Language ability and entrepreneurship education: Necessary skills for Europe’s start-ups?

Language ability and entrepreneurial education are seen as essential resources for start-ups operating in intensified landscapes of internationalisation and globalisation. Deemed as the necessary skills for corporate effectiveness vis-à-vis rivals, this paper responds to calls for increased understandings of cultural components as vital to entrepreneurship and the product of institutional forces. Thus, it explores (a) the impact language ability has on start-up expansion; (b) the perceptions of international relations as based on language ability as a tool for cross-cultural communication; and (c) the role of educational context from the entrepreneurs’ perspective. Based on interviews from European online start-ups across three discrete contexts—Finland, Portugal and Sweden—it concludes that contextual trends regarding language and education are founded upon the cultural-cognitive and normative pillars of institutionalisation. Further, by combining actor-context perspectives, it poses that language ability and education are resources borne from the domestic environment which positively moderate the start-up’s international success. Nevertheless, the notion of learnt entrepreneurship remains contested. Taken together, this study contributes by offering deeper insight into the role of context on entrepreneurial tendencies by combining resource and institutional perspectives.     

Oil price shocks and volatility spillovers in the Nigerian sovereign bond market

This paper investigates volatility spillover in the Nigerian sovereign bond market arising from oil price shocks, using Vector Autoregressive Moving Average ‐ Asymmetric Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (VARMA‐AGARCH) model. The paper covers the period March 22, 2011 to April 14, 2016 and makes use of the daily data of the Nigerian Sovereign Bond, Brent oil and West Texas Intermediate (WTI), respectively. We endogenously and sequentially detect structural break points using the test of Bai and Perron (2003) framework. In order to accurately estimate the model, we modify it by incorporating the break points into the VARMA‐AGARCH model, a process which if ignored would lead to model misspecification. The results obtained demonstrate a significant cross‐market volatility transmission between oil and sovereign bond market with ample sensitivity to structural breaks. The study also computes optimum weight portfolio and hedge ratio both with and without structural breaks and results equally indicate sensitivity to structural breaks.     

Ordering,revenue and anchoring in art auctions

We estimate the effect of ordering by value on revenues in sequential art auctions held by Sotheby's and Christie's. We exploit a pre determined rotation of which of these two houses holds their auction first during auction week in New York City. When the house that goes first has relatively expensive paintings compared to the other house, we find that the sale premium for the week is around 21% higher relative to the mean sale premium, and the fraction of paintings sold during the week is around 11% higher. We provide evidence that this is due to an anchoring effect.     

Does it matter where you come from? Vertical spillovers from foreign direct investment and the origin of investors

This study uses firm-level panel data from Romania to examine whether the origin of foreign investors affects the degree of vertical spillovers from FDI. Investors' origin may matter for spillovers to domestic producers supplying intermediate inputs in two ways. First, the share of intermediates sourced locally by multinationals is likely to increase with the distance between the host and the source economy. Second, the sourcing pattern is likely to be affected by preferential trade agreements. In this case, the Association Agreement between Romania and the European Union (EU) implies that inputs sourced from the EU are subject to a lower tariff than inputs sourced from the United States or Canada. This means that on average American investors may have a greater incentive than EU investors to source from Romania and hence present a greater potential for vertical spillovers. The empirical analysis produces evidence consistent with this hypothesis. The results show a positive association between the presence of American companies in downstream sectors and the productivity of Romanian firms in the supplying industries and no significant relationship in the case of European affiliates. The results also indicate that Romanian firms in sectors whose products are expensive to transport benefit more from downstream presence of American affiliates than Romanian firms in sectors with low shipping costs. No such pattern is found for European affiliates.     

An approach to evaluate the acute impacts from simulated accidental releases of chlorine and ammonia

The manner in which specific chemicals are used is studied in order to identify plausible release scenarios and the probability of their occurrence.     

The South African labour market, 1995–2015

This study investigates the changes in the South African labour market in the post-apartheid period. While unemployment increased over the 1995–2015 period, employment also increased. Nonetheless, the extent of employment increase is not rapid enough to absorb all net entrants into the labour force, resulting in increasing unemployment, or an employment absorption rate of 65.3%. Unemployment is concentrated in specific demographically and geographically defined groups, most notably Africans, the lowly educated and those aged below 30 years, residing in rural areas in Gauteng. Finally, four worrying findings are observed: youth jobseekers aged below 30 years struggle to find their first job; chronic unemployment is more serious for the relatively older jobseekers (aged 45 years or above) with past work experience; employees working for small, medium and micro enterprises still stagnate at approximately 3.5 million; and jobseekers from the older age cohorts are less likely to actively seek work by enquiring at workplaces and answering job advertisements.     

A preliminary comparative analysis of 3D body scanner,manually taken girth body measurements and size chart measurements

In an attempt to provide a technological solution to the influx of cheap imports in South Africa and bridging the technology divide between Africa and the rest of the world, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research procured a three‐dimensional body scanner from the Textile and Clothing Technology Corporation, in the US. The pilot study was aimed at introducing the technology to the South African consumers, and to compare the scanned data with the manually taken measurements. A convenience sample of 56 females in South Africa was interviewed using a structured questionnaire. Interviews were used to capture views on acceptance of the technology, prior to being scanned. Scanning garments made from a stretchy fabric were designed and sewn in four sizes of small, medium, large and extra large. A covariance, one sample t‐test and paired t‐ tests were used for data analyses. Almost all respondents felt comfortable with the designed scanning garments and the scanning process. The scanner measurements were generally more numerical in value than the manual measurements for a body part as expected, although the disparity was on the higher side than expected. The discernible difference between means of scanned data and standard values in the currently used sizing charts highlighted the long overdue need to update the sizing charts using a national anthropometric database generated locally.     

Spirituality In (and Out) of the Classroom: A Pragmatic Approach

This paper is divided into two sections. In the first section, I discuss “what is spirituality?” and in the section that follows, I examine some of the implications of my definition to the teaching of spirituality in an undergraduate business ethics course. For the purposes of this paper, spirituality is defined as the planned experience (the inner feeling) of blending integrity and integration through 1 – acceptance (of the past), 2 – commitment (to the future), 3 – reasonable choice, 4 – mindful action, and 5 –continuous dialog (both internal and external). This definition is a work-in-progress and offered mainly as a point of departure rather than a final destination.