Training as a generator of employee capabilities

In the current global economic environment, companies aiming to obtain lasting competitive advantages must be aware of those abilities that differentiate the company from its competitors. In this sense, personnel training may stimulate the development of certain capabilities related to the company's human resources, which could support this differentiation and hence the desired competitive advantage. For this reason, we have considered as an aim of this work to analyse personnel training as a policy for the development of the organisation's human capital, and its influence on the impulse of three differentiating capabilities, namely the employees' knowledge or know-how, the generation of a collective mind and the organisational commitment of personnel. In this article, we shall first analyse from a theoretical point of view the influence of the company's training policies on the development of certain differentiating capabilities. Then, we shall empirically prove this theoretical relation within the framework of the different business units of a financial institution.     

Entrepreneurial size,complexity and decentralization of decision-making in the use of temporary help workers in Spain

Using data from a postal survey of Spanish firms, the present work, as its main objective, tries to evaluate the effect of entrepreneurial size, degree of decentralization in decision-making and vertical complexity on the use of temporary help workers. As complementary objectives, it also seeks to confirm the effect of entrepreneurial size on elements of the organizational structure, such as decentralization in decision-making, and on vertical complexity. To respond to the hypotheses, a LISRE model has been used. The results show that entrepreneurial size and degree of decentralization positively affect the frequency with which companies use temporary help workers. In contrast, vertical complexity negatively affects the use of this type of worker. On the other hand, it is confirmed that entrepreneurial size positively affects decentralization in decision-making and vertical complexity.     

Productivity and R&D: an econometric evidence from Spanish firm-level data

This article analyses the relationship between productivity growth and R&D investments of Spanish manufacturing firms during the 1990s. The theoretical model is a version of the Cobb–Douglas production function in its growth rate form. The purpose is to estimate the rate of return to R&D expenditures. The econometric specification is a distributed lag model. The estimation applies the generalized method of moments method. The main empirical finding is that a positive and significant role is played by R&D expenditures on productivity growth. The rate of return to R&D expenditures is 26.598%.     

Income Inequality in Malaysia*

The objective of this paper is to examine the changes in Malaysian income distribution during the last three and a half decades and the reasons for the changes. It was found that the Gini ratio for Malaysia peaked in 1976 and fell thereafter to 1990. However, inequality seems to reverse its direction since then. Policies that could explain the changes in income distribution include the promotion of export‐oriented industrialization, education, and training, and the restructuring of equity ownership and assistance in asset accumulation. While the various other redistributive measures in the form of rural development helped in poverty eradication, their effectiveness in redistribution needs to be improved. Several hypotheses have been forwarded to explain the widening of income inequality after 1990. These include the difference in the growth rates of incomes of the rural and urban areas, trade and globalization, and impediments to the process of internal migration.     

Organizational Learning in Tourism Crisis Management: An Experience From Malaysia

Tourism and related organizations are dealing with crises either based on a specific crisis management plan, contingency planning, designed guideline, or ad hoc response. These organizations learn from crises in different ways, but no mechanisms have been explored to indicate how these organizations learn within the framework of Tourism Crisis Management (TCM). Among various reasons is limited systematic research that has been undertaken in this area. This study addresses this gap in our current knowledge by proposing a model for analyzing and developing organizational learning within the framework of TCM. The study shows the perceptions of 25 key players in Malaysia’s tourism industry on the role of organizational learning in managing crises. The findings also revealed that organizational learning is subject to negligence and few key practitioners thinking about in-depth learning from the crisis management perspectives.     

Why People Play at Work: A Theoretical Examination of Leisure-at-Work

ABSTRACT

Postmodern perspectives on work and leisure acknowledge the interwoven nature of these domains, an example being the increasing number of organizations intentionally incorporating leisure into the employee experience. Existing research, however, provides no specific theoretical guidance regarding the potential impacts of strategically integrating recreation activities into the work domain. Thus, based on positive organizational scholarship and leisure science theories, we build an individual level model describing the phenomenon of leisure-at-work (LAW). We propose LAW activities have the ability to produce feelings of personal expressiveness at work as moderated by employees' perceptions of the activities. Personal expressiveness then mediates LAW activities' ability to promote the development of organizational commitment, work engagement, and resilience among employees.     

Agent based model of a simple economy

This article proposes a model of a simple economy based on a set of agent-based modeling principles. The model is based on the ??trust game?? formulated by Berg et?al. (Games Econ Behav 10:122?C142, 1995), and anticipates a random matching of partners taking in to account adaptive agent behavior. Simulation in the NetLogo programming environment, using profile distributions obtained from empirical studies, has shown the most successful agents to posses low parameters of trust in the role of Sender and high parameters of trustworthiness in the role of Receiver.     

Income Distribution in East Asian Developing Countries: recent trends

This paper updates estimates of the trends in income distribution in the eight countries of the developing East and Southeast Asian region. In the last update by Krongkaew (1994 ), inequality was found to be increasing in the newly industrialising economies of Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, while in the ASEAN−4 (with the exception of Thailand) it was declining. Since then, the region has undergone the East Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. Recent data indicate that income distribution in Hong Kong and Taiwan continues to improve. Income inequality in South Korea declined until 1993 but began to increase slowly until the crisis sharply widened the disparity. The evidence for Singapore is mixed, with one set of estimates showing a dip in inequality while another indicates a widening of income disparity during the crisis. The crisis had the immediate impact of improving income distribution in all the ASEAN–4 countries, mainly because of reductions in the income shares of the top income groups. Later data show that inequality has since risen in all of them, except for Malaysia (for which no recent data are available).     

Measuring and forecasting retail trade in real time using card transactional data

We build big data retail trade indicators for Spain using high-dimensional card transaction data from one of the country’s biggest banks. The resulting indicators replicate the dynamics of the Spanish retail trade indices (RTI), regional RTIs (Spain’s autonomous regions), and RTI by retailer type (distribution classes) released by the Spanish National Statistics Institute. The new indicators not only have a higher frequency (daily data) and higher geographical and sectorial breakdown but are also shown to improve nowcasting and forecasting power for the official RTI, making them key variables to monitor consumption.