The Russian Default

This article argues that the international financial markets' massive involvement in Russia had at best a limited basis in developments in the real economy, while financial inflows from the West both enabled and encouraged Russia to avoid the restructuring which lies behind the economic recovery elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. The best hope for a positive future for Russia is to allow many Russian banks and firms to go bankrupt and to change the nature of foreign financing. Liberal reforms could then be pursued with a clean slate. However, the author sees little likelihood of either of these happening.     

Managerial markets in transition in Central and Eastern Europe: a field study and implications

In this paper, we report findings from the first comprehensive study of managerial labour markets in Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on field data from 157 firms in six countries. Results indicated widespread and deep changes occurring in the region’s managerial markets. Despite differences among countries in reform and economic performance, we found these particular changes to be surprisingly common across the countries studied. They included rapid rises in salary and benefit levels, narrowing of some skill gaps, shifts to more sophisticated methods of recruitment and an overall move towards Western management practices. The study also revealed severe shortages of qualified managers in all the countries studied. The resulting tightness in the managerial labour markets was reducing only modestly, despite other improvements. Foreign and joint-venture firms were relying disproportionately on expatriate managers, and may not have been sufficiently developing locals. We argue that, partly because of this, the distortions in pay, promotions and performance resulting from these tight markets are likely to persist for some time.     

Wage inequality and the labor market impact of economic transformation: Croatia, 1970–2008

In this paper, we examine wage inequality and wage differentials in Croatia from 1970 to 2008 using two long aggregate time series on the distribution of income. We focus especially on changing income inequality related to educational and vocational attainment, changing income inequality within those groups, and how these two components of inequality were affected by the economic transformation from socialism to capitalism. We find that income inequality between groups rose moderately post-transformation, while overall inequality increased more sharply. This finding is consistent with a growing importance of individual rather than group productivity in labor market compensation, a change broadly consistent with the economic transformation of the Croatian labor market.     

Size matters: entrepreneurial entry and government

We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual’s decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from corruption and on “market freedom” defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property rights and regulation. We test these relationships by combining country-level institutional indicators for 47 countries with working-age population survey data taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial entry is inversely related to the size of the government, and more weakly to the extent of corruption. A cluster of institutional indicators representing “market freedom” is only significant in some specifications. Freedom from corruption is significantly related to entrepreneurial entry, especially when the richest countries are removed from the sample, but unlike the size of government, the results on corruption are not confirmed by country-level fixed-effects models.     

商业模式创新失败的五个原因

CEO及高管团队并不热衷于商业模式创新,他们对当前的模式很满意,希望组织中的其他人都集中精力来优化它。每当提到新的商业模式或者颠覆性的技术时,他们一般仅仅视为威胁。