How Did Finance Capital Infiltrate the World of the Urban Poor? Homeownership and Social Fragmentation in a Spanish Neighborhood

When working‐class localities in developed countries are in question, social fragmentation is often analyzed along ethnic lines. Instead, this article claims that it is more critically fruitful to explore fragmentation in terms of people's relations with the state and different forms of capital. It does this by considering housing in Spain as a key resource that connects state policies both with the forms of reproduction and (dis)organization of the disadvantaged, and with the development of real estate and finance capital. First, it unfolds the historical formation of the Spanish ‘homeownership culture’ and the construction–finance complex. Second, starting from an in‐depth ethnography of a peripheral neighborhood in Barcelona, it emphasizes the embeddedness of recent financialization in the livelihood strategies of poor households. Finally, it shows how the process led to a commodification and erosion of those social relations on which it partially depended, thereby exposing problems for class reproduction and fracture lines among the urban poor.     

The HR department's contribution to line managers' effective implementation of HR practices

The implementation of human resource (HR) practices (HRPs) is increasingly regarded as a cornerstone in the achievement of overall HRM effectiveness. This article addresses the role of the HR department in contributing to line managers' (LMs) effective implementation of HRPs. It does so by comparing the actions of HR departments in both effective and ineffective implementation processes in different firms. Its findings reveal that HR departments can make a difference by taking initiatives that foster LMs' implementation abilities, motivation and opportunities, such as deploying in‐the‐field HR specialists, framing practices in appealing ways, involving LMs in the development of HRPs and seeking CEO support, among others. By fleshing out these HR initiatives and linking them to the AMO framework, we build an inductive model that offers a more nuanced view of what HR departments can do to have their proposals effectively implemented by LMs.     

Expatriate compensation and its link to the subsidiary strategic role: a theoretical analysis

This paper focuses on the strategic design of expatriates' salaries. Unlike standard expatriation literature that assumes a lack of connection between strategy and international managers' compensation, we use the theoretical concepts from the international strategic management research to discuss how different international strategies affect the way expatriates are compensated. In this respect, the paper proposes a series of hypotheses on how expatriate compensation systems take shape according to the role that the expatriates may play in the internationalization process. The hypotheses refer to the type of incentives offered to encourage acceptance of the assignment, the type of criteria used to evaluate their performance and the reference unit used to establish variable compensation.     

Issue Information

The international human resource management (IHRM) field naturally lends itself to spotlighting the importance of internal and external organizational contexts to help understand how to manage employees in organizations effectively. However, we argue that the range of opportunities that the field creates to understand this context has not yet been fully embraced by IHRM scholars. To address this gap, this special issue explores: (a) the variety of approaches to theorizing how contexts promote or constrain organizational practice; and (b) relevant methodologies that might allow us to unearth novel context-dependent theory in international HRM. We propose a distinction between variable-oriented theorizing (that explains the effects of internal and external contexts on the phenomena under study) and context-dependent theorizing (that requires researchers become intimately familiar with the setting under study to understand context as a shaper of meaning). This editorial also highlights how the articles in the special issue contribute to stimulating further context-dependent IHRM research.     

Forward-premium puzzle: is it time to abandon the usual regression?

The forward premium puzzle is usually evidenced by the rejection of the null hypothesis in the uncovered interest parity (UIP) regression. Because this parity need only hold in a risk-neutral world, a risk adjustment term is missing from the equation if speculation in foreign exchange markets is risky. We deal with this issue following the literature which assumes that discounted returns on foreign government bonds are log-normal, so we can linearize the Euler pricing equations (in level) and obtain a modified UIP system for which the risk adjustment term is obtained by applying to the pricing kernel-based relations a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity-in-mean model. However, here we innovate by adopting a methodology which differs from all these related works. We construct and use a stochastic discount factor that does not depend on a specific model, by residing in the space of returns which we extract from the data by simply imposing the orthogonality restrictions represented by the Euler equations. So, we devise a purely statistical pricing kernel that performs well in in-sample level equations. Somewhat disappointingly, the risk premium inclusion in the conventional regression changes neither the significance nor the magnitude of the forecasting power of the forward premium for most currencies we study. The contrasting performance of the tests in level and in logs suggests that linearization may be to blame.     

