Industrial policy in Eastern Europe: A three-country comparison

The design and implementation of industrial policy in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s are explored. In Czechoslovakia where management of the economy was more centralized than in Hungary and Poland, a policy of promoting production and export of nuclear equipment was effectively carried out; other product groups were less successful. In Poland, bureaucratic resistance undermined the implementation of industrial policies (which were never unambiguously formulated). The Hungarian policy was chiefly oriented toward import substitution. The statistical evidence gives only weak support for the effective conduct of industrial policies in these countries.     

Der Arbeitsplatzwechsel als Erneuerungsprozeß

Summary The notions of renewal theory, in the context of labour turnover, include the following random variables: Length of completed service in a firm (in other contexts called failure time or waiting time); uncompleted service in the employee's present employment (spent waiting time); and number of times an employee changed his job in a given year (number of renewals).The second and third of these distributions are known from interviews of a large sample of Austrian employees; it has been assumed that the first conforms to a law given by Silcock (equation 6). On this assumption the parameters have been obtained and tested by comparing the implied distribution of the number of renewals with the empirical data.The result is satisfactory for men, but not for women (who comprise two distinct groups, according to working life, which may not easily fit one distribution). The calculated length of service distribution is given in Table 2 and Figur 3.A second part of the paper deals with asymptotic solutions. Owing to limited working life the process of job renewals is a terminating process. In a sense, though, the process continues, if the worker is replaced by another one. If there were no limit at all to the process, Silcock's formula would imply an ultimate steady state with infinite renewal time. In practice this state is approached gradually, and this can be accounted for by introducing an exponential function which shows how the length of service in one job increases with the progress of working life.Finally, the renewal approach has two aspects: From the point of view of the firm, the workers are renewed from that of the workers, the jobs. The two renewal processes are in a sense dual to each other.

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Die Berechnungen für diese Arbeit wurden vonSonja Kröpfl durchgeführt     

Why is Austria’s Pension System So Much Better Than Germany’s?

The pension systems in both Germany and Austria have undergone substantial reforms, though only one of the countries appears to have had success. Average earners in Austria will receive gross pensions equivalent to 78.1% of their average earnings, whereas in Germany they will receive just 37.5%. The authors argue that Germany has been left with a system that has abandoned the goal of protecting people's standard of living.     

Inferring Market Structure from Customer Response to Competing and Complementary Products

We consider customer influences on market structure, arguing that market structure should explain the extent to which any given set of market offerings are substitutes or complements. We describe recent additions to the market structure analysis literature and identify promising directions for new research in market structure analysis. Impressive advances in data collection, statistical methodology and information technology provide unique opportunities for researchers to build market structure tools that can assist real-time marketing decision-making.     

An organizational capability perspective on multi-unit franchising

Previous research on multi-unit franchising (MUF) has primarily focused on agency and transaction cost perspectives. The present study develops and tests an organizational capability (OC) model of the franchisor’s choice of MUF. According to the OC view, the franchisor gains a competitive advantage by exploration and exploitation of firm-specific resources and capabilities. We hypothesize that, if the franchisor expects to obtain a competitive advantage resulting from higher exploration and exploitation capabilities when using MUF as opposed to single-unit franchising, the franchisor will more likely choose MUF as a governance mode of the franchise system. Based on empirical data from the German and Swiss franchise sectors, the results of the regression analysis support these hypotheses. Our main contribution to the franchise literature is the development of an OC model of the franchisor’s choice of MUF that complements the existing organizational economics ?explanation of MUF.