Upstreamness,Wages and Gender: Equal Benefits for All?

This article provides first evidence on the impact of a direct measure of firm‐level upstreamness (i.e. the steps before the production of a firm meets final demand) on workers’ wages. It also investigates whether results vary along the earnings distribution and by gender. Findings, based on unique matched employer–employee data relative to the Belgian manufacturing industry for the period 2002–2010, show that workers earn significantly higher wages when employed in more upstream firms. Yet, the gains from upstreamness are found to be very unequally shared among workers. Unconditional quantile estimates suggest that male top earners are the main beneficiaries, whereas women, irrespective of their earnings, appear to be unfairly rewarded. Quantile decompositions further show that these differences in wage premia account for a substantial part of the gender wage gap, especially at the top of the earnings distribution.     

The Role of Collateral in the Credit Acquisition Process: Evidence from SME Lending

This study tests the simultaneous impact of observed characteristics and private information on debt term contracts in a multi‐period setting, using a dataset of 12,666 credit approvals by one major Portuguese commercial bank during 2007–2010. The main results show that borrowers with good credit scores that know they have a high probability of success and are unlikely to default are more willing to pledge collateral in return for a lower interest rate premium (IRP). Furthermore, lenders tailor the specific terms of the contract, increasing both collateral requirements and the IRP from observed risk, for borrowers operating in riskier industries and with less credit availability. The results are robust to controls for joint debt terms negotiation and the degree of collateralization offered by the borrower.     

The role of reconciliation quality in limiting mispricing of non-GAAP earnings announcements by EURO STOXX firms

This empirical study investigates the relationship between the market mispricing of pro forma earnings announcements and the degree to which pro forma earnings are quantitatively reconciled with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) earnings. For a sample of EURO STOXX Fixed Index companies we find evidence of positive abnormal returns related to pro forma earnings disclosures, and, upon further analyses, conclude that this evidence is generally more consistent with the notion of market mispricing than omitted risk factors. Moreover, when reconciliation quality is controlled, market mispricing is found to be prevalent and pronounced only for low quality reconciliations. This finding suggests that reconciliation is important in reducing market mispricing.     

Informalization in gig food delivery in the UK: The case of hyper-flexible and precarious work

This article examines the process of informalization of work in platform food delivery work in the UK. Drawing on qualitative data, this article provides new analytical insight into what drives individual formal couriers to both supply and demand informalized sub-contracted gig work to undocumented migrants, and how a platform company enables informal work practices through permissive HR practices and technology. In doing so, this article shows how platform companies are enablers of informal labor markets and contribute to the expansion of hyper-precarious working conditions.     

How songs from growing up and viewers' attachment styles affect video ads' effectiveness

We propose that the positive effect of coming-of-age songs on ad effectiveness arises from a mediation process where the music-evoked interpersonal memories of growing up stored in the brain and their accompanying emotions inevitably play a role, but not so straightforwardly as previously suggested. Rather, their effects work through the heightened familiarity of and peaked preferences for coming-of-age songs. We also propose that these sequentially mediated effects are moderated by viewers' developmental attachment styles. We test and find support for these propositions in three multimethod studies with more than 1200 participants born between the 40s and the mid-70s and almost 60 popular songs released between the 60s and the 2010s. We discuss the implications of our findings, namely for age-segmented video ads, and suggest future research directions.     

Workers’ tenure and firm productivity: New evidence from matched employer-employee panel data

Using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian firms, we explore the impact of workers’ tenure on firm productivity. To do so, we estimate production functions augmented with firm-level measures of tenure. We deal with the endogeneity of standard inputs and tenure, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of Ackerberg et al.’s (2015) control function method, which explicitly removes firm fixed effects. Consistently with recent theoretical predictions, our analyses point to positive, but decreasing, returns to tenure. We also find that the impact differs widely across several firm dimensions. Tenure is particularly beneficial for productivity in contexts characterized by a certain degree of routineness and low job complexity. Along the same lines, our findings indicate that tenure exerts stronger positive impacts in industrial and capital-intensive firms, as well as in firms less reliant on ICT-intensive and knowledge-intensive processes.     

