Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy

This paper investigates the contribution of gender differences in job mobility to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that over the first 10 years of labour market experience job mobility accounts for up to 30% of total log wage growth for men and only 8.3% for women, and that this difference is mainly due to differences in returns to mobility. The gender mobility gap is robust to the inclusion of individual, job and firm characteristics, to different ways of accounting for individual unobserved heterogeneity, and is mainly found for voluntary job moves. Looking at the characteristics of the jobs and the firms' workers move to, we find that moves to larger firms represent by far the main source of gender differences in returns to mobility. We offer two possible explanations for this finding; one which involves differences in bargaining behaviour and one which relates to the theory of compensating differentials.     

Job mobility restriction mechanisms and appropriability in organizations: The mediating role of secrecy and lead time

This paper addresses the following question: does mobility restriction enhance the appropriability of R&D investments? And if so, how does this occur? We propose that mobility restriction mechanisms affect appropriability through their impact on secrecy and lead time. We test mediation hypotheses in a sample of biotechnology firms and discuss the implications for intellectual property protection strategies and human resource management.     

Evolving corporate governance and firms performance: evidence from Japanese firms

This study is an attempt to investigate the implications of the ownership structure and control transfers in the Japanese corporate market, which are attributed mainly to the government’s liberalization policies during 1990s. It appears that institutional shareholdings—either financial or non-financial corporations—are associated with poor performance, whereas the foreign and domestic private ownerships lead to an improvement in the performance of the firms. We observe that unwinding the cross-shareholding between banks and corporations and mutual transfers among non-financial institutions allows for efficiency gain. Furthermore, the ownership transfer to private and foreign individuals is consistently associated with high market value, which implies that individuals’ transfers lead to an increase in efficiency.     

Employment and wage practices of Japanese firms in the Philippines: convergence with Filipino-Chinese and Western-owned firms

In foreign-owned Philippine firms, human resource approaches and practices tend to converge. Japanese-owned firms localize their human resource practices by emphasizing local standards and practices in compensation, hiring, recruitment, job assignments and the like. On the other hand, Western-owned firms tend to adopt well-known Japanese style practices. Filipino-Chinese-owned firms tend to be traditional, emphasizing both informal and hierarchical control mechanisms which put a premium upon loyalty and trust, through familistic, informal but hierarchical control mechanisms. As the owners of these firms pass on control to the next generation, they tend to hire professional managers. These managers include younger generation Filipino-Chinese educated abroad. They are torn between the rational, and traditional norms and practices insisted upon by their Confucian-oriented elders, and the demands of a competitive and ever-changing technology and economy.

It is quite meaningless to attach adjectives like ‘Japanese’, ‘Filipino-Chinese’ or ‘Western’ to universal concepts like industrial relations and human resource approaches - the search for the best approach in work relations is beyond the issue of convergence or divergence.     

工作投入与工作卷入和工作狂的区分

工作投入(work engagement)是组织心理学家在最近引入的一个新概念,新的概念在最初被介绍的时候,总是要避免与已经存在的概念相重复。工作倦怠(burnout)的研究已经有30多年的历史了,是当前人们争相研究的热点,它     

Technological spillovers and productivity in Italian manufacturing firms

We study whether a firm’s total factor productivity dynamics is positively influenced by its own R&D activity and by the technological spillovers generated at the intra- and inter-sectorial level. Our approach corrects simultaneously for the endogeneity and the selectivity biases introduced by the use of a firm’s own R&D as a regressor. The evidence suggests that a firm’s involvement in R&D activities accounts for significant productivity gains. Firms also benefit from spillovers originating from their own industries, as well as from innovative upstream sectors.     

工作要求和工作资源对工作投入的影响研究

本文在JD-R理论框架下,探讨工作要求、工作资源与工作投入之间的关系。通过对服装企业研发人员的问卷调查与统计分析,结果显示:服装企业研发人员的工作投入状况整体处于中等偏上水平;工作要求与工作投入呈弱负相关性,工作资源对工作投入具有较强的正相关性,并且工作资源的不同维度对工作投入有显著正向预测作用,显示了工作资源对提高工作投入的特殊作用。     

Resource allocation in multi-divisional multi-product firms

Journal of Productivity Analysis - This paper is concerned with specifying and estimating the productive characteristics of multidivisional multiproduct companies at the divisional level. In order...     

Local development and embedded large firms

A classification of potential ties between large firms and local economies is proposed, first, by working on various sections of literature concerning multinational enterprises, subsidiaries and regional development. Then, building on a model of a dynamic local economy, i.e. the vital industrial district, a framework is sketched in which different combinations of linkages are put in relation to different pools and degrees of strength of social capital and other local factors. The main object of this paper is to present that framework and illustrate a proposition nested in it. The proposition is that involvement in knowledge exchange and institutional building, identifying ‘developmental embeddedness’, is more probable where and when the local factors are neither ‘too weak’ nor ‘too strong’, and contextual policies fostering the developmental role of large firm units are present.     

Job quality in Europe

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the relaunch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual's job quality than the country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic.     

Job Assignment and Promotion

The paper surveys theoretical models of job mobility with special attention to promotion and career profiles. The review is ordered according to the assumptions concerning information on workers' relevant characteristics (i.e. perfect vs. imperfect information, private vs. public information) and technology (i.e. single-job models vs. many-job models). JEL classification: D21, J31, L23     

Job satisfaction and quits

We test the wealth maximization theory of quitting behavior on the German Socioeconomic Panel (1985–2003). With the interpretation of job satisfaction as an expression of the experienced preference for the present job against available alternatives, the propensity to stay in the present job is simply related to the residual of a job satisfaction equation. We show that this residual is a better predictor of quits than the overall level of satisfaction. Furthermore, we validate a dynamic extension of the economic theory of quits for which uncertainty in the expectation of future events plays a decisive role.     

Job satisfaction in teams

This paper analyses and discusses the results of a large sample survey of job satisfaction among clerical employees working in teams. The relative strengths of association between several variables and job satisfaction are assessed and the results support the importance of on-the-job training, participation in decision making and management leadership. Questions are raised about first-line supervisors as team leaders.     

Growth in total factor productivity and links among firms

In this paper we study the relevance of links among firms in explaining the mean and the auto-correlation property of the aggregate total factor productivity rate of growth (Solow residual). Our approach relies on the interaction between idiosyncratic shocks of firms and the network structure of firms. We analytically study this phenomenon using the adjacency matrix of a complete network and we present a simulation with more general random adjacency matrices. We also check empirically, using Italian data, the relationship between the network structure and the Solow residual. In particular, in the empirical part, we find two main results: firstly, the relationship between the Solow residual and the measure of connectivity of firms is positive, in accordance with the analytical results. Secondly, we find that the measure of connectivity is pro-cyclical with the annual growth rate of industrial production.     

Organizational differences in managerial compensation and benefits in Chinese firms

More than two decades of economic reforms have brought profound changes in human resource management practices in both the state and non-state sectors in China. This study focuses on the impact of organizational factors on compensation and benefits for Chinese managers in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), publicly listed firms (PLFs), and foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs). The empirical investigation of 465 firms located in three major Chinese cities, Shanghai, Nanjing and Guangzhou, provides evidence that organizational factors, such as ownership, firm size, firm age, location and industrial sector, have significant impacts on the variances in Chinese managers' compensation levels, compensation structures and benefits. The trends in the development of compensation and benefits for Chinese managers are also discussed as the Chinese economy moves closer to a more globalized, highly dynamic economy after China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.