The economic impact of implementing an ergonomic plan

It is of paramount importance for executives to be well aware of registered nurse (RN) hidden replacement costs related to musculoskeletal injuries. Developing and implementing an ergonomic plan that includes procurement of appropriate lifting equipment at the point of care makes sense. Armed with an ergonomic plan, proactive case management, and a return to work program, the organization is positioned for fiscal success. The ANA's Handle With Care campaign addressed the fact that 12% of RN turnover and 38% of RN workers' compensation pay are related to back strains. Using the benchmarks reported in the Handle With Care campaign, the average cost of replacing an RN who leaves nursing due to a back injury ranged from $25,450 to $38,280 per nurse. Health care worker injury prevention should be valued as a retention strategy, as well as a fiscal responsibility where all stakeholders benefit.     

Linkages, Thresholds, and Development

Growth is rarehistorically, with short expansions interspersed with long periodsof stasis. We examine how well this can be explained by a generalclass of Schumpeterian growth models that treat development asa progress through a space of commodities, from simple to morecomplex goods. This process of sequential innovation in a partiallyordered network of commodities is called linkage formation. The central result of this article is thatSchumpeterian growth models exhibit generic threshold behavior.Below a critical probability of linkage formation, developmentgradually ceases. Above the critical probability, innovationcontinues with probability one.     

Patenting Strategy of Entrepreneurial Orientated Firms in New Zealand

Patenting is regarded as an important area for firms wanting to capture the strategic value of intellectual property. Further, patents are often used as a proxy for innovation— i.e., a firm with a large number of patents is said to be innovative. At the same time, a firm that is innovative is also said to have an entrepreneurial orientation (EO). In spite of this apparent linkage between an EO and patenting, little empirical evidence strategically links the two constructs. This paper addresses this gap by providing one of the first studies examining the relationship between an EO and patenting.     

Global managers and Japanese multinationals: internationalization and management in Japanese financial institutions

The paper examines the internationalization of Japanese banks in the 1980s and 1990s and the experiences of managers within them. These banks underwent a vast expansion in international activities in the 1980s, followed by an equally rapid contraction in the 1990s. Building on a series of interviews conducted in London and Tokyo in the period 1999-2001, the paper examines how this impacted on the careers and expectations of both Japanese and non-Japanese managers. The paper argues that the organizations have been fundamentally changed by these experiences and have become in varying ways ‘transnational social spaces’. The idea of multinationals as transnational social spaces is developed as a general way of linking flows (of people, practices and ideas) inside the firm to broader processes in the development of global political economy.     

Strategic and Natural Risk in Entrepreneurship: An Experimental Study

We report on the results of experiments where participants choose between entrepreneurship and an outside option. Entrepreneurs enter a market and then make investment decisions to capture value. Payoffs depend on both strategic risk (i.e., the investments of other entrepreneurs) and natural risk (i.e., luck). Absent natural risk, participants endogenously sort themselves into entrepreneurial and safe types, and returns from the two paths converge. Adding natural risk fundamentally changes these conclusions: Here we observe excessive entry and excessive investment so that entrepreneurs earn systematically less than the outside option. These payoff differences persist even after many repetitions of the task. With a risky outside option, entry further increases and about one‐third of entrepreneurs adopt a passive strategy, investing little or nothing. Finally, we examine an environment where an individual must become an entrepreneur but chooses the stakes over which she will compete. Due to under‐entry and under‐investment in the high stakes setting, the returns gap grows to over 15 percentage points. A two‐factor model incorporating loss aversion and love of winning can rationalize these returns patterns.