Lone star or team player? The interrelationship of different identification foci and the role of self‐presentation concerns

Work identity is important in the attraction and retention of staff, yet how the facets of such identity relate remains convoluted and unclear despite this being of interest to both scholars and practitioners. We use structural equation modeling to analyze empirical data from 144 employees in the United Kingdom's oil and gas industry, analyzing the nature and interrelationship of identification as individual‐level (career advancement) and social‐level (work group and organization) foci, as well as considering the two psychological self‐presentation factors (value expression and social adjustment) that direct and drive identification processes. A dichotomy between individual and social components of work identity is found, revealing a strong association between both social‐level foci of identification. Moreover, both components of work identity are found to be premised on different psychological factors, furthering our knowledge of the enmeshed nature of identity at work.     

Financial Development and Inequality in the Global Economy

We build a heterogeneous firms model with firm‐specific wages and credit frictions to study the role of financial development for inequality in the global economy. If there are many small (non‐exporting) firms, better access to external funds reduces wage and profit inequality as well as unemployment. In contrast, if there are many large (exporting) firms, financial development might have opposite effects – especially if trade costs are low. In summary, the implications of financial development for inequality depend on the size distribution of firms and on the costs of exporting. Trade liberalization, however, raises inequality unambiguously.     

Conform or challenge? Adjustment strategies of sanction-torn companies

The literature on sanctions often neglects the role of domestic firms in sender states, although sanctions only have a real economic effect when senders’ firms reduce their activities on the target's market. In contrast, sanctions avoidance and increasing investments in the target country (the observed behaviour of many companies facing the EU sanctions against Russia imposed in 2014) mitigate the impact of these restrictive measures. While sanctions increase the political risk for companies, they also offer economic opportunities—and previous studies could not settle the debate on which factor prevails. By evaluating responses from British, French, German, Italian and Polish enterprises to an online survey distributed in 2017, we analyse at the firm level how sanction-torn companies adjust to new political orders and what drives their strategic decisions. We find evidence that resource dependency induces strategies that challenge sanction policies: in particular, non-fungible assets in the target country incentivise companies to further increase their engagement. These defiance strategies diminish the real economic effect of sanctions and generate a new economic equilibrium, which has negative long-term implications on the choice set of policymakers to further pursue the imposition of sanctions and which even outlasts the lifting of these restrictive measures.     

Aus Hartz IV wird Bürgergeld — nur alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen?

In this article, we discuss reform elements of “Hartz IV”. This includes, on the one hand, merging unemployment benefits with housing benefits and the additional child benefits (Kinderzuschlag) and, on the other hand, reducing disincentives which prevent the recipients from earning higher incomes. Employment incentives can be improved if the effective marginal transfer withdrawal rate is reduced and, at the same time, the preferential treatment of “mini jobs” is reduced. In addition, the eligibility criteria should be simplified. This could reduce the rate of non-takeup and thus hidden poverty. One criticism of such a reform of Hartz IV is that it would increase the number of transfer recipients. However, this is not an economically sensible outcome in a reform effort. What is important is the disposable income of transfer recipients affected and that the design of the transfer withdrawal does not create lock-in effects.

     

Going NUTS: The effect of EU Structural Funds on regional performance

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a per capita GDP level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget. This rule gives rise to a regression-discontinuity design that exploits the discrete jump in the probability of EU transfer receipt at the 75% threshold for identification of causal effects of Objective 1 treatment on outcome such as economic growth of EU regions. We find positive per capita GDP growth effects of Objective 1 transfers, but no employment growth effects.     

Bank modelling methodologies: A comparative non-parametric analysis of efficiency in the Japanese banking sector

This study examines the efficiency of the Japanese banking system utilising the slacks-based measure. In addition, we also extend the comparative bank modelling methodology literature by utilising both the intermediation and production approaches, together with the profit/revenue-based approach, proposed in [Berger, A.N., Mester, L.J., 2003. Explaining the dramatic changes in performance of US banks: technological change, deregulation, and dynamic changes in competition. J. Financial Intermed. 12, 57–95]. We find that, across the three methodologies, there are marked differences in: mean efficiency scores; the dispersion of efficiency scores; and the ranking of banks and bank sectors. Hence, the results demonstrate a very high degree of modelling dependence, which has importance in the context of policy responses.     

Organization of industrial R&D on a global scale

Although the globalization of industrial R&D processes has increasingly attracted management scientists and considerable work on R&D internationalization has been done since the 70s, important problems in organizing geographically distributed R&D sites have not yet been resolved. This analysis is based on 165 interviews in 31 technology-based multinationals from Switzerland, Germany, USA, and Japan conducted between 1994 and 1997. We describe the extent of R&D internationalization, its key drivers and principal impediments. Two trends are identified: (i) a geographic concentration on leading technology centres, and (ii) a tightened coordination of R&D units. Overlaying structures, superimposed to regional and functional structures, play a central role in overcoming current deficits in global R&D management. Organizational constituents of this structure are technology offices (Schering), technology management as a competence center (Schindler), central project offices (IBM), central project management (Bayer), project oriented career development (Bosch), virtual project management departments (Roche), and cross-cultural job rotation (ATR).