COMPENDIA: Harmonizing Business Ownership Data Across Countries and Over Time

This paper presents a harmonized data set over the period 1972–2002, containing two-yearly data on the number of non-agricultural business owners and the size of the labour force for 23 OECD countries, as well as the quotient of these two variables which is called the business ownership rate of a country. The data set is called COMPENDIA, which means COMParative ENtrepreneurship Data for International Analysis. It has been constructed by EIM Business and Policy Research, using OECD statistics as well as other relevant sources. We make an attempt to make business ownership rates comparable across countries and over time.     

A general equilibrium analysis of parental leave policies

Despite mandatory parental leave policies being a prevalent feature of labor markets in developed countries, their aggregate effects in the economy are not well understood. To assess their quantitative impact, we develop a general equilibrium model of fertility and labor market decisions that builds on the labor matching framework of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994). We find that females gain substantially with generous policies but this benefit occurs at the expense of a reduction in the welfare of males. Leave policies have important effects on fertility, leave taking decisions, and employment. These effects are mainly driven by how the policy affects bargaining – young females anticipate future states with higher threat points induced by the policy. Because the realization of these states depends on the decisions of females to give birth and take a leave, leave policies effectively subsidize fertility and leave taking. We also find that generous paid parental leaves can be an effective tool to encourage mothers to spend time with their children after giving birth.     

The Effect of Entrepreneurial Activity on National Economic Growth

Entrepreneurial activity is generally assumed to be an important aspect of the organization of industries most conducive to innovative activity and unrestrained competition. This paper investigates whether total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) influences GDP growth for a sample of 36 countries. We test whether this influence depends on the level of economic development measured as GDP per capita. Adjustment is made for a range of alternative explanations for achieving economic growth by incorporating the Growth Competitiveness Index (GCI). We find that entrepreneurial activity by nascent entrepreneurs and owner/managers of young businesses affects economic growth, but that this effect depends upon the level of per capita income. This suggests that entrepreneurship plays a different role in countries in different stages of economic development.     

A Conceptual Framework for the Design of Geo-Collaborative Systems

Geo-collaborative systems address the computational support to situations where people are working in different locations, gathering geographically-related data in the field and sharing knowledge. We propose a conceptual framework identifying the design issues that fundamentally set the stage for eliciting the requirements of geo-collaborative systems. The conceptual framework has five elements: places, teams, tasks, artifacts and geo-referenced knowledge. We also highlight two important relationships between some of these elements: (1) a task-artifact relationship, related with the need to increase the organizational decision making abilities through concerted efforts; and (2) an artifact-knowledge relationship, related with the need to support mechanisms for jointly understanding geo-referenced data. The conceptual framework was applied to the development of a groupware tool aiming to increase the productivity of the geological mapping process followed by a national agency with competence in this area. The paper describes in detail how the conceptual framework influenced the groupware design. The obtained results indicate that the framework can focus the designers on the human aspects of geo-collaboration and guide them through the initial design stages.     

Die Marktabgrenzung im Versicherungskartellrecht am Beispiel der Berufshaftpflichtversicherungen

The definition of the relevant market is crucial to the application of European and German competition law and especially difficult when dealing with insurance markets. Generally, the product and geographic market comprises all products or services that are regarded as substitutable by consumers. In addition, the supply-side substitutability can be taken into consideration. In defining insurance product markets, the supply-side substitutability is decisive, because insurance products are seldom interchangeable from a policy holder’s point of view. Applying the concept of supply-side substitutability to professional indemnity insurances leads to product markets correlating with the different professional groups: Indemnity insurances for physicians constitute a product market; insurances for lawyers, notary publics, tax advisers and public accountants form another market and insurances for architects and construction engineers another one. These product markets are still national markets. Professional indemnity insurances are extensively shaped by the differing legal systems, namely by national insurance contract law, by liability provisions and by a legal obligation to insure. Consequently, policy holders cannot substitute their indemnity insurance with foreign insurance products and insurers are confronted with market entry barriers. However, the proposed directive on services on the internal market and the adopted directive on insurance mediation could result in community-wide markets in the near future.     

Accounting for preference dependency in target costing – a note

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Target costing is a well-established strategic cost management tool in theory and practice. The original target costing model implies independence of...     

The purchasing department's leadership role in developing and maintaining a preferred customer status

Developing and maintaining a preferred customer status is one of the main objectives of organizations that want to obtain a better access to supplier's information, resources, and innovation. This paper addresses the extent and the nature of the purchasing department's leadership role in the process of developing and maintaining a preferred customer status. A qualitative exploratory approach based on eleven cases has been used in order to take into consideration the context specific to the buyer-supplier relationship in a preferred customer scenario.Our study shows that the purchasing department performs four main categories of roles: (1) identifies and selects the best supplier, (2) structures and segments the supply base, (3) builds close relationships with selected suppliers and (4) develops working relationships, using an effective communication. Each of these roles is related to three key components of the purchasing department's capabilities: boundary, relational, and coordination. These four categories of roles illustrate supply's ability to recognize and understand the specifics of the preferred customer situation. Based on our analysis, the purchasing department should be viewed as extending an organization's resource base, making the organization more competitive.Our analysis also shows that the purchasing managers' leadership is critical for the development and the coordination of activities with selected suppliers, as well as proper communication with them. Specifically, the purchasing manager's transformational leadership generates more internal user and supplier involvement through the creation and articulation of a common vision, by establishing shared goals with other organizational units, and by focusing on activities that benefit the organization; this allows to move from initiative-driven efforts to an “institutionalized preferred customer status management” in the organization.     

Technological spillovers from multinational firms

This paper aims to identify genuine technological spillovers from multinational firms (MNEs). To this end, we use data on R&D from MNEs to measure spillovers, while most of the existing literature uses output to measure the foreign presence in an industry (what we call output-based spillovers). In line with the existing literature, we distinguish between horizontal spillovers (i.e., intra-industry linkages) and vertical spillovers (i.e., backward—or downstream—and forward—or upstream—inter-industry linkages). Our results show that the three types of technological spillovers from MNEs are positive, with the horizontal spillovers the larger ones, followed by backward spillovers. The effect of forward spillovers is much smaller in magnitude. Moreover, we find that not controlling for industry size (i.e., technological spillovers from all firms in an industry) leads to underestimating both horizontal and backward spillovers from MNEs, and to overestimating forward spillovers from MNEs. Finally, we find that the distinction between technological and output-based spillovers is of great relevance. The size of backward technological spillovers is approximately 44% of the size of output-based backward spillovers, while for horizontal spillovers both types of spillovers are quite similar. Importantly, output-based forward spillovers are negative while technological forward spillovers are positive.