Satisfied with red tape? Leadership,civic duty,and career intention in the military

We examine how the coerciveness of HR procedures and leadership behaviours affect job satisfaction (JS) and career intention (CI), and how civic duty (CD) mediates these relationships. Within the framework of the human resource management performance chain, we draw on leadership and motivational theories and test the proposed relations in a structural equation model with data from a survey of the Federal Armed Forces Germany (n = 1,331). The findings show that the behaviour of supervisors, rather than red tape, influences JS and CI. The results extend our understanding of the interplay between leadership behaviours and followership attitudes under high degrees of organizational coercion.     

Shared producer and consumer responsibility — Theory and practice

Over the past decade, an increasing number of authors have been examining the nexus of producer versus consumer responsibility, often dealing with the question of how to assign responsibility for internationally traded greenhouse gas emissions. Recently, a similar problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the Ecological Footprint: While the method traditionally assumes a full life-cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility, a large number of producers (businesses and industry sectors) have started to calculate their own footprints (see www.isa.org.usyd.edu.au). Adding any producer's footprint to other producers' footprints, or to population footprints, which all already cover the full upstream supply chain of their operating inputs, leads to double-counting: The sum of footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint. The committee in charge of the Footprint standardisation process was hence faced with the decades-old non-additivity problem, posing the following dilemma for the accounting of footprints, or any other production factor: if one disallows double-counting, but wishes to be able to account for producers and consumers, then one cannot impose the requirement of full life-cycle coverage; the supply chains of actors have to be curtailed somehow in order to avoid double-counting. This work demonstrates and discusses a non-arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains, into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy.     

IS THERE A CURSE OF RELOCATION? ANALYSING THE CAUSAL LINK BETWEEN OFFSHORING AND THE INNOVATION PERFORMANCE OF (SMALL) FIRMS

We analyse the empirical link between offshoring activities and different dimensions of innovation performance at the firm‐level. In order to identify causal effects running from offshoring to innovation, we use a quasi‐experimental comparison group approach by means of (conditional) difference‐in‐difference estimations applied to German establishment‐level data for firms that conducted offshoring activities in the period 2007–13. We find that the international relocation of business functions has a negative impact on the firms’ propensity to be innovative in terms of product and process innovations as well as product improvements. While for larger firms the reduction in process innovations is most striking, potentially due to a lack of resources, stagnation in expertise and a reduction in intra‐organizational learning‐by‐doing associated with the relocation of some business activities, for small and medium‐sized enterprises we particularly observe a reduction in product innovations after the offshoring activity has taken place. When interpreting this ‘pessimistic’ picture on the link between offshoring and the innovation performance of firms, the reader should note that our findings for German establishments have to be assessed through the lens of a global economy in economic recession after 2008, which may have intensified the negative impact of offshoring on the firms’ innovation performance.     

Going offshore or better staying in? Spatial relocation strategies and their impact on firm innovativeness

We analyse the short- to mid-run effects of spatial relocation strategies on firm innovativeness and productivity growth. Using conditional difference-in-difference estimation with multiple treatments, we find for a sample of German firms in 1999–2013 that offshoring has a statistically significant negative impact on the firms’ innovation activity and productivity growth vis-à-vis nonrelocating comparison firms. In contrast, we find a positive link between domestic relocation activities and the firms’ propensity to introduce a product innovation. Firms should thus carefully account for potentially distorting performance effects when deciding about the spatial scale of relocation strategies in the short to mid-run.     

Does market competitiveness significantly affect public intervention in agricultural insurance: the case in Italy

Analyses of agricultural insurance failures often assume the existence of competitive supply, tracing the reasons for high insurance cost and limited farmer participation to informational problems, and suggesting the need for premium subsidization in order to increase participation. However, in countries such as Spain and Italy, where agricultural insurance is most highly subsidized, it could be that supply is not fully competitive. In this article, we explore the incidence of public subsidies to agricultural insurance premia when supply is noncompetitive. Through the use of a simple empirical model of an insurance market, it is shown that, while in the case of a competitive supply, subsidies to insurance would benefit farmers, a monopolistic supply would capture most of the subsidy, thus eliminating the potential incentive towards wider participation by farmers. The model is applied to a panel of Italian farms for different levels of risk aversion to demonstrate the limited effect that a subsidy to a hypothetical all risk yield insurance would have on farmer participation in the case of monopolistic supply.     

Complexity as a constraint on firm expansion within and across industries

With this paper, we want to shed light on factors influencing a firm's rate of expansion. We argue that expansion is a complex task and complexity associated with expansion projects in one period can negatively impact rate of expansion in the following period. Moreover, we argue that firm portfolio complexity also slows down further expansion. Using longitudinal data on the expansion path of 91 German companies, we show that added product scope of expansion and degree of internationalization characterizing expansion in one period as well as level of product and international diversity have a significant impact on slowing down rate of expansion in the subsequent period. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Equipping immigrants: migration flows and capital movements in small open economies

This paper explores the extent to which migration-related capital flows can explain the variation in investment rates and current and capital account imbalances in OECD countries. We begin with a general equilibrium model of a small open economy in which migration is exogenous. Migrants must be equipped with capital, and the resulting demands for capital will generate cross-border flows of capital. Next, we move to an empirical exercise in which we allow both capital and labor flows to be endogenous. We test this model using data from a panel of OECD countries. We conclude that migration flows do in fact generate substantial matching capital flows. We calculate that increased migration may have accounted for as much as one-fifth of the increase in the US current account deficit since 1960.     

A modified maximum likelihood test

If the supremum in the definition of the maximum likelihood test is replaced by the essential supremum, conditions for asymptotic optimality can be relaxed.This research was supported in part by NSF research grant number GP 31123X.