal carbon pricing has gained popularity among multinational enterprises, its firm-level impact is underexplored. This research provides novel theoretical and empirical evidence on how the internal carbon price as a cost component can contribute to profitability growth. We construct a panel dataset of 132 multinational enterprises across Europe, North America, and Asia by tracking their use of internal carbon pricing from 2013 to 2017 based on their records at the Carbon Disclosure Project. To address endogeneity bias, we employ propensity score matching method on a fixed-effects model. Results indicate that using internal carbon pricing can increase return on assets by 1.1%. Firms with internal carbon prices are more likely to reduce cost of goods sold to improve return on assets. Our study suggests that internal carbon pricing as environmental self-regulation can generate profitability gains through cost reduction. The research also points out the potential of voluntary internal carbon pricing to complement command-and-control carbon pricing regulations.     

RISE OF THE FIDUCIARY STATE: A SURVEY OF SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUND RESEARCH

We survey the literature documenting the rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), which, with assets under management of over $5.4 trillion at year‐end 2014, are a major force in global finance. Research papers have analyzed the evolution of SWFs from stabilization funds to stand‐alone wealth management funds; we both survey this research and show that more than 25 countries have launched or proposed new SWFs since January 2008. The most salient and controversial feature of SWFs is that they are state‐owned; we survey the existing literature on state ownership and discuss what this predicts about the efficiency and beneficence of government control of SWF assets. We discuss the documented importance of SWF funding sources (oil sales revenues versus excess reserves from export earnings) and survey the normative literature describing how SWFs should allocate funds. We then summarize the empirical literature studying how SWFs actually do allocate funds—across asset classes, geographically, and across industries. We document that most SWF equity investments in publicly traded firms involve cross‐border purchases of sizeable minority stakes (median around 20%) in target firms, with a strong preference for investments in the financial sector. Next, we assess empirical studies examining the impact of SWF stock investments on target firm financial and operating performance, and find universal support for a positive announcement period stock price increase of 1–3%. This, however, is significantly lower than the 5% abnormal return documented for stock purchases by comparable privately owned financial investors in recent studies, indicating a “sovereign wealth fund discount.” We conclude by summarizing the lessons of SWF research and pointing out unresolved issues.     

Technology capital: the price of admission to the growth club

We assess long-run patterns of global agricultural productivity growth between 1970 and 2005 and examine the relationship between investments in technology capital and productivity. To measure agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) we employ a Solow-type growth accounting method to decompose output growth into input and TFP growth. For technology capital we construct two indexes reflecting national capacities in agricultural research and education-extension for 87 developing countries. We then correlate technology capital levels with long-term growth rates in agricultural TFP. Our findings show that global agricultural TFP growth as a whole accelerated since 1980, although performance was very uneven across developing countries. TFP growth rates were significantly influenced by technology capital. Marginal improvements to research capacity, given a minimal level of extension and schooling existed, were associated with faster TFP growth. However, marginal increases in extension-schooling without commensurate improvements in research capacity did not improve productivity performance.     

Exploring the sources of financial performance in Chinese banks: A comparative analysis of different types of banks

Since significantly organizational difference in Chinese banks, this study makes an attempt to investigate whether there exist some differences of the financial performance and its decomposed components for Chinese banks. We employ the decomposition of profit change model introduced by Grifell-Tatje and Lovell (2015, P215) and normalized price definition of Balk (2018) to develop a normalized profit change decomposition model which can well deal with the firms’ scale difference. This model also decomposes the normalized profit into the technical efficiency effect, technical effect, size effect, price and quantity margin effect, and price recovery effect. For the empirical evidence, we find that although there is an increase of profit gains, the profit growth rate decline by year. Furthermore, the productivity is not the main factor to expand profits, quantity margin effect also makes peer contributions. Finally, the productivity effect and its decomposed components present different functions in different kinds of Chinese banks.     

Reassessing measures of sustainable firm performance: A consultant's guide to identifying hidden costs in corporate disclosures

Strategy, management, corporate social responsibility, critical accounting, and other business researchers frequently utilize financial metrics such as return on assets, return on equity, and return on sales as proxy measures for the financial performance of firms. Large data sets offer convenience but exclude the textual data of corporate disclosures that offers critical insight into specific executive actions and social and environmental outcomes. This study looks at the detrimental consequences of the prevalent practice of relying on macrofinancial metrics as measures of firm performance. Insight from the socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM) is then applied to help an external analyst develop the perspective of an internal consultant to identify hidden costs in corporate disclosures. An extensive case on former CEO Robert Nardelli's tenure at Home Depot is presented as an example of applied SEAM theory to explore how a causal network of dysfunctions can be traced through publicly available financial disclosures. The management discussion and analysis as well as the executive incentive compensation formulas serve as a roadmap to discover hidden costs. The study offers a critical perspective of financial disclosures to allow researchers to externally diagnose dysfunctions sooner rather than years later, an insight formerly only available to internal consultants.     

Capacity,competiton and efficiency in hospitals: A nonparametric approach

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new,multiple output measure of plant capacity which we use to analyze the performance of hospitals in different competitive environments. To evaluate each hospital's plant capacity, we employ a nonparametric (linear programming) framework. The resulting measure of capacity can be determined from observed inputs and outputs and is based on the best practice performance of all hospitals in the sample. This methodology is closely related to Farrell-type measures of efficiency and, as a by-product, yields information on efficiency of individual hospitals. This technique imposes no prespecified functional form and allows for multiple outpus (to account for differences in case-mix). We apply this methodological approach to a sample of hospitals in Michigan. Our results are used to compare capacity utilization and efficiency of hospitals across different competitive environments.The refereeing process of this paper was handled by R. Kopp.