Impact of individual characteristics and sociocultural environment on academic success

This article aims at ascertaining the factors of academic success and failure of 1,980 freshmen enrolled for the first time at the University of Brussels in 1987, by means of an ordered probit methodology. The results confirm the impact of variables characterizing social as well as cultural capital of the students. They highlight the significant impact of schooling record prior to attending a university and suggest the importance of variables such as sex and nationality. The results illustrate the respective roles of mothers in transmitting verbal skills and of siblings in conveying "inside information" on university life. Finally, they stress the essential role played by ability, which is proxied by a filtered measure of high school results.The authors would like to thank A. de Palma, F. Thys-Clément, and A. Micomibi for their comments, as well as R. Kurgan-Van Hetenryk.     

Utilitarianism and fairness in portfolio positioning

The paper introduces the theory of optimal positioning of financial products. It is illustrated in the context of long-term intertemporal portfolio allocation and can be applied for example to asset allocation funds. We embed this problem in location theory: the portfolio is optimized within the investors’risk aversion dimension. For the CRRA utility functions, we compute explicitly the distance functions. For the first (utilitarian criterion), the average utility of the investors is maximized. For the second one (fairness criterion), the choice of portfolio is optimized so that the average monetary loss due to the lack of customization is minimized. Given the distribution of investors’ risk aversion, we provide a solution method and an algorithm to optimally position standardized portfolio along one of these two criteria.     

Host Country Politics and Internationalization: A Meta-Analytic Review

We study how host country politics influence internationalization. Our meta-analysis clarifies which ideas receive support across the empirical literature and reveals new theoretical insights in three areas: the conceptualization of host country politics, the impact of host country politics on internationalization steps, and the moderating influence of home-country conditions on the previous relation. First, regarding the concept of host country politics, we propose analysing host country politics rather than political risk, and separating political decision-making, i.e., regulation creation, from political administration, i.e., regulation implementation. Second, on the effect of host country politics on internationalization steps, we suggest a dynamic management across the internationalization process, with managers shifting from avoiding harm through country selection to pre-empting harm through entry mode selection, to adapting to harm to ensure survival. Third, studying how home-country conditions modify the impact of host country politics on internationalization, we propose that multinationals build political and uncertainty management capabilities from their exposure to home country conditions that help them manage host country politics better.     

Innovation, competition, and growth: Schumpeterian ideas within a Hicksian framework

Schumpeter’s ideas, which should be the basis of any evolutionary approach to the relations between innovation, competition and growth, are revisited and interpreted within the analytical framework proposed by Hicks in Capital and Time. Two main results emerge. First, the introduction of any new technology may lead to higher unemployment and reduced productivity; only an active monetary (and banking policy) will allow the economy to capture productivity gains. Second, within an industry confronted by recurrent technological changes, certain monopoly practices may be needed for this industry to converge towards an efficient market structure determined by the content of technology and the profile of demand. These results suggest some reconsideration of the macroeconomic and industrial or competition policies designed, in Europe, to cope with both technical change and globalization in modern economies.     

Integration of third parties within existing dyads: An exploratory study of category management programs (CMPs)

In this study, we focus on the pursuit of cross-functional integration between suppliers and retailers along the different phases of a collaborative project. More specifically, we explore why and how, a supplier and retailer would want to shift the locus of integration from the dyadic to the network level by adding a third party to an ongoing relationship.A case study is developed to analyze the process of integration in the context of category management programs. The analysis reports on a program developed by a regional retailing chain based in the south of Italy, with the collaboration of a national coffee blends supplier and a third-party leader in the market analysis service business.The findings offer a novel view of third parties' role, which broadens the scope from a typical, initial support of negotiations to an evolving modality of intervention during the different phases of the collaborative project. More precisely, the third party enables the sequential and joint activation of alternative forms of interaction between the parties, which is pivotal for enacting the integration mechanism that is most suitable for each program phase.These findings offer a rich set of insights for the analysis of integration within distribution channel and supply chains, as well as for category management and, more generally, for knowledge management in marketing relationships.     

The role of temporal focus,dispositional employability,and training on the perceived internal career prospects of talents

Abstract

In this paper, we study employability in the group of talented employees. We explore how employees’ temporal focus affects their dispositional employability and how dispositional employability influences their perceived internal career prospects. We also examine the moderating role of training perceived as developmental on the relationship between dispositional employability and perceived internal career prospects. Upon examination of these relationships within an organization that has a closed talent management approach, we find support for the hypothesized mediating and moderating relationships. Present and future focus were positively related to talents’ dispositional employability, which in turn increased their perception of career prospects in the current company. The latter relationship was stronger among talents who perceived that they had received training for more important positions than those who did not. The results advanced current knowledge of antecedents and outcomes of employability in the specific group of talents and shed light on the organizational practices that may help with talent retention.     

Inequality and growth: the perverse relation between the productive and the non-productive assets of the economy

The explosion generated by the global financial crisis in 2008 and its transmission to the real economies have been interpreted as calling for new kinds of regulation of the banking and the financial systems that would have allowed re-establishing a virtuous relation between the real and the financial sectors of the economy. In this paper we maintain a different view, that the financial crisis and the ensuing real crisis have roots in the strong increase in income inequality that has been taking place in the Western world in the last thirty years or so. This has created an all around aggregate demand deficiency crisis that has strongly reduced prospects and opportunities for investments in productive capacities and shifted resources toward other uses, thus feeding a perverse relation between the productive and the non-productive assets of the economy. In this context the way out of the crisis is re-establishing the right distributive conditions, which cannot be obtained by a policy aimed at relieving the weight of private or public debts but calls for a redistribution through taxes on the incomes of non-productive sectors, a fine tuning that should prevent excessive taxations transforming positive into negative effects.     

A new international database on education quality: 1965–2010

The aim of this article is to propose a new database allowing a comparative evaluation of the relative performance of schooling systems around the world. We measure this performance through pupils’ achievement in standardized tests. We merge all existing regional and international student achievement tests by using a specific methodology. When compared with other existing databases, our approach innovates in several ways, especially by including regional student achievement tests and intertemporal comparable indicators. We provide a data set of indicators of quality of student achievement for 103 countries/areas in primary education and 111 countries/areas in secondary education between 1965 and 2010.