Contextualising capability development: configurations of knowledge governance mechanisms in project-based organizations

Given the project-based organization’s (PBO) strong focus on autonomy and temporary decentralisation, it faces unique challenges with regard to long-term organisational learning and capability development. To address how PBOs cope with these challenges, we address the role of knowledge governance (KG) mechanisms to foster capability development. The present paper reports on a multiple case study comprising 23 PBOs and demonstrates the importance of ‘configurations of KG mechanisms’ for facilitating learning and capability development. This paper develops four distinct configurations (balanced, formalistic, interactive, and fragile) that promote three principal organisational-level learning processes: shifting, leveraging and adapting. This research underscores the close relationship between knowledge governance mechanisms and capability development and the importance of designing the appropriate configuration of KG mechanisms to foster capability development.     

Dynamics of sectoral business cycle comovement

Sectoral comovement accounts for a considerable share of the variance of aggregate variables. However, little is known about its time-varying aspects by now. In this article, a multivariate DCC- GARCH framework is employed to study dynamics of sectoral comovement across manufacturing sectors both in the United States and in Germany. To account for possible nonlinearities, asymmetric effects in conditional volatilities as well as in conditional correlations are being assessed. We find that comovement across sectors is not stable but shows irregular movements. Particularly, contractions tend to be more synchronized than expansions in manufacturing sector. Moreover, we examine the role of various aggregate factors for the fluctuations in conditional correlations. Our findings reveal that both the non-constant variability of common factors and the changes in the effects of these factors play role for the fluctuations in sectoral comovement.     

A Comment on Dehez and Tellone, “Data games: sharing public goods with exclusion”

This comment shows that the data cost game introduced in Dehez and Tellone (Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2013) coincides with the nonadditive component of the library cost game studied in Driessen, Khmelnitskaya, and Sales (TOP, 2012) where the core, nucleolus, and Shapley value were also investigated.     

Discounting and welfare evaluation of policies

We start with the premise that if policy discounting is to have any welfare relevance, one has to accept it being a derivative of a social welfare function (SWF). We show that if that derivative is to have a net present value (NPV) form, then the baseline allocation must be stationary. In addition, we show that at a stationary baseline in an overlapping generations growth economy, the intergenerationally fair discount rate equals the growth rate of per‐capita consumption, which is, roughly, 2% for the United States. This differs from the interest rate, even in the golden rule equilibrium, unless population growth is null. The last result is based on the main theorem in Mertens and Rubinchik (2012) and is demonstrated for a policy space that might naturally arise in applications.     

The impact of stress on tournament entry

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to taking part in a mandatory tournament predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary tournament. We find that competing increases stress levels. This cortisol response does not predict tournament entry for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the tournament for women. In Experiment 2, we exogenously induce physiological stress using the cold-pressor task. We find a positive causal effect of stress on tournament entry for women but no effect for men. Finally, we show that although the effect of stress on tournament entry differs between the genders, stress reactions cannot explain the well-documented gender difference in willingness to compete.     

Local labor markets and earnings of refugee immigrants

This paper estimates how local conditions at the time of immigration influence later outcomes for refugee immigrants to Norway, exploiting the quasi-experimental nature of the Norwegian system for settlement for “quota” or resettlement refugees. A unique administrative dataset with assigned settlement municipalities is used to identify the causal effect of initial location characteristics. Being placed in a labor market where other non-OECD immigrants do well increases own annual labor earnings up to 6 years after immigration. Extended models suggest that this effect is not driven by individual scarring effects: when controlling for the contemporaneous employment rate in the assigned region, effects of initial conditions disappear. Rather, the effects appear to be due to persistence in local labor market conditions combined with limited geographical mobility in response to adverse labor market conditions.     

The Three Hurdles of Tax Planning: How Business Context,Aims of Tax Planning,and Tax Manager Power Affect Tax Expense

The question of why some companies pay fewer taxes than others is a widely investigated topic of interest. One of the well‐known explanations is a phenomenon called tax avoidance. We develop a grounded theory model of influences on corporate tax planning through a series of 19 in‐depth German tax expert interviews. Our research identifies three independent hurdles in the tax planning process, which can help to explain different levels of tax expense across companies. Those three hurdles sequentially address which tax planning methods are available (defined by business characteristics), desirable (given via aims of tax planning), and implementable (determined by tax manager power). A large part of previous research has estimated the influence of firm characteristics, which we incorporate in the broader term business characteristics, on tax expense, while the other influences that we identify have largely been left “out of the equation.” In the light of the current public debates on tax avoidance, we reveal two important findings: First, we find that companies vary widely in the aggressiveness of their aims of tax planning, which contrasts sharply with the picture often drawn by undifferentiated media reports. Second, tax managers can assume very different levels of power in their organization. The implementation of desirable tax planning methods varies depending on this level of tax manager power. In conclusion, our three‐hurdle grounded theory provides generalizable insights into important influences on corporate tax planning which help to explain the observed variation in tax expenses across firms.     

The productive effect of transport infrastructures: does road transport liberalization matter?

In this paper we analyze the impact of motorway networks on production for a panel of twenty one manufacturing and service sectors of eleven EU countries observed over the period 1980–2003. In particular, we analyze if the degree of regulation of the road transport sector affects the link between productivity and motorway infrastructures. Overall results suggest that output elasticity with respect to motorway is found to be lower for countries characterised by a high degree of entry barriers in the road transport sector. This result is found to be more evident for industries which rely more heavily on transport services.     

An asset-pricing view of external adjustment

Recent literature has argued that conventional measures of external sustainability - the trade balance and current account - are misleading because they omit capital gains on net foreign asset positions. We adjust the definition of the current account to include the capital gains and discuss how this may affect our thinking about external adjustment and sustainability. We do so in the context of a two-country macro-finance model of Pavlova and Rigobon (2008a) that allows exploration of the interconnections between equilibrium portfolios and external accounts' dynamics. We calibrate the model and find that it generates several testable implications, some of which have already been validated empirically. First, we establish dynamic properties of the capital-gains adjusted current account and show that they are fundamentally different from those of the conventional current account. Second, we find that capital gains have a stabilizing effect on the trade balance and the current account. Finally, we demonstrate that in response to a shock, the conventional and the capital-gains adjusted current accounts may move in opposite directions.