When global virtual teams share knowledge: Media richness,cultural difference and language commonality

Technological developments and internationalization have made virtual communication a central part of everyday life in many larger organizations. In recent years this trend has been intensified by travel-budget cuts imposed by the global financial crisis. Accordingly, the use of virtual media for internal knowledge sharing is now more important than ever before. Extant studies have provided useful theories and empirical documentation on how to manage global virtual teams. However, no prior research has examined the interaction of media type with the relation between culture/language and canonical/equivocal knowledge sharing. This is an important omission because cultural and linguistic variations are known to have a great effect on knowledge sharing. We use ethnographic field-study methodology for an exploratory examination of the effects of culture, shared language commonality and media choice on knowledge sharing in a large Danish MNC with particular focus on its Indian subsidiary. Results show that certain types of media are more useful for certain types of knowledge sharing depending on the cultural and linguistic variation between the communicating parties.     

Career success schemas and their contextual embeddedness: A comparative configurational perspective

We introduce career success schemas as critical for understanding how people in different contexts perceive and understand career success. Using a comparative configurational approach, we show, in a study of 13 countries, that two structural characteristics of career success schemas—complexity and convergence—differ across country contexts and are embedded in specific configurations of institutional factors. Adopting complexity and convergence as primary dimensions, we propose a taxonomy of career success schemas at the country level. Based on this taxonomy, we contribute to the understanding of subjective career success across countries, discuss the importance of schemas for organisational career systems in multinational enterprises, and propose specific guidelines for future comparative careers research.     

Welfare Effects of Changing Technological Efficency in Regulated Open-Access Fisheries

Environmental and Resource Economics - Small-scale fisheries often operate under conditions of regulated open access; that is, the fishery is subject to natural or regulatory constraints on fishing...     

Commodity prices and fiscal policy design: Procyclical despite a rule

Recent studies offer evidence of reduced fiscal procyclicality to commodity price changes in resource‐rich countries—a feature commonly attributed to the adoption of fiscal policy rules. We revisit this issue and find that, by controlling for global activity shocks while allowing for time‐varying changes in both fiscal policy and the volatility of shocks, this finding does not hold. To show this we develop a time‐varying dynamic factor model, allowing for a multiple of shocks, stochastic volatility and time‐varying parameters, and estimate it on data for Norway, whose handling of resource wealth is often cited as exemplary.     

Exploring alternative relationships between perceived investment in employee development,perceived supervisor support and employee outcomes

The purpose of this study was to explore alternative relationships between perceived investment in employee development (PIED), perceived supervisor support (PSS), and employee outcomes in the form of attitudes (affective commitment and turnover intention) and work performance (work effort, work quality and organisational citizenship behaviour). A cross-sectional survey among 331 employees from a Norwegian telecommunications organisation showed that the relationship between PSS and employee attitudes was partially mediated by PIED. In addition, PSS was found to moderate the relationship between PIED and three self-report measures of work performance. The form of the moderation revealed a positive relationship only for high levels of PSS. These findings suggest that line managers are of vital importance in implementing developmental HR practices, either because they influence how such practices are perceived by employees, which, in turn, affects employee attitudes, or because positive experiences with both line managers and HR practices seem to be needed in order for developmental HR practices to positively influence employee performance.     

Expectations and regime robustness in price formation: evidence from vector autoregressive models and recursive methods

The forward-looking linear quadratic adjustment cost (LQAC) model has received attention when modelling prices. Empirical evidence supporting the model seems, however, ambiguous. We find that the LQAC-model is severely at odds with price data for Norwegian machinery exports also when the pure forward-looking rule is augmented by additional lags of the targeted variable. A conditional equilibrium correction (EqCM) model explains the export price behaviour more accurately. Our findings may rule out a large class of expectations based models and not just the particular LQAC-model in the formation of export prices. We also demonstrate that the EqCM-model performs well post-sample despite that monetary policy in Norway has changed from a fixed to a floating exchange rate regime following a recent introduction of inflation targeting. This regime robustness shows that the Lucas critique lacks force empirically in our case.     

Family background and income during the rise of the welfare state: Brother correlations in income for Swedish men born 1932–1968

We investigate if the association between family background and income in Sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968. Our main finding is that the share of the variance in long-run income that is attributable to family background, the so-called brother correlation in income, has fallen by some 17% from 0.49 for the cohorts of brothers born in the early 1930s to below 0.32 for the cohorts born around 1950. From then on, the correlations have inched back up to around 0.37. We report suggestive evidence that the decline is driven by changes in education.     

Economic modeling approaches for wildlife and species conservation

This paper presents modeling approaches for wildlife and species conservation with a special emphasis on large mammals in a developing country setting. In such countries there are frequently conflicts over land use and species conservation, and institutions for managing conflicts are often weak or even lacking. In addition, most of the world species and biodiversity are found in developing countries. Two main issues are discussed. First, we study a situation where the wildlife is valuable, but is considered a pest by the local people living close to the wildlife. Second, we consider models with a discrepancy between management geography and biological geography, and where the species flows between a conservation area with no harvesting and a neighboring area with harvesting and possible habitat degradation.     

Property Rights and Natural Resource Conservation. A Bio-Economic Model with Numerical Illustrations from the Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem

This study develops a model for wildlifemigrating seasonally between a conservationarea and a neighbouring area. When beingoutside the conservation area, harvesting takesplace by a group of small-scale farmers. Thelocal people have two motives for harvesting;to get rid of ``problem' animals as roamingwildlife destroys crops and agriculturalproducts, and hunting for meat and trophies.Depending on the specification of the propertyrights, the harvesting is legal or illegal. Itis demonstrated that it is far from clear whichof the two property rights regimes that givesthe highest wildlife abundance. Hence, contraryto what is argued for in the literature,handing the property rights over to the localpeople means not automatically more wildlifeand a more ``sustainable' resource utilization.The reason lies in the nuisance motive forharvesting. The exploitation under the twodifferent property rights regimes areillustrated by numerical calculations with datathat fits reasonable well with the exploitationof the wildebeest population in theSerengeti-Mara ecosystem.