The Part‐Time Job Satisfaction Puzzle: Different Types of Job Discrepancies and the Moderating Effect of Family Importance

Although part‐time employment often appears as a substandard form of employment, evidence that part‐time employees are less satisfied than full‐time employees is ambiguous. To shed more light on this puzzle, I test an extended discrepancy theory framework using data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel. The results help explain previous inconsistent findings: Part‐time employment increases the chances of being underemployed while it reduces the likelihood of working more hours than preferred, and the negative effects of both types of working time mismatches on job satisfaction are similar in size. Furthermore, the importance attributed to family roles mitigates the negative effect of part‐time employment on job satisfaction.     

How do firms make money selling digital goods online?

We review research on revenue models used by online firms who offer digital goods. Such goods are non-rival, have near zero marginal cost of production and distribution, low marginal cost of consumer search, and low transaction costs. Additionally, firms can easily observe and measure consumer behavior. We start by asking what consumers can offer in exchange for digital goods. We suggest that consumers can offer their money, personal information, or time. Firms, in turn, can generate revenue by selling digital content, brokering consumer information, or showing advertising. We discuss the firm’s trade-off in choosing between the different revenue streams, such as offering paid content or free content while relying on advertising revenues. We then turn to specific challenges firms face when choosing a revenue model based on either content, information, or advertising. Additionally, we discuss nascent revenue models that combine different revenue streams such as crowdfunding (content and information) or blogs (information and advertising). We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for future research including implications for firms’ revenue models from the increasing importance of the mobile Internet.     

Pharmaceutical new product development: why do clinical trials fail?

A high percentage of new drug candidates fail to reach the market during clinical trials, and these failures imply massive financial losses for the pharmaceutical companies. Clinical trials have distinctive characteristics and additional complexity compared with the late stages of product development in many other industrial sectors. Although the current literature on clinical trial has offered explanations for why a drug is abandoned during clinical trials (e.g., toxicity, lack of efficacy, and economics), studies investigating non‐drug‐related causes of failure are scarce. New product development (NPD) failures also differ from one another; however, no comprehensive conceptual framework in the NPD literature describes how to classify failures. This study suggests a conceptual framework for explaining NPD failures in the pharmaceutical industry by drawing on clinical trial literature combined with an exploratory empirical approach based on 17 interviews with industry experts. The initial interviews were used to identify managerial issues related to clinical trial failure, and the later interviews had a more iterative character to validate the issues identified in the previous round. We identified seven critical management issues causing failures in clinical trials. Our findings indicate that chaotic and slow patient recruitment, lack of experience in choosing and monitoring partners, lack of feasibility of the study protocol, low quality of the registered data, too high incidence of serious adverse events and severe incidents, unmanageable level of portfolio complexity, and incorrect assessment of the market potential or returns cause the failure of clinical trials. The conceptual framework for failures proposed in this paper combines project and product failures while acknowledging relevant specificities in clinical trials. Clinical trial managers are also supported in their decision making in clinical trials with an identified list of critical management issues that require attention to reducing the chance of failure. This study provides a basis for future empirical testing, including measuring interdependencies among the critical management issues and their adequacy for predicting failure.     

The Aftermath of Anti-Dumping: Are Temporary Trade Barriers Really Temporary?

A consistent finding in the literature is that anti-dumping (AD) acts as a significant barrier to bilateral trade, in particular, during the time such measures are in force. Adding to a relatively scarce empirical literature, however, we identify adverse impacts of AD which survive well beyond its revocation. More specifically, while we cannot rule out a slight post-revocation recovery, we find empirical evidence that once affected bilateral trade does not fully recover on average following revocation. We use panel data at the Harmonized System four-digit (HS4) level of aggregation to produce these results and show that they are robust to the duration of AD cases, the time of their imposition and revocation, differentiation by economic sector and the nature of imposing countries. Several explanations for our observed empirical results seem plausible, and we provide a theoretical framework which suggests our results could be driven by market exit or underinvestment of targeted firms.

     

The purity of impure public goods

In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the links between the analysis of the voluntary provision of pure and impure public goods. In particular, it is shown that the impure public good model can be transformed into a pure public good one. This innovative method not only leads to new comparative statics results, but also provides new insights on the impure public good model, for example, on causes of the nonneutrality of income transfers with regard to Nash equilibria in the impure public good case.