An Increase in the Federal Minimum Wage: Good for Employees,Bad for Stockholders?

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Regret and nonredemption of daily deals: Individual differences and contextual influences

The growth of online daily deal price promotions and the resulting consumer nonredemption of daily deal coupons is worthy of understanding from a psychological lens of nonconsumption. Whereas there is an emerging literature on daily deals and established literature on barriers to redemption, there exists a gap in where this scholarship intersects. This study provides a conceptual model explaining why consumers purchase daily deal coupons and do not redeem them. We explain consumers’ reasons for buying a daily deal upfront along with their reasons for not using it from theoretical lenses of reasons theory and social motivations theory. On testing the model empirically with qualitative and deepening insight via quantitative methods, the findings reveal that reasons for purchasing daily deals are rooted in individual consumer-level factors (i.e., price-consciousness, buying impulsiveness, and susceptibility to interpersonal normative influence). Further, reasons for nonredemption are explained by contextual elements of the daily deal (i.e., offer distinctiveness, the total number of daily deals sold, restrictions on using the deal, and low discount size). Our findings suggest that post-purchase regret ultimately explains a key reason deals go unused. Marketing implications are offered in the areas of characteristics of daily deal offers.     

Fragile democracies and constitutional crises: a laboratory for studying the role of constitutional constraints

Constitutional Political Economy -     

Dramaturgical performances and work-leisure dynamics in rural-to-urban domestic migrations

Situated against the backdrop of the dramatic socio-economic transformation of the Chinese society that propelled mass rural-to-urban migrations, this study focused on a group of female migrant workers who worked in the city as paid live-in-caregivers. The research explored how their work and leisure lives were related to their self-perceptions, self-expressions and social interactions. A total of 18 in-depth semi-structured interviews with female migrant workers who had moved from rural areas of China to the capital city of Beijing and worked as home caregivers were conducted. By adopting Goffman’s front stage and back stage model and bridging the literature in the fields of migration, caregiving, and leisure, the study examined the experiences and personal meanings of being a migrant caregiver and the strategies and practices migrant caregivers used to present and assert themselves in the everyday life of migration.     

Financial constraints and foreign direct investment: firm-level evidence

Low productivity is an important barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. But firms may also need external finance to shoulder the costs of entering foreign markets. We develop a model of multinational firms facing real and financial barriers to foreign direct investment (FDI), and we analyze their impact on the FDI decision. Theoretically, we show that financial constraints can affect highly productive firms more than firms with low productivity because the former are more likely to expand abroad. We provide empirical evidence based on a detailed dataset of German domestic and multinational firms which contains information on parent-level financial constraints as well as on the location the foreign affiliates. We find that financial factors constrain firms’ foreign investment decisions, an effect felt in particular by firms most likely to consider investing abroad. The locational information in our dataset allows exploiting cross-country differences in contract enforcement. Consistent with theory, we find that poor contract enforcement in the host country has a negative impact on FDI decisions.     

The new road to the top

By comparing the top executives of 1980's Fortune 100 companies with the top brass of firms in the 2001 list, the authors have quantified a transformation that until now has been largely anecdotal. A dramatic shift in executive careers, and in executives themselves, has occurred over the past two decades. Today's Fortune 100 executives are younger, more of them are female, and fewer were educated at elite institutions. They're also making their way to the top more quickly. They're taking fewer jobs along the way, and they increasingly move from one company to the next as their careers unfold. In their wide-ranging analysis,the authors offer a number of insights. For one thing, it has become clear that there are huge advantages to working in a growing firm. For another, the firms that have been big for a long time still provide the most extensive training and development. They also offer relatively long promotion ladders--hence the common wisdom that these "academy companies" are great to have been from. While women were disproportionately scarce among the most senior ranks of executives in 2001, those who arrived got there faster and at a younger age than their male colleagues. Perhaps the career hurdles that women face had blocked all but the most highly qualified female managers, who then proceeded to rise quickly. In the future, a record of good P&L performance may become even more critical to getting hired and advancing in the largest companies. As a result, we may see a reversal of the usual flow of talent, which has been from the academy companies to smaller firms. It may be increasingly common for executives to develop records of performance in small companies, or even as entrepreneurs, and then seek positions in large corporations.     

Knowledge transfer in an innovation simulation model

To understand the development of innovation processes in these knowledge-driven economies, one needs to focus on underlying processes of creating and sharing new knowledge. In this paper, an evolutionary simulation model is used to achieve some insights into these innovation processes. The model is based on the one hand on rules about market performance, investments and R&D strategies, and on the other hand on a model concerning knowledge creation (the ability of firms to create knowledge through intramural R&D efforts and the ability to discover and absorb new developments from basic academic research and competitors) and knowledge transfer based on an exponentionally expanding pool of (not necessarily new) knowledge of innovations in the own sector, but also from external sources. It is demonstrated that the imitative firm can be economically more successful but this strategy may prove to be superior only after a long time span.     

Reconstruction of previous failure times and records

For the sequences of independent identically distributed random variables with continuous distributions, we provide the optimal upper bounds for the increments of order and record statistics under condition that the values of future order statistics and records are known. The bounds are expressed in terms of quantiles and absolute moments centered about the quantiles of the parent distribution. We also describe the distributions which approach the bounds with arbitrary desired accuracy.The second author was supported by the Polish State Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) under Grant 5 P03A 012 20Received November 2003     

Neoclassical life-cycle consumption: a textbook example

Summary.   We present a simple neoclassical life-cycle model in continuous time, in which the effects of endogenous labor supply, uncertain lifetime, and family composition on consumption and income profiles are jointly analyzed. Due to a parsimonious specification, analytical solutions for consumption growth are available for constant intertemporal elasticity of substitution preferences. Without relying on borrowing constraints, the model can generate a hump in the consumption profile, and a comovement of consumption and income during working life. Received: June 9, 1999; revised version: October 4, 1999     

Frontier-free Europe: a study of female migrants in the banking sector

Legislation on 'freedom of movement' guarantees the recognition of qualifications between countries of the European Union (EU), and is meant to provide migrants with access to employment in all member states. This paper reports on a study undertaken of EU migrant women in the banking sector in Britain, Germany and Spain. The discusses the experiences of migrants with regard to access to employment and positions abroad comparable to those held prior to migration. Migrants in this case experienced obstacles in the access to such employment. Although their experiences influenced by labour-market needs, findings suggest that the determining factors for barriers encountered were differences in the education and training cultures of countries pre- and post-migration, and the values and attitudes attached to these in of expectations by employers and migrants themselves.