The impact of job training on temporary worker performance: Field experimental evidence from insurance sales agents

Despite the limited incentives they provide for idiosyncratic investment, temporary work arrangements are becoming increasingly common. Using evidence from a field experiment conducted among salespeople in a Kenyan insurance firm, this paper examines the consequences of providing job training for temporary workers. The findings show that providing access to training significantly increases firm revenue, primarily due to performance increases among higher‐ability workers. The findings from the study are consistent with temporary workers willingness to invest in job training when the job‐specific returns from doing so are sufficiently high.     

Explaining entrepreneurial intentions,nascent entrepreneurial behavior and new business creation with social cognitive career theory – a 5-year longitudinal analysis

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Scholars conceptualize entrepreneurial behavior (EB) as the actions taken for new venture creation, which are said to manifest from an...     

Capital market integration

This special issue is dedicated to a topic of great interest in international financial economics — Capital Market Integration. The topic remains live and vigorously examined, as evidenced by the nine papers presented here. These papers divide into three themes: integration and markets, integration and policy, and integration and crisis. Collectively, the papers highlight the importance of market- and policy-induced phenomena for understanding the nature and consequences of capital market integration.     

The New Political Economy of EU State Aid Policy

Despite its importance and singularity, the EU’s state aid policy has attracted less scholarly attention than other elements of EU competition policy. Introducing the themes addressed by the special issue, this article briefly reviews the development of EU policy and highlights why the control of state aid matters. The Commission’s response to the current economic crisis notably in banking and the car industry is a key concern, but the interests of the special issue go far beyond. They include: the role of the European Commission in the development of EU policy, the politics of state aid, and a clash between models of capitalism. The special issue also examines the impact of EU policy. It investigates how EU state aid decisions affect not only industrial policy at the national level (and therefore at the EU level), but the welfare state and territorial relations within federal member states, the external implications of EU action and the strategies pursued by the Commission to limit any potential disadvantage to European firms, and the conflict between the EU’s expanding legal order and national.     

Compensating Competitors or Restoring Competition? EU Regulation of State Aid for Banks During the Financial Crisis

We contrast the theory underpinning state aid for failing banks with that for failing firms in the non-financial sector. We argue that there is little justification for measures to ‘compensate’ rivals when the bank has been saved for reasons of systemic stability. The Commission’s approach to bank restructuring aid takes insufficient notice of this. Furthermore, the use of punitive divestitures is not the best way of addressing moral hazard. Worse, such divestitures can impede competition by creating weak rivals. We provide four detailed case studies to illustrate the problems. We conclude that the Commission provided a useful constraint in the midst of a crisis of unprecedented scale and complexity, but its approach could have been improved by more systematic attention to effective competition relative to the appropriate counterfactual.     

A comparative analysis of the work values of Greece's ‘Millennial’ generation

This study adds to the growing body of international evidence concerning the millennial generation (i.e. those born after 1980), by documenting the work values of millennial-aged undergraduate students (N = 649) in Greece, using an adapted version of the Lyons Work Value Survey. Our results show that millennial-aged Greeks place most importance on intrinsic and social aspects of work, and less importance on extrinsic and prestige values. We statistically compare our results to those of published studies of millennial-aged respondents from other countries and find that Greek respondents hold a unique work value profile, although they demonstrate some similarities to counterparts in other countries. Our findings do not clearly support the notion of a ‘global youth generation’, as young people in various countries hold different work value priorities. This suggests that employers seeking to recruit, engage and retain young workers internationally must tailor their offerings to the specific cultural context.     

What Do We Conclude from the Success and Failure of Mergers?

Tichy's review of the evidence presents at best a very mixed picture of the success of mergers as a corporate strategy. However, care should be taken not to interpret this as a case for crudely prohibitive competition policy. A simple framework is developed to show that mergers anticipating market changes might not be inappropriate, even when ex post results will appear disappointing. We argue that the competition authorities should protect consumers, and not provide management consultancy on behalf of shareholders. We suggest a more limited reform of the EC Merger Regulation than that proposed by Tichy.     

Financial Crisis and Changes in Firm Governance,Corporate Structure,and Boundaries

The paper researches the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on various measures of firm governance, including the impact on firm boundaries such as buyer–supplier relationship, capital structure, and employment effects. Using a unique data set of 1686 Eastern European firms, we examine how the crisis affected the financial and employment decisions of different industrial and service sector firms. As these firms faced a steep decline in sales and capacity utilization, as well as credit constrains, they were forced to make significant and far reaching changes in various aspects of their operations. We discuss the implications of these changes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Empirical relevance of efficient contract theory: inter-firm contracts

Although there has been enormous development of the theory ofefficient contracts in the last 20 years, empirical tests wereslow to come. However, over the last 10 years, a considerablebody of evidence has accumulated, particularly in relation tocontracts between firms. This paper develops a simple, integratedtheoretical framework to illustrate 11 testable hypotheses.The contract theories covered include risk sharing, principal-agentincentive models, transaction cost and incomplete contract modelswith specific investment, and the theory of relational contracting.The problems associated with empirical work on contracts arediscussed before setting the hypotheses against a wide rangeof econometric and other empirical evidence (including workon franchising, sharecropping, subcontracting, contract duration,private institutions, experimental evidence, and a wide rangeof case studies).     

Contracts and Specific Investment: An Empirical Test of Transaction Cost Theory

Empirical work has failed to keep pace with recent advances in transaction cost theory and the theory of contract. The first econometric analysis of its kind is reported by using a new data set of small subcuntractors making specific inputs for customers in the engineering industry. The use of formal contracts is found to be strongly associated with specific investment and other variables measuring technological complexity and vulnerability to potential opportunism by customers. Furthermore, despite typically long-term relationships, over half of subcontractors avoid making efficient, specific investments. Overall, we find strong support for the transaction cost theory of contracts.