An investigation of skill requirements for business and data analytics positions: A content analysis of job advertisements

Presently, analytics degree programs exhibit a growing trend to meet a strong market demand. To explore the skill sets required for analytics positions, the authors examined a sample of online job postings related to professions such as business analyst (BA), business intelligence analyst (BIA), data analyst (DA), and data scientist (DS) using content analysis. They present a ranked list of relevant skills belonging to specific skills categories for the studied positions. Also, they conducted a pairwise comparison between DA and DS as well as BA and BIA. Overall, the authors observed that decision making, organization, communication, and structured data management are key to all job categories. The analysis shows that technical skills like statistics and programming skills are in most demand for DAs. The analysis is useful for creating clear definitions with respect to required skills for job categories in the business and data analytics domain and for designing course curricula for this domain.     

Individual adoption of HR analytics: a fine grained view of the early stages leading to adoption

Abstract

High performing organizations are using analytics for evidence-based decision-making. However, the human resource (HR) function in many organizations has been slow to adopt this innovation. This study applies innovation theory, informed by the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), to examine the individual’s decision to adopt HR Analytics in an effort to identify why the adoption rate is lagging. We examined early stages of the individual decision process beginning from Stage 1 (knowledge) and leading to Stage 3, (the decision) to adopt or not to adopt the innovation. We found several points in the process that can act as barriers or facilitators. Organizations and champions of this innovation wishing to facilitate HR analytics adoption can take action to remove as many of these barriers to the individual’s decision as possible. Further research should focus on the best way to remove these barriers.     

Large-Scale Immigration and Labour Market Integration: First Lessons from the Recent Past in Germany

In summary, because of their exogenously driven and often non-voluntary migration pace, refugees often face a disadvantageous starting position in a developed destination country with respect to their labour market integration.     

Who needs a reason to indulge? Happiness following reason-based indulgent consumption

While consumers and marketers perpetuate the lay theory that indulging with a reason is more pleasurable and makes everyone happier, this research identifies a condition under which indulging without a reason “feels right” and produces a more positive emotional reaction. The authors show that indulging with or without a reason and consumers' trait self-control interact to influence happiness felt following an indulgent purchase. While high self-control consumers are happier when they have a reason to buy indulgent products (e.g., when they can justify the indulgence), low self-control consumers are happier when they do not have a reason to indulge. That is, indulging with a reason is less pleasurable for consumers with low self-control. This effect on happiness has an impact on downstream judgments about the product and yields important implications for consumer welfare as well as marketing managers. Across four studies we show the effect on consumption happiness, examine consequences of the effect, and report evidence for the underlying process.     

Escaping the Fantasy Land of Freedom in Organizations: The Contribution of Hannah Arendt

Journal of Business Ethics - This article examines why and how workers adhere and contribute to the perpetuation of the freedom fantasy induced by neoliberal ideology. We turn to Hannah...     

Capital structure and value of reported earnings: evidence from an emerging market

This article documents a nonlinear impact of capital structure on the value of reported earnings in India during the period between 2009 and 2015. Our results show that earnings reported by firms with moderate level of debt are more valuable than earnings reported by firms with low or high level of debt. Our results are robust across various proxies of capital structure and across various sub-samples. This article argues that moderate level of debt is associated with low-agency problems, while low and high level of debt is synonymous to high-agency problems. Differences in agency problems result in reported earnings that have very different levels of relevance.     

Dividend Barrier Strategies in A Renewal Risk Model with Generalized Erlang Interarrival Times

Abstract

We consider a renewal risk model with generalized Erlang distributed interarrival times. We assume that the phases of the interarrival time can be observed. In order to solve de Finetti's dividend problem, we first consider phasewise barrier strategies and look for the optimal barriers when the initial capital is 0. For exponentially distributed claim sizes, we show that the barrier strategy is optimal among all admissible strategies. For the special case of Erlang(2) interarrival times, we calculate the value function and the optimal barriers.