Is international tourism responsible for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic? A cross-country analysis with a special focus on small islands

This article aims at analysing the role of international tourism attractiveness as a potential factor for the outbreak and the early spread of the recent COVID-19 disease across the world (also called the first wave) with a special focus on small Island economies. Econometric testing is implemented over a cross-country sample including 205 countries/territories (with 59 small islands) after controlling for several usual suspects. The results state a positive and significant relationship between COVID-19 prevalence and inbound tourism arrivals per capita. Thus in the early stages of the spread (before travel restrictions), international tourism could be seen as one of the main responsible factors for the recent pandemic, validating the “tourism-led vulnerability hypothesis”. Accordingly, considering that such health shocks should be more frequent in the near future, this finding suggests that the tourism specialization model in the context of small islands is too vulnerable to be considered as sustainable in the medium and long-run. Policymakers must opt for economic diversification when possible. Otherwise, building up a strong public-health system alongside a specialized tourism sector is required.

     

The resurrection of earlier imprints post mortem: Explaining the Turkish agricultural cooperative movement with an imprinting theory lens, 1888–1937

This study aims to extend the cooperative lifecycle theory, which builds on consecutive degeneration and regeneration of ideal cooperative values such as democracy, self-help, and solidarity by offering a new regenerative mechanism. In this respect, the study imports multilevel imprinting theory from the organizational ecology domain to explicate the punctuated evolutionary pattern of Turkish agricultural credit cooperatives, which displayed significantly different characteristics from Raiffeisen cooperatives that cooperative discourse in Türkiye used for a long as a benchmark. The archival research undertaken in the study asserts that the imprints of Ottoman Memleket Sandiks (OMS) have stamped agricultural credit cooperatives of the Republican era long after their erosion. The resurrection of imprints was enabled by Ziraat Bank, which acted as an intermediary organization and took over the remnants of OMSs. Our analyses also suggest that the State's polity and policy transformations culminate in selective activation of past imprints within the Ziraat Bank, which, in turn, shaped the Turkish agricultural cooperative field.     

Measuring learning from others: The development and validation of the Proactive Social Informal Learning Questionnaire

The present study aims to develop, validate, and cross-validate an instrument measuring three proactive social informal learning activities, namely feedback seeking, help seeking and information seeking. Prior research mainly focused on detecting or measuring the frequency of these seeking behaviours and did not consider whether the information, help or feedback that has been sought was also used. Furthermore, although these seeking behaviours were studied extensively in different research fields, the current study takes a learning perspective and interprets feedback, help and information seeking as learning activities. The questionnaire was completed by a convenient sample of 650 professionals working in higher education, consultancy, retail and food production. We performed an exploratory factor analysis (N = 230 educators) to explore the structure of the questionnaire. This was followed by a confirmatory factor analysis (N = 230 educators) to confirm the structure. Finally, we cross-validated the questionnaire in a sample of business professionals (N = 190) by testing for measurement invariance. The final questionnaire resulted in a five-factor structure measuring the (1) Use of Feedback Seeking, (2) Frequency of Help and Information Seeking, (3) Use of Help seeking, (4) Use of Information Seeking and (5) Frequency of Feedback Seeking. The current study presents a preliminary, yet promising instrument that taps into proactive social informal learning.     

Quid pro quo harassment,contracts and liability

This paper identifies two channels through which contracts induce performance and contain quid pro quo harassment: a disincentive effect raises the cost for harassers and a selection effect that attracts whistleblower types raises potential victims' resistance. An effective employer liability generates a negative relationship between wages and harassment risk. If liability is ineffective, however, employers can opt for low-wage contracts that induce high harassment and minimum internal complaints. In such environments, wages compensate exogenous harassment risks. Thus the wage-harassment risk equation can signal effectiveness of employer liability.