Accounting for Investments in Human Capital: A Review

This paper provides an overview of the human capital literature, focusing on the firm's incentives and disincentives to invest in human capital and subsequently to account for the investments. The evidence suggests human capital investment decisions are intrinsically linked to the success of a business and ultimately to the probability of survival. However, disclosure is largely a voluntary choice by managers as there are few formal disclosure requirements. The conclusion from the evidence shows that the benefits to stakeholders of disclosing information relating to human capital investment are likely to outweigh the costs and suggests a wide range of topics for future research.     

Pricing and risk of swing contracts in natural gas markets

Review of Derivatives Research - Motivated by the growing importance of swing contracts in natural gas markets, this article extends the literature on commodity price modelling as well as valuation...     

Software firm turnarounds in the 1990s: An analysis of reversing decline in a growing,dynamic industry

Investigations into management actions that reverse organizational decline have produced inconsistent findings. Prior studies have focused on the value of retrenchment actions versus strategic actions to engineer a performance turnaround. These studies, however, have generally not controlled for the cause of firm decline, overlooking a major theoretical contingency. Examining prepackaged software firms in the 1990s, we test the association of strategic and retrenchment actions in facilitating turnarounds in a munificent industry. The results show that measures of strategic actions—new product introductions, strategic alliances, and acquisitions—were positively associated with turnarounds. Conversely, measures of retrenchment actions—layoffs, asset reductions, and product withdrawals—were negatively associated with performance recovery. Our results suggest declining firms in munificent industries cannot retrench their way back to prosperity. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Entrepreneurial narrative and a science of the imagination

This article is an introduction to a special issue on entrepreneurial narrative that provides theoretical and empirical links between scholarship in narrative and entrepreneurship as well as demonstrates how theories and methods in narrative may be applied to the study of entrepreneurship as a phenomenon. A conjecture that narrative perspectives might lead to a “science of the imagination” is offered.     

Organizational public value and employee life satisfaction: the mediating roles of work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

Building on Meynhardt’s public value concept, which has been developed to make transparent an organization’s contributions to the common good, we investigate the influence of organizational common good practices in the perceptions of employees (measured as public value) on employees’ work attitudes and life satisfaction. The proposed model is tested on a sample of 1045 Swiss employees taken from the 2015 Swiss Public Value Atlas data-set. Study findings reveal that organizational public value is positively related to employee life satisfaction, and that this relationship is partially mediated by work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Further, we show that employee common good orientations strengthen the positive impact of organizational public value on employee work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Results also provide evidence that the indirect effects of organizational public value on employee life satisfaction via work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior are stronger at higher employee common good orientation levels.     

The ECA-method for Identifying Sensitive Reactions within an IO Context

The paper introduces an alternative method to determine "sensitivity' within an input–output-context and makes the most sensitive connections visible in an overall graph. The method called ECA (Elasticity Coefficient Analysis) tries—like the Important Coefficient Analysis (ICA)—to derive structures from a certain property of the Leontief inverse. As the core of the method is elasticity—i.e. taking the relative reaction of the element bij of the inverse as a measure of response to a 1% change of the input coefficient aij—it describes the dynamic potential of certain sectors on possible changes of technical coefficients. In the second part of the paper, comparisons are made between the results of MFA (Minimal Flow Analysis), ICA and ECA upon using the same table for analysis. ICA and ECA to some extent show similarities but also some differences. Both contrast with MFA with respect to the very basis of the approach that enforces different interpretations of the results. Finally, some hypotheses on the differences and similarities are set up that could give a perspective for the further use of the different methods.