Being a woman in an ICT job: an analysis of the gender pay gap and discrimination in Spain

Despite policy initiatives aimed at promoting female access to jobs, the information and communication technology (ICT) professions have traditionally been largely monopolised by men. Segregation, gendered stereotypes and environmental factors have a clear impact on educational and professional choices, as well as on working conditions. The spread of ICT to all economic activities has meant that ICT specialists are now to be found everywhere, not only in the ICT sector where many stereotypes related to technical jobs persist. This work aims to analyse the gender wage gap and discrimination in ICT professions, with the emphasis on how working in an ICT-intensive industry might affect that situation. The study uses the Spanish Earning Structure Survey data for 2014, and applies wage decomposition techniques to the wage distribution. The results show that female ICT professionals face unfavorable working conditions, especially in highly qualified jobs and in ICT-intensive industries.     

Mergers & acquisitions research: A bibliometric study of top strategy and international business journals, 1980–2010

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are important modes through which firms carry out their domestic and international strategies and have been noted as the CEOs favorite strategy. As a significant field of study, M&A-research has accumulated substantial knowledge. This bibliometric study examines the extant strategy and international business literature on M&As. Methodologically, we examined a sample of 334 articles published in sixteen leading management/business journals, during a 31 year period — from 1980 to 2010. The results provide a global perspective of the field, identifying the works that have had the greater impact, the intellectual interconnections among authors and works, the main research traditions, or themes, delved upon on M&A-related research. Structural and longitudinal analyses reveal the changes in the intellectual structure of the field over time. A discussion on the accumulated knowledge and future research avenues concludes this paper.     

Fish market integration and demand analysis: a Mediterranean case study

This study discusses the importance of delineating market boundaries prior to undertaking demand analysis. The Northern Adriatic Sea is considered a good case study by which to test this approach, given the richness of species landed there and their heterogeneous distribution across the space involved. Three groups of demersal species (whitefish, cephalopods, and crustaceans) are chosen for the study. First, geographical market boundaries are defined for each product (species) using price–price relations between market places. Second, demand is analyzed inside the defined market area through the linear approximation of the inverse almost ideal demand system. Geographical market integration bears several patterns of complete or partial integration, depending on the species. It could be said that integration is higher for species of high economic relevance among regions where large quantities are landed. For all product groups, our estimations suggest that moderate substitution effects do exist among species. The characteristics of the fleets and of the buyers, as well as the biophysical attributes of the sea basin (i.e., species richness and heterogeneous spatial distribution) are discussed as explanatory variables of market integration/segmentation.     

Infrastructure spillovers and strategic interaction: does the size matter?

We set up a model in which the residents of two neighboring municipalities use the services provided by public infrastructures located in both jurisdictions. The outcome is that municipalities strategically interact when investing in infrastructures, with the small municipality reacting more to the expenditure of its neighbor than the big one. This theoretical prediction is tested by estimating the determinants of the stock of public infrastructures of the municipalities belonging to the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy. By introducing the classical spatial lag-error component, we find that municipalities positively react to an increase in infrastructures by their neighbors, but the effect vanishes above a given population threshold. Such a result is confirmed when we exploit the exogenous variation in the neighbors’ stock of infrastructures induced by a strong flood that occurred in the Province of Trento in 2000.     

Local government responsiveness to federal transfers: theory and evidence

Federal transfers can depend on local fiscal capacity which is measured by local tax bases. The aim of this paper is to understand to what extent and how these transfers affect local tax decisions. We develop a model with two provinces producing one mobile good. The good is taxed according to the destination principle. Final consumers decide to buy the good from the province where it is cheaper. The two provinces engage in tax competition. The introduction of scale economies into the shopping technology generates nonlinear tax reaction functions which make it possible to test the effect of a transfer equalizing local tax bases on tax competition in two complementary tax regimes. Used for this purpose are cigarette and gasoline tax data from Canada. In the case of cigarette tax, it is found that nonlinearity in tax competition is almost entirely offset when equalization holds: tax competition in the two tax regimes become closer. The shopping technology for gasoline gives less scope for scale economies, so that equalization does not affect reaction functions.      

Training as a source of competitive advantage: performance impact and the role of firm strategy,the Spanish case

In recent years, training has become one of the sources of competitive advantage for any business, since it constitutes a manner in which to augment the inimitability of human factor. We propose the study of this variable from two perspectives: (1) to verify its effects on business results, and (2) to analyse the existing relationship between training and business strategies. Our research has focused on Spanish businesses of more than 50 employees, which were sent a postal questionnaire.     

Increases in poverty in South Africa, 1999–2002

Analysis of the results in the 1999 October Household Survey and the 2002 Labour Force Survey suggests that the number of people in the bottom two expenditure classes (R0–R399 and R400–R799 per household per month) increased by about 4,2 million over the period. As the boundaries of these expenditure classes remained constant in nominal terms, there is a likelihood that the number of people in poverty will have increased as well. This article attempts to discover whether this is indeed the case. The possible increase in the number of people in poverty is not equal to the increase in the number of people in these two expenditure categories. Rather, it is equal to the difference between the numbers of people in poverty in the two years. Our first crude estimate of the maximum potential number of ‘new’ poor suggests that it could be as high as 4,5 million. This estimate, which excludes any adjustments for possible underreporting of expenditure, child cost economies and household economies of scale, and the ‘social wage’, is whittled down as we attempt to make the relevant allowances. Responding to claims that poverty is increasing in the country, the government has pointed to a failure to consider the contribution of the social wage to the alleviation of poverty. Accordingly, we have also attempted to estimate the impact of the social wage.     

Production Chains and Linkage Indicators

This paper uses a framework of production chains, which emerge from the vertical integration processes, in order to propose a general definition of linkage indicators. This definition is based on blocks of sectors and offers, among others, the following advantages. A reduction in the aggregation requirement, the resolution of the problems associated with the so-called distribution matrices, an easier analysis of the linkage components and, finally, the possibility to shed light on the links between Hypothetical Extraction Methods and sectoral analyses. Moreover, because of its general form, it helps to identify analogies between different types of indicators.     

Institutional lending to knowledge-based businesses

Knowledge-based businesses (KBBs) are vital to economic development and revitalization in many regions, especially in areas that have experienced a decline in traditional industries. While much attention has been devoted to various aspects of traditional small firm financing, there is a paucity of empirical research to explain how new knowledge-based firms are externally financed. The current study researches institutional strategies, structures and risk assessment practices of chartered banks and government agencies in a peripheral region of Canada. It examines the extent to which these institutions have modified traditional lending approaches and practices to meet the needs of knowledge-based firms. The study explores the existence of institutional lending cultures through an empirical investigation of risk assessment practices employed by account managers.Two business proposals, one for a knowledge-based firm and one for a more traditional firm, were presented to account managers in chartered banks and government agencies for initial review and subsequent due diligence and risk assessment. Verbal protocols and interview data obtained at three stages of the due diligence process were analyzed using standard multivariate techniques and consensus analysis (CA). CA, a tool developed to measure cultural agreement in cognitive anthropology, was employed to assess the level of agreement among lenders with respect to risk assessment.Overall, the study findings confirm that specialized strategies, structures and processes for lending to KBBs are only partially developed, are still evolving and are considerably diverse in both the banking and government sectors. Furthermore, the level of agreement among lenders develops during the course of the due diligence process. Results confirm consensus and the existence of a lending culture sensitive to the needs of KBBs among a select but important subgroup, knowledge-based lending specialists. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for researchers, entrepreneurs in search of capital and policy makers seeking to develop new business opportunities for regional economic development.