The Impact of Employment on Parental Coresidence

We examine the extent to which parents use housing and shared living arrangements as a form of risk‐sharing for their adult children, using detailed data on children and parents in the Health and Retirement Study for 1998–2012. On average, a young man moving from full‐time to nonemployment raises the likelihood of coresiding with a parent by 1.5 percentage points; moving from full‐time employment to being part‐time employed raises the likelihood of coresiding with a parent by 2 percentage points. The implied elasticity of parental coresidence with respect to the son's income is ‐1.1; for daughters, the elasticity is ‐0.5.     

Effects of Collaborative Communication on NPD Collaboration Results: Two Routes of Influence

Although NPD collaboration with external partners has become the next generation in NPD practice, the discussion concerning how to organize collaboration so as to obtain better results is far from over. Since communication is the most important element in successful interfirm exchange, this study focuses on the impact of collaborative communication and its facets—frequency, formality, reciprocal feedback, and rationality—on NPD collaboration results. In order to explain how collaborative communication can best be managed to enhance NPD collaboration results, this research combines the relational and resource‐based views, proposing the existence of two routes of influence: the direct resource‐based route and the indirect relational route mediated by trust. Using a sample of 207 NPD collaboration projects of innovative firms, empirical findings indicate that reciprocal feedback–rationality and frequency play an important role in product quality and adherence to budget and schedule, respectively, even without trust. Moreover, the trust between partners substantially reinforces the positive influence of reciprocal feedback–rationality on NPD collaboration results and makes the effect of formality significant. Therefore, the two alternative routes are confirmed as important paths to new product success, which provides relevant managerial implications.     

Searching for Goldilocks: The Distance‐Based Capitalization Effects of Local Public Services

This article empirically models the effect of distance on residential property values of three different types of services, fire, police and emergency medical services. Interesting economic trade‐offs emerge as service station proximity provides both amenity and disamenity effects. Using over three million home sales from the state of Florida along with two different measures of distance, this study provides evidence of nonlinear capitalization effects on local housing values. A difference‐in‐difference model utilizing new facility construction provides corroborating evidence of these findings.     

Making sense of new technology during organisational change

This article examines how employees interpret the use of various social media and web 2.0 technologies by managers of an organisation during a merger process. The article explores the way in which managers use technology to give sense to the merger process, the corresponding sensemaking of employees and also how employees make sense of the use of technology itself. The findings show that new media enables the sharing of emotional sense about organisational processes between managers and employees and places employees with different levels of involvement with the process and at different points in the organisational hierarchy on equal footing. In spite of this, employees view the use of technology negatively and feel mastered by the technology itself. In discussing these unintended consequences of the use of this technology, the article further discusses the paradoxes that emerge from using new technology to give sense during organisational change.     

Crowdsourcing and work: individual factors and circumstances influencing employability

The development of a fast and reliable Internet, new technologies online payment systems, and changes in work structure that enable and demand flexible working patterns have driven a move to a new form of Internet‐enabled labour exchange called crowdsourcing. Evidence from an in‐depth qualitative study is presented, focusing on selected users' interactions and experiences of working on two UK‐based crowdsourcing platforms. The paper shows that workers engaged in this form of labour exchange need to deploy existing employability skills and networks to effectively meet the challenges, and take advantage of the opportunities, that crowdsourcing presents. Individual factors and circumstances emerge as paramount for workers' continued engagement in this form of employment. Using selected components from an employability framework, the findings suggest that crowdsourcing can offer new pathways to practising skills and enhancing employability for some workers.     

When Research Meets Development: Antecedents and Implications of Transfer Speed

This paper focuses on the organization of new product development in large, R&D‐intensive firms. In these firms, research and development activities are often separated. Research is conducted in dedicated research projects at specialized research labs. Once research results are achieved by research projects, they are transferred to business units for further development and commercialization. We investigate the speed whereby research projects transfer their first research results to business units (hereafter: transfer speed). In particular, we analyze the antecedents and performance implications of transfer speed. Based on data of 503 research projects from a European R&D intensive manufacturing firm, our results suggest that a fast transfer speed (as measured by the time it takes for a research project to develop and transfer its first research result to business units) is associated with a better research performance (as measured by the total number of transfers the research project generates). Moreover, we find that different types of external R&D partners—science‐based and market‐based partners—play distinct roles in speeding up project first research transfers. While market‐based partnerships (i.e., customers and suppliers) generally contribute to a faster transfer of first research results, science‐based partnerships (i.e., universities and research institutions) only speed up first research transfers of technologically very complex projects. Our results also show that early patent filings by research projects accelerate first research transfers.     

Timing the Start of Material Substitution Projects: Creating Switching Options under Volatile Material Prices

Firms developing new products often face the challenge of making investment decisions under uncertain input–cost conditions due to the price volatilities of the materials they use. These decisions need to be made long before the final products are launched on the market. Therefore, firms that invest in the opportunity to switch materials in a timely manner will have the flexibility to react to material price changes and realize competitive advantages. However, volatile material prices may also cause a firm to delay investment. Using real‐options reasoning, this paper studies the influence of input‐cost fluctuations on the timing decision to start new product development (NPD) and thus create the follow‐on opportunity to later replace an existing product. A model that combines waiting and switching options to derive influencing factors of the flexibility value that triggers the investment is developed and tested on a sample of material substitution projects from manufacturing firms. The results show how price uncertainty of the new and the old material, their joint price development, the expected project duration, and competitive preemption are related to the propensity to delay the start of NPD. The findings provide new insights on how timing in adopting materials can be used to hedge exposure to volatile material prices. The insights are relevant for adopters and producers of new materials, as well as for policy makers who strive for supporting the diffusion of new materials.     

Towards the Development of a Tax System Complexity Index

Reducing tax system complexity is a common goal amongst policymakers; yet there is no commonly agreed definition of complexity. This paper seeks to fill this gap, by proposing the construction of an index of tax system complexity, conceived as a summary indicator of the overall complexity of a tax system at a particular point in time. If adopted, such an index would not only enable assessment of the changing level of a country's tax system complexity over time, but may also facilitate comparisons of the relative complexity of different countries' tax systems in future.     

Geography,Informal Information Flows and Mutual Fund Portfolios

This paper explores how informal information channels impact mutual fund performance. We measure the strengths of two location‐based information channels: 1) information transfers among fund managers (fund‐fund links) and 2) transfers between managers and the companies in which they invest (fund‐company links). We find that each channel increases investment performance in the absence of the other, but decreases it when acting in combination. Stock selection associated with the presence of one channel, but the absence of the other, earns positive future returns. Our results indicate that the economic benefits of informal information channels depend critically on the nature of their interactions.