TRAINING,TURNOVER, AND SEARCH*

This article explores a model of firm‐specific training in a job search environment with labor turnover. The main substantive finding is a positive association between training and wages (when dispersed). The article then precisely characterizes how both wage dispersion and firm profitability depend on the flow value b≥ 0 of workers' unmatched time. It is shown that: (i) for all high values b, no equilibrium exists; (ii) for intermediate values b, multiple equilibria arise, where firms earn zero profits, and choose from a general wage distribution; (iii) for all lower values b, there is a unique equilibrium, with firms earning positive profits, and choosing from an atomless set of wages.     

The Paradoxical Nature of The Relationship Between Training and Learning

The difficulty of explaining the paradoxical nature of organizational life has resulted in reductionist approaches, which present the relationships between processes as causal and linear. The relationship between training and economic performance, the contribution of training to individuals' adaptability to change and the significance of knowledge and learning to organizational competitiveness are just some examples of the perceived linearity of the relationships between processes. The relationship between training and learning falls in the same category in that it is assumed to be very strong. This article makes a contribution to this debate by providing new insights about the relationship between training and learning. Using recent empirical findings from a longitudinal study in the Financial Services Sector, this article examines some of the basic differences between training and learning using the individual manager as the unit of analysis. These differences reveal some of the conditions that shape the relationship between training and learning. The findings from the study suggest that the relationship between training and learning may appear strong on the surface; however in essence it may be superficial and mechanistic.     

The Determinants of Mergers and Acquisitions in Banking

This paper investigates the determinants associated with the likelihood of a bank becoming involved in a merger or an acquisition. Using a multinomial logistic regression and a Cox regression with time-dependent covariates, we investigate the determinants of being a target or an acquirer from a sample of 777 deals involving EU acquirers and 312 global targets over the period of 1991 to 2006. Both the multinomial logistic and Cox regressions identify the same determinants associated with becoming acquirers or targets. A higher likelihood of becoming an acquirer exists for larger banks with a history of high growth, greater cost X-efficiency, and lower capitalization. In contrast, banks are more likely to be targets if they have lower free cash flows, are less efficient, are relatively illiquid, and are under-capitalized. But, the predictive power of the two regressions is different as the multinomial logistic regression outperforms the Cox regression when predicting the likelihood of becoming an acquirer.     

The expected benefit as determinant of deal-prone consumers' response to sales promotions

This study proposes that the responses of more and less deal-prone consumers to price discounts and premiums depend on the promotional benefit level. At low and moderate benefit levels, low deal-prone consumers show a higher evaluation for price discounts than for premiums but if the benefit is high, deal proneness does not bias the higher evaluation of price discounts. An experimental study shows that low deal-prone consumers are concerned with obtaining price discounts. Taken together, these findings suggest that consumers more concerned with obtaining promotions do not always prefer price discounts.     

Building the New Europe: western and eastern roads to social partnership

This article focuses on the struggle for a social Europe by examining social partnership developments in two western countries, Germany and Britain, and two eastern countries, Bulgaria and Poland. The resurgence of social partnership in the west, even in the weakest case (Britain), is paradoxically driven in part by neoliberal EU economic policies. In the east, post-communist tripartism helped preserve social peace with the coming of markets, while both international lending agencies and subsequent EU accession processes pushed domestic actors towards social dialogue. The coming or deepening of markets has therefore surprisingly promoted or reinforced relations of social partnership throughout Europe.     

Exchange of indivisible goods and indifferences: The Top Trading Absorbing Sets mechanisms

There is a wide range of economic problems that involve the exchange of indivisible goods with no monetary transfers, starting from the housing market model of the seminal paper by Shapley and Scarf (1974) to problems such as the kidney exchange or the school choice problem. The classical solution to many of these models is to apply a mechanism called Top Trading Cycles, attributed to David Gale, which satisfies good properties for the case of strict preferences. In this paper, we propose a family of mechanisms, called Top Trading Absorbing Sets mechanisms, which generalize the Top Trading Cycles to the general case in which individuals are allowed to report indifferences, while preserving a maximal possible set of its desirable properties.     

Systematic Variation in Willingness to Pay for Aquatic Resource Improvements and Implications for Benefit Transfer: A Meta-Analysis

Researchers are increasingly considering benefit transfer approaches that allow welfare measures to be adjusted for characteristics of the policy context. The validity and reliability of such adjustments, however, depends on the presence of systematic variation in underlying WTP. This paper describes a meta-analysis conducted to identify systematic components of WTP for aquatic resource improvements. Model results reveal systematic patterns in WTP unapparent from stated preference models considered in isolation, and suggest that observable attributes account for a substantial proportion of the variance in WTP estimates across studies. The analysis also exposes challenges faced in development, estimation, and interpretation of meta-models for benefit transfer and welfare guidance. These challenges remain salient even in cases where the statistical performance of meta-models is satisfactory.