Chasing after “good jobs.” Do they exist and does it matter if they do?

Most people believe that there are such things as good jobs—jobs that a worker would consider herself lucky to get. But for economists, the existence of good jobs is debatable. In this paper, I provide a definition of a good job based on various theories of the labour market: a job that involves a surplus captured partly by the worker. I use that definition to guide an empirical investigation of the existence and importance of good jobs. I conclude that good jobs do exist—that the labour market does not just function according to a Roy model with wage differentials reflecting only skill differentials, compensating differentials or bond posting—and that their impact on the overall wage structure is substantial. Finally, I discuss the implications of the existence of good jobs for policy setting and for assessments of the justice of a society.     

Modelling Risk Perceptions of Stakeholders in Public–Private Partnership Toll Road Contracts

This paper investigates the risk perceptions of key stakeholder groups typically involved in public–private partnership (PPP) toll roads. Risk perceptions have an important impact on these PPP schemes for investing in public infrastructure. However, the nature and extent of risk associated with the specification of a PPP contract that commits contracting parties to deliver on their obligations remain unclear. In the context of major transport infrastructure, such as a new toll road, the often‐cited key risk to investors is the traffic (and hence demand) risk. There are, however, other risks, including political risk and media risk, the latter often causing untold harm resulting in modifications to the planned infrastructure. This paper develops a method to capture evidence on how public sector and private sector partners involved in previous PPPs perceive the levels of risk associated with each risk attribute, as a way of identifying the ex ante risk setting brought to negotiations in PPP toll road investments. Using a sample of 101 experts with contract experience in 32 countries, we develop a stated choice experiment and estimate a discrete choice model to quantify a risk profile index (RPI) to capture the perceived (relative) influence of each dimension of risk, and then identify sources of systematic differences in the RPI as a way of understanding the influence of personal traits and contextual and contractual factors.     

Industry concentration,excess returns and innovation in Australia

This paper examines market concentration and stock returns on the Australian Securities Exchange. We find that dominant companies operating in concentrated industries in Australia are able to generate significant risk‐adjusted excess stock returns. Our results for Australian data are opposite to that found by Hou and Robinson (2006) for United States market data. Hou and Robinson reason that United States firms which operate in concentrated industries are insulated from competitive pressures, have lower levels of innovation (Arrow, 1962) and therefore experience lower profitability and stock returns. By contrast, the Australian data show a significant and positive relationship between concentration and innovation expenditure. Therefore, the excess stock returns of dominant companies in Australia are consistent with previous research linking innovation expenditure with excess stock returns. We hypothesize that the apparent contradiction of our results compared with Hou and Robinson (2006) for the United States market is resolved by an examination of the differences in size and competition in United States and Australian industries and the consequent differential ability of dominant companies in the two countries to generate monopoly rents and invest in ‘Schumpeterian’ (Schumpeter, 1942) innovation.     

Choice and the Internet: From Clickstream to Research Stream

The authors discuss research progress and future opportunities for modeling consumer choice on the Internet using clickstream data (the electronic records of Internet usage recorded by company web servers and syndicated data services). The authors compare the nature of Internet choice (as captured by clickstream data) with supermarket choice (as captured by UPC scanner panel data), highlighting the differences relevant to choice modelers. Though the application of choice models to clickstream data is relatively new, the authors review existing early work and provide a two-by-two categorization of the applications studied to date (delineating search versus purchase on the one hand and within-site versus across-site choices on the other). The paper offers directions for further research in these areas and discusses additional opportunities afforded by clickstream information, including personalization, data mining, automation, and customer valuation. Notwithstanding the numerous challenges associated with clickstream data research, the authors conclude that the detailed nature of the information tracked about Internet usage and e-commerce transactions presents an enormous opportunity for empirical modelers to enhance the understanding and prediction of choice behavior.     

The Born-Global Phenomenon: A Comparative Case Study Research

This qualitative, case-based research investigates the most relevant traits shown by several new, export-involved born-global firms and their entrepreneurs-managers versus other more traditional and also recently-established exporting SMEs in a specific geographic region inside Spain. More concretely, we aim to shed light on the type of factors and specific conditions underlying the emergence and further expansion of born-global exporters, as compared to other counterparts, which do not share their rapid internationalising character from inception. From our cross-comparison of four firm cases investigated in this setting against a number of factors generally associated with the born-global or gradual internationalisation paths, our results indicate that both constitute two consistent and distinctive patterns of international development. Another relevant finding in this research is that born globals seem indeed to be more entrepreneurial regarding their export entry behaviour into foreign markets than gradual exporters. Relevant academic, managerial, and policy-making implications are also outlined from these results.     

Localized advantage in a global economy: The case of Bangalore

This article examines how and why firms in Bangalore, a city in southern India, have achieved success in the global software industry. We use Porter's “diamond framework” to analyze information obtained from secondary sources and interviews with engineers, managers, and top executives from software firms and officials involved in Bangalore's development. While we found some aspects of the case conform to Porter's framework, many other elements tend to diverge from the model. Thus, the article contributes to the Porter's diamond model literature by extending its application to assessing the development of successful regions in knowledge‐based industries in developing economies. The discussion in the article would be of value to officials interested in creating such successful regions, as well as international business executives interested in the opportunities afforded by locating in these regions. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Assessing Industrial Buyer Preferences: Using the Swait-Louviere Test to Test the Key Informant Assumption

When using professional buyers to study an organizations buying behavior an important consideration is whether their preferences reflect those of the organization. Since this is a key informant problem, the present article focuses on the issue of the degree to which key informants can be used to provide insights into their own organizations preferences. We conduct a direct test of the key informant assumption using the Swait-Louviere test. In this test preferences from a choice experiment using actual buyers, and from market decisions made by the organization, are estimated separately, then jointly in multinomial logit models. We found that buyers experimental preferences were similar to estimates obtained from the market decisions. Buyers preferences were closer to the intuitive preferences of the organizations top executives than the estimates based on past market decisions, although a model based on the combined data outperformed either. We discuss the implications of these results for industrial buying research.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

Contracting Under Endogenous Risk

Agents make decisions by trading off cost, return and risk. The literature, however, does not consider the impact of risk on action choice. We show that this tradeoff has important implications for the firm. First, the firm may provide no insurance in the salary. Since the agents action choice will determine her risk, the salary cannot compensate her for it. Second, the firm may not be able to design an incentive scheme to implement particularly risky actions. Finally, the firm may not be able to design a scheme in which the agent splits her effort across multiple tasks. This is particularly problematic for tasks that are technological substitutes.