Internal vs. External Whistleblowers: A Comparison of Whistleblowering Processes

We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of 33 cases of internal and external whistleblowers wrongfully fired for reporting wrongdoing. Our results show external whistleblowers have less tenure with the organization, greater evidence of wrongdoing, and they tend to be more effective in changing organizational practices. External whistleblowers also experience more extensive retaliation than internal whistleblowers, and patterns of retaliation by management against the whistleblower vary depending on whether the whistleblower reports internally or externally. We discuss implications for organizations and whistleblowers, and we conclude that researchers need to develop different theoretical explanations of internal and external whistleblowing processes.     

Negative Emotional Reactions to Project Failure and the Self-Compassion to Learn from the Experience

Project failure is likely to generate a negative emotional response for those involved in the project. But do all people feel the same way? And are some better able to regulate their emotions to learn from the failure experience? In this paper we develop an emotion framework of project failure that relies on self‐determination to explain variance in the intensity of the negative emotions triggered by project failure and self‐compassion to explain variance in learning from project failure. We discuss the implications of our model for research on entrepreneurial and innovative organizations, employees' psychological ownership, and personal engagement at work.     

Earnings Management and Annual General Meetings: The Role of Managerial Entrenchment

We examine earnings management around the annual general meeting (AGM) and assess the influence of managerial entrenchment. Consistent with prior research, we show positive and statistically significant abnormal returns surrounding AGMs regardless of the level of managerial entrenchment. We find evidence of significant earnings manipulation primarily among entrenched managers. Specifically, they manage abnormal accruals downward two quarters prior to the AGM and significantly increase abnormal accruals in the quarter immediately before the AGM. Our evidence is consistent with AGMs triggering managers to disseminate information in a manner that shapes the market's perception of the firm.     

A mixture of Gaussians approach to mathematical portfolio oversight: the EF3M algorithm

An analogue can be made between: (a) the slow pace at which species adapt to an environment, which often results in the emergence of a new distinct species out of a once homogeneous genetic pool and (b) the slow changes that take place over time within a fund, mutating its investment style. A fund’s track record provides a sort of genetic marker, which we can use to identify mutations. This has motivated our use of a biometric procedure to detect the emergence of a new investment style within a fund’s track record. In doing so, we answer the question: What is the probability that a particular PM’s performance is departing from the reference distribution used to allocate her capital? The EF3M algorithm, inspired by evolutionary biology, may help detect early stages of an evolutionary divergence in an investment style and trigger a decision to review a fund’s capital allocation.     

Returning to the workforce after retiring: a job demands,job control,social support perspective on job satisfaction

Despite growing interest in the aging of the workforce, few investigations have explored a key aspect of diversity among older workers: whether or not they consider themselves retired. Using a sample of workers ages 50 and older from the National Study of the Changing Workforce (2008), we apply career development theory and the job demand–control(–support) framework to investigate potential differences between working retirees (i.e. employed older adults 50+ who consider themselves retired) and working non-retirees (i.e. employed older adults 50+ who do not consider themselves retired) in terms of their job characteristics (i.e. demands, control, support) and how these job characteristics are related to job satisfaction. We find that working retirees report lower job demands and higher social support, and that there is limited evidence for the buffering hypothesis. Implications for researchers and employers are discussed.     

Social interactions,product differentiation and discontinuity of demand

We propose a discrete choice model of socially interacting consumers choosing between two product variants. The model shows that the discontinuity of demand as well as the demand polarization proposed by Becker (1991), A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influences on Price, depend crucially on the heterogeneity of consumers’ preferences and on the level of product differentiation. When the two products are sufficiently similar, it turns out that the market is shared asymmetrically as suggested by Becker (1991). By contrast, when the products are different and the preferences of the consumers are sufficiently heterogeneous, the market is shared symmetrically as in Hotelling’s (1929) model.     

Government policy in the formal and informal sectors

The paper quantitatively investigates, in general equilibrium, the interaction between the firms' choice to operate in the formal or the informal sector and government policy on taxation and enforcement, given a level of regulation. A static version of Ghironi and Melitz's (2005) industry model is used to show that firms with lower productivity endogenously choose to operate in the informal sector. I use cross-country data on taxes, measures of informality, and measures of regulation (entry and compliance costs, red tape, etc.) to back out how high the enforcement levels must be country by country to make the theory match the data. The welfare gains from policy reforms are on average 1.2% (measured in terms of consumption) for OECD countries. I also find that the welfare gains from reducing regulation are on average 2.1%. Finally, performing a similar decomposition to that of Hall and Jones (1999), I find that distortions associated with informality account for a factor of 1.5 of the output per capita difference between the richest and the poorest countries.     

Overlooked issues in the conceptualization and measurement of counterproductive work behavior

The current paper addresses three important yet generally overlooked issues regarding the conceptualization and measurement of counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). First, we argue that the field would benefit from the adoption of situation-specific CWB measures that are tailored to the organization or occupation being studied. Such an approach would ensure that CWB measures include sample-relevant behaviors and exclude irrelevant behaviors. Second, we discuss several potential sub-dimensions of CWBs that should be examined in future research. These sub-dimensions include: 1) legal vs. illegal activities, 2) hostile vs. instrumental aggression, and 3) task-related vs. non-task-related counterproductive behaviors. Finally, we consider the relevance of the bandwidth-fidelity principle to the measurement of CWBs.