Employee brand engagement on social media: Managing optimism and commonality

This article considers how employees engage with B2B firms on social media, a topic that is largely overlooked in the extant brand engagement literature. Using the results from a large-scale study of employee brand engagement on social media, we identify two key drivers of employee brand engagement using the content analysis tool DICTION—namely, optimism and commonality. Employees of top-ranked and -rated firms express higher levels of optimism and commonality in their reviews of their employers on social media than do their counterparts in bottom-ranked and -rated firms. This permits the construction of a 2 × 2 matrix that allows managers to diagnose strategies for increasing or improving employee brand engagement. This creates four different kinds of employee brand engagement situations, and offers human resources and marketing managers different strategies in each case. We demonstrate how practitioners and scholars can shed new light on the way stakeholders engage with brands.     

Language ability and entrepreneurship education: Necessary skills for Europe’s start-ups?

Language ability and entrepreneurial education are seen as essential resources for start-ups operating in intensified landscapes of internationalisation and globalisation. Deemed as the necessary skills for corporate effectiveness vis-à-vis rivals, this paper responds to calls for increased understandings of cultural components as vital to entrepreneurship and the product of institutional forces. Thus, it explores (a) the impact language ability has on start-up expansion; (b) the perceptions of international relations as based on language ability as a tool for cross-cultural communication; and (c) the role of educational context from the entrepreneurs’ perspective. Based on interviews from European online start-ups across three discrete contexts—Finland, Portugal and Sweden—it concludes that contextual trends regarding language and education are founded upon the cultural-cognitive and normative pillars of institutionalisation. Further, by combining actor-context perspectives, it poses that language ability and education are resources borne from the domestic environment which positively moderate the start-up’s international success. Nevertheless, the notion of learnt entrepreneurship remains contested. Taken together, this study contributes by offering deeper insight into the role of context on entrepreneurial tendencies by combining resource and institutional perspectives.     

Economic development and inflation: a theoretical and empirical analysis

This paper studies the relation between inflation and economic development. The literature is largely silent regarding both the theoretical and empirical perspectives that undeveloped countries endure higher average inflation than developed economies. We present a simple theoretical model linking the inflation phenomenon to the tradition of development economics. Empirical evidence is garnered to test the hypothesis that economic development engenders a downward bias to inflation rates. Through the feasible-GLS estimator in a panel of 65 countries from 2001 to 2011, we aim at listing a number of variables most commonly used to explain differences in the stage of economic development across countries and identifying the most statistically relevant ones to account for differences in inflationary patterns. While our results show that inflation is inversely correlated with the level of the technological content of the economy (measured by share of high-tech exports), human capital and cyclical unemployment, it is directly related to the degree of inflation persistence and terms of trade growth. However, our findings still present an inverse and low correlation between inflation persistence and economic development, implying that development-sensitive variables allowed into the model can only partially account for the differences in inflation at different levels of economic development.     

Relevance of corruption on the effect of public health expenditure and taxation on economic growth

We investigate whether corruption distorts the positive effect of public health expenditure and taxation on growth through panel data analysis of 75 developing countries for the period from 1995 to 2014. The findings indicate that, although both public health expenditure and taxation can increase economic growth, in countries with more corrupt governments this effect is reduced.     

Optimal fiscal policy in sunspot‐driven oligopolistic economies

Economies with oligopolistic markets are prone to inefficient sunspot fluctuations triggered by autonomous changes in firms equilibrium conjectures. A well‐designed taxation‐subsidization scheme can eliminate these fluctuations by coordinating firms in each sector on a single equilibrium, left unaffected. The optimal taxation scheme must select the number of active firms that makes the best trade‐off (in terms of consumer welfare) between the markup and the scale inefficiency distortions. Implementing such stabilization policy leads to significant welfare gains, attributable to an “efficient stabilization effect,” typically ignored in usual computations of the welfare costs of fluctuations.     

The effect of nonreciprocal preferential trade agreements on benefactors’ exports

Over the last decades, developed countries have provided developing countries with preferential market access via trade policies in the form of nonreciprocal preferential trade agreements (NRPTAs). Despite the lack of reciprocity of this kind of agreements, certain criteria for designating eligible countries refer to the commercial interests of benefactor countries. This paper examines for the first time the effect of NRPTAs on benefactors’ exports to beneficiary countries. Using recent developments in the econometric analysis of the gravity equation, we find robust evidence that nonreciprocal agreements have had an economically significant effect on exports not only for beneficiary countries but also for benefactor countries.     

Alliances Between Brands and Social Causes: The Influence of Company Credibility on Social Responsibility Image

This research extends previous findings related to the positive influence of company credibility on a social Cause–Brand Alliance’s (CBA) persuasion mechanism. This study analyzes the mediating role of two dimensions of company credibility (trustworthiness and expertise) with regard to the influence of altruistic attributions and two types of brand–cause fit (functional and image fit) on corporate social responsibility image. A structural equation model tests the proposed framework with a sample of 299 consumers, and the results suggest that (1) image fit and altruistic attribution are cues that consumers use to evaluate company trustworthiness when linking to a social cause; (2) functional fit significantly influences perceived company expertise but not trustworthiness; and (3) trustworthiness has more weight than expertise in judgments about corporate social responsibility.     

Labour Adjustment Implications of Service Offshoring: Evidence from Canada

About one‐fifth of Canadian employees are in jobs that are vulnerable to service offshoring. Despite this figure, both theory and our empirical evidence (based on a variety of methodologies and datasets) suggest that the offshoring of business services is not likely to lead to large adverse employment effects. We also conclude that existing active labour market adjustment policies (e.g. increased labour market information, job search, mobility and training) developed for other adjustment pressures such as technological change and free‐trade in goods are just as appropriate (perhaps even more so) to deal with the consequences of service offshoring.     

Knowledge spillovers: cooperation between universities and KIBS

Knowledge is increasingly perceived as a fulcral factor to company competitiveness. As the transfer of knowledge is one of the key functions of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS), this research seeks to analyse how the transfer of knowledge takes place between the higher education sector and KIBS type firms. The empirical results show that cooperation between KIBS and universities occurs irrespective of the typology (whether professional or technological in focus). We also empirically establish how geographic proximity is the factor bearing greatest influence over cooperation while such cooperation proves to have a positive impact on the company capacity to innovate. We furthermore find that this innovation capacity also drives a positive company financial performance.