Further investigation of the uncertain trend in US GDP

The presence of deterministic or stochastic trend in US GDP has been a continuing debate in the literature of macroeconomics. Ben-David and Papell (1995 Ben-David, D and Papell, DH. 1995. The great wars, the great crash, and steady growth: some new evidence about an old stylized. Journal of Monetary Economics, 36: 453–75. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) found evidence in favour of trend stationarity using the secular sample of Maddison (1991 Maddison, A. 1991. Dynamics Forces in Capitalist Development: A Long-Run Comparative View, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar]). More recently, Murray and Nelson (2000 Murray, CJ and Nelson, CR. 2000. The uncertain trend in U.S. GDP. Journal of Monetary Economics, 46: 79–95. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) correctly criticized this finding arguing that the Maddision data are plagued with additive outliers (AO), which bias inference towards stationarity. Hence, they propose to set the secular sample aside and conduct inference using a more homogeneous but shorter time-span post-WWII sample. In this article we re-visit the Maddison data by employing a test that is robust against AO's. Our results suggest the US GDP can be modelled as trend stationary process     

Lobbying, Counterlobbying, and the Structure of Tariff Protection in Poor and Rich Countries

A political economy model of protection is used to determineendogenously the intersectoral patterns of protection. Threepropositions are derived that are consistent with the stylizedpatterns of tariff protection in rich and poor countries: Nominalprotection rates escalate with the degree of processing, protectionis higher on average in poor countries, and rich countries protectagriculture relatively more than they protect manufacturing,whereas poor countries do the reverse. Numerical simulationsfor archetypal rich and poor economies confirm that the endogenouslydetermined structure of protection is broadly consistent withobserved patterns of protection.     

When Less (Potential Demand) Is More (Revenue): Asymmetric Bidding Capacities in Divisible Good Auctions

We show that asymmetry in bidders’ capacity constraints plays an important role in inhibiting collusion and promoting competitive outcomes in multi-unit auctions in which the final value of the good is common knowledge. This effect appears to be related to the increased difficulty of coordination when there are significant differences between bidders. Due to its impact on collusive outcomes, asymmetry in bidding capacities has a more powerful impact on the seller’s revenue than does the auction type. Consistent with the finding in Sade et al. (2006) that the discriminatory auction is more susceptible to collusion than the uniform-price auction, asymmetry in capacity constraints has a greater impact in discriminatory auctions.We thank Emmanuel Morales-Camargo, Ira Luria and Yelena Larkin for their excellent research assistance. We have benefited from comments by Yishay Yafeh, Eugene Kandel, Dan Levin, David Genesove, Eric Hughson, Steve Rock, Peter Bossaerts, David McAdams two anonymous referees, participants at the 2005 International Meeting of the Economic Science Association in Montreal, the 2006 winter meeting of the Econometric Society in Boston, and seminar participants at the University of Cincinnati, Hebrew University, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Tel-Aviv University, the University of Notre Dame, and Ben-Gurion University. Sade thanks the Israel Science Foundation (ISF 480/05) and the Krueger Center for Finance at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for partial financial support.     

Differentiating the workforce: The performance effects of using contingent labor in a context of high-performance work systems

In this study we focus on the impact of contingent labor on the outcomes of high-performance work systems (HPWS). Building on the emerging research on the social mechanisms linking HRM to organizational effectiveness, we argue that a higher incidence of contingent labor diminishes the productivity payoff associated with the use of HPWS for managing standard employees. We test these arguments using a sample of 229 British firms of different industries. The results support our arguments and help develop a more holistic and critical viewpoint in the analysis of workforce differentiation.