Workplace democracy in Bulgaria: from subordination to partnership in industrial relations

Bulgaria has for many years been an innovator in industrial relations. Its new labour code, as a model of industrial democracy, has few parallels in market or even other central planned economies. Here the authors trace the ideological, social and political background to the new code which has been seen as an instrument of radical social change.     

Management forecast credibility and underreaction to news

In this paper, we first document evidence of underreaction to management forecast news. We then hypothesize that the credibility of the forecast influences the magnitude of this underreaction. Relying on evidence that more credible forecasts are associated with a larger reaction in the short window around the management forecasts and a smaller post-management forecast drift in returns, we show that the magnitude of the underreaction is smaller for firms that provide more credible forecasts. Our paper contributes to the literature by providing out-of-sample evidence of the drift in returns documented in the post-earnings-announcement drift literature, with the credibility of the news being one explanation for the phenomenon.     

Regional relationships between inherent coffee quality and growing environment for denomination of origin labels in Nariño and Cauca,Colombia

International markets are increasingly signaling demand for quality-differentiated coffee, which the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) proposed to exploit to identify those regional coffees that would fulfill the requirements to be classified as denomination of origin. The objective of this study was to develop and implement a sound, robust and repeatable approach with and for the FNC to identify regional causal relationships between coffee quality and environmental characteristics as bases for labels of denomination of origin. Environmental differences between coffee-growing areas in the departments of Cauca and Nariño were statistically significant for several characteristics, including the number of dry months, annual precipitation and diurnal temperature range. The dominant varieties (Caturra and Colombia) did not show major differences in quality attributes, and were pooled for the analyses with the environmental data. There are significant differences in biochemical and sensorial product characteristics between the two departments. The spatial patterns in product characteristics exhibit a non-random, regionally-changing structure that is related to those in the environmental data. The generated results provided ample evidence to support the application for regionally-based denominations of origin. Recommendations were derived to help mainstreaming the developed approach and thereby facilitate policy decisions for its use in other geographies and with other crops. Furthermore, the importance of systematic interdisciplinary institutional collaboration for large-scale denomination of origin projects was corroborated for food policy dialogue and decision making. It seems plausible that producers of high-quality products within other commodities are likely to follow the FNC in seeking denomination of origin for their goods. The presented approach is crucial to facilitate policy.     

Draining the judiciary bottleneck: A quasi-experiment in improving a government service

This study describes judicial reform as a quasi-experiment. The reform is the deployment and implementation of the GICA-Justicia (Gestión Integral de Calidad y Acreditación: Quality and Accreditation Integral Management) Quality-Management Standard (QMS) within the Second Court of Appeal of Costa Rica's Supreme Court; the reform includes process improvements following the implementation. The study of impact includes a direct comparison to its homologous in Panama's Justice System. The GICA-Justicia emerges in the QMS environment as a process-performance tracking and improvement tool for accreditation of district courts and courts of appeal. This study offers “sui generis state of the art” empirical know-how via the use of an interrupted time series quasi-experiment. This study contributes to literature by unveiling a successful new judicial service improvement design in a Latin-American context.     

Human resource management and early internationalization: is there a leap-frogging in international staffing?

The present study focuses on the international staffing of early internationalizers by linking the Ethnocentric, Polycentric, Regiocentric, and Geocentric (EPRG) concept with the Process Theories of Internationalization. On a dataset of 116 (N) German medium-sized companies, we test whether the determinants which allow firms to internationalize shortly after their inception, namely prior international experience, technological intensity, and networks, influence the firms' international staffing. We further elaborate whether this influence differs between early and late internationalizers. The empirical results show that prior international experience is not associated with the firms' international staffing at all, and thus, does not allow conclusions. Technological intensity increases the probability of the choice of an ethnocentric staffing policy, especially for early internationalizers. In contrast, networks enable firms, especially early internationalizers, to pursue regiocentric or geocentric staffing policies.