An empirical analysis of green supply chain management in the German automotive industry

The purpose of this paper is the empirical investigation of the status quo of green supply chain management in the German automotive industry from a practitioner's point of view. Several aspects of green supply chain management, such as the point of time of implementation, the driving forces, the relevance of intended goals and their particular realization and the adoption of eco‐programs with suppliers and customers as well as internal and external barriers are analyzed. Furthermore, the link to different performance criteria is tested by inductive statistics in order to show the potential of green supply chain management for competitiveness. For this study, managers from the automotive supply industry in Germany were asked about their estimations in this regard. The main conclusion is that managers express the need for green supply chain management on the one hand but also see corresponding problems in terms of required resources on the other hand. Furthermore, the analyses show that green supply chain management leads to higher performance in terms of several performance criteria. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Updating and Estimating a Social Accounting Matrix Using Cross Entropy Methods

The problem in estimating a social accounting matrix (SAM) for a recent year is to find an efficient and cost-effective way to incorporate and reconcile information from a variety of sources, including data from prior years. Based on information theory, the paper presents a flexible 'cross entropy' (CE) approach to estimating a consistent SAM starting from inconsistent data estimated with error, a common experience in many countries. The method represents an efficient information processing rule-using only and all information available. It allows incorporating errors in variables, inequality constraints, and prior knowledge about any part of the SAM. An example is presented, applying the CE approach to data from Mozambique, using a Monte Carlo approach to compare the CE approach to the standard RAS method and to evaluate the gains in precision from utilizing additional information.     

Pensions reforms,workforce ageing and firm-provided welfare

This paper investigates the impact of an exogenous increase in the legal retirement age on the firms’ propensity to provide welfare services voluntarily to their employees. To this purpose we exploit a unique information derived from the Rilevazione su Imprese e Lavoro (RIL), a survey conducted in 2015 on a large and representative sample of Italian firms. Applying different regression models we show that firms which were forced to give up previously planned hirings because of the Law 201/2011 (the so-called ‘Fornero pension reform’), increased the probability of providing welfare services at workplace. By referring to the sociological, human resource management and economic literature we then argue that a sudden increase in the legal retirement age may motivate the employers to establish welfare schemes as a way to cope with an ageing workforce. Our findings also hold when propensity score matching methods are used in order to control for sample selection issues.     

Profit rate dynamics, income distribution, structural and technical change in Denmark, Finland and Italy

Under less restrictive assumptions than in previous contributions, this paper highlights various patterns of profit rate dynamics that are common to the countries under scrutiny. Without a substantial re-distribution of income in favour of profits, the profit rate declines. When labour productivity is weak the profits/wages ratio declines leading to a decline in the profit rate, also due to capital deepening. Developments in the capital-labour ratio tend to increase the organic composition of capital while those in the ratio between the capital price deflator and the average wage tend to decrease it. Falls in the profit rate took place in countries with a weak technological change with episodes of Marxian bias. Employment shifted from low to high capital intensity sectors, from low to high organic composition industries and from low to high productivity sectors. Rising strength of labour and realization failures tend to have a greater role than rising organic composition in cyclical profit rate dynamics. Over the cycle, the first mechanism is also the first one to show up, while the others tend to follow it. Theoretical and policy implications are offered.     

When imperfect collusion is profitable

This paper studies cartel stability under the assumption that member firms can choose intermediate degrees of collusion as well as the joint-profit-maximizing solution in determining the quota to be produced by each firm. After showing that firms can increase the number of participants by decreasing the degree of collusion, I prove that individual members' profits are maximized when firms choose a (possibly low) degree of collusion such that all firms in the industry want to take part in the cartel. More precisely, if the number of firms in the industry is four or less, then all of them want to take part in the cartel even if the maximum degree of collusion is chosen (i.e., the monopoly output is produced); if the number of firms is greater than four, firms will still create an industry-wide cartel but they will produce a higher quantity than the monopoly output.     

Assessing the Determinants of High-Growth Manufacturing Firms in Italy

Few firms grow rapidly, but their contribution to employment growth is often impressive. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse both the external and internal factors that can affect the probability of being a high-growth firm (HGF) in Italy. We found that HGFs are, on average, young firms and are present in different industries, but the role of demand is important to understanding their performance at the sectoral level. Moreover, our findings show that financial constraints and profitability are not associated with the probability of being a HGF. HGFs, on average, are characterised by high productivity, but only when growth is measured in terms of sales. The most original results of this study concern the endogenous determinants of rapid growth, which have yet to be adequately examined in the literature. First, we found that the concentration of ownership is important for HGFs that experienced rapid growth in their sales. Second, the quality of human capital is a strong point for firms experiencing rapid employment growth.     

Examining Public Hospital Service Failure: The Influence of Service Failure Type,Service Expectations,and Attribution on Consumer Response

This study investigates three independent variables; types of service failure, service expectations, and attribution on postfailure responses in healthcare. A between-subjects 3?×?2?×?2 experimental design using written scenarios was used. The findings demonstrate that customer responses to service failures in hospitals are extensively influenced by the type of service failure, the level of service expectation of the provider, and, to a lesser extent, the controllability of the cause of the failure. Core service failures lead to greater increases in negative responses for satisfaction, emotional, and behavioral responses than supplementary service failure with high service expectations protecting the provider against overall dissatisfaction, negative word-of-mouth, and switching behaviors. Interestingly, perceived high controllability leads to greater dissatisfaction but not to increased negative emotional or behavioral responses. The study applies attribution theory to explain the results. The article concludes with managerial implications.     

Telia—a Swedish‐Finnish marriage after a failed Norwegian courtship

In 2002, the Swedish telecommunications company Telia merged with the Finnish telecommunications company Sonera. Prior to this merger, Telia had already attempted to ally with the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor. This effort had resulted in a disaster; the “marriage” of the two companies was “divorced” after only two months in 1999. In the first part, the case study will feature an introduction to the telecommunications industry. In the second part, the unsuccessful merger between Telia and Telenor will be examined. Particular emphasis will be placed on national conflicts of interest and the power games played by politicians and leading managers. In the third part, the merger between Telia and Sonera will be described. This will be interpreted as another example of a politically and culturally difficult, but to this day successful merger. Finally, both merger episodes will be analyzed with reference to international mergerand‐acquisition (M&A) literature. The focus will be on motivations and objectives, environmental influences on the two mergers, and internal issues of the merging companies. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Sectoral adjustment of employment to shifts in outsourcing and trade: evidence from a dynamic fixed effects multinomial logit model

This paper analyzes the effects of trade and outsourcing on the transition probabilities of employment between sectors, using a dynamic multinomial logit framework with fixed effects. The data cover a sample of individual Austrian male workers over the period 1988–2001. Our results strongly support the view that international economic forces are important determinants of labor market turnover. In particular, an increase in the outsourcing intensity negatively affects the probability of staying in or changing into the manufacturing sector, even more so for industries with a comparative disadvantage. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.