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This chapter investigates the financial performance and technical efficiency of the 26 listed firms in the services sector of the Philippine Stock Exchange over the period 1998–2007, using the DuPont system and the super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (SE-DEA). Empirical findings revealed a negative return on equity for the sector and the presence of outliers in the sample. We also verified a robust significant association between the financial and technical performances of the sector.

The chapter offers new significant contributions to knowledge in terms of the multidimensional performance evaluation and the efficiency of the stock market, especially in developing economies, which has not been a well-researched area. Managerial implications are also identified for the improvement of the firms’ management and the usefulness of the SE-DEA model in performance management.

The United States has been at the forefront of a global shift away from direct state funding of higher education and toward student loans, and student debt has become an issue of growing social concern. Why did student loans expand so much in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s? And how does organization theory suggest their expansion, and the growth of federal student aid more generally, might affect higher education as a field? In the 1960s and 1970s, policy actors worked to solve what was then a central problem around student loans: banks’ disinterest in lending to students. They did this so well that by 1990, a new field of financial aid policy emerged, in which all major actors had an interest in expanding loans. This, along with a favorable environment outside the field, set the stage for two decades of rapid growth. Organization theory suggests two likely consequences of this expansion of federal student loans and financial aid more generally. First, while (public) colleges have become less dependent on state governments and more dependent on tuition, the expansion of aid means colleges are simultaneously becoming more dependent on the federal government, which should make them more susceptible to federal demands for accountability. Second, the expansion of federal student aid should encourage the spread of forms and practices grounded in a logic focused on students’ financial value to the organization, such as publicly traded for-profit colleges and enrollment management practices.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) calls for far-reaching changes to the way economic activity will occur in EU digital markets. Before its remedies are imposed, it is critical to assess their impacts on individual markets, the digital sector, and the overall European economy. The European Commission (EC) released an Impact Assessment in support of the DMA that purports to evaluate it using cost/benefit analysis.

An economic evaluation of the DMA should consider its full impacts on dynamic competition. The Impact Assessment neither assesses the DMA's impact on dynamic competition in the digital economy nor evaluates the impacts of specific DMA prohibitions and obligations. Instead, it considers benefits in general and largely ignores costs. We study its benefit assessments and find they are based on highly inappropriate methodologies and assumptions. A cost/benefit study using inappropriate methodologies and largely ignoring costs cannot provide a sound policy assessment.

Instead of promoting dynamic competition between platforms, the DMA will likely reinforce existing market structures, ossify market boundaries, and stunt European innovation. The DMA is likely to chill R&D by encouraging free riding on the investments of others, which discourages making those investments. Avoiding harm to innovation is critical because innovation delivers large, positive spillover benefits, driving increases in productivity, employment, wages, and prosperity.

The DMA prioritizes static over dynamic competition, with the potential to harm the European economy. Given this, the Impact Assessment does not demonstrate that the DMA will be beneficial overall, and its implementation must be carefully tailored to alleviate or lessen its potential to harm Europe’s economic performance.

Securing the managerial and executive talent that organizations need is a hot topic in the contemporary business community, but it is also an old challenge with a long and varied history. Contemporary observers are typically surprised to discover first how much the practices from the 1920s look like those that are dominate in the more innovative industries a century later and second how much more sophisticated the plans and systems for managing talent in corporations were in the 1950s than now. The research community interested in human resources often sees the 1950s practices as something like a dominant paradigm; they have in fact already been in sharp decline for almost a generation. For researchers and instructors interested in the practices of “talent management” at the managerial and executive level considered broadly – including subtopics like management development, career planning, succession planning, etc. – it is important to see the roots of contemporary practices and how they have and are changing over time as doing so reinforces the basic notion from contingency theory: practices respond to changes in context. The important aspects of context that drove changes in the design and execution of managerial careers over time has to do with the structure of corporations and how they responded to their competitive environment. The fact that changing business needs led to different corporate structures, business models, and, in turn, different approaches for managing the leaders of corporations also gives us perhaps the best guidance as to where practices in these areas will be in the future. For researchers, starting with this historical perspective is also the best way to develop a macro perspective on the more micro practices and outcomes associated with these talent management questions.

The creation of sustainable value has become a key driver of competitive advantage for many companies. The field of organization development and change can assist these companies because it provides the theories, research, models, and tools they need to embed sustainability into their core business practices. In this chapter, we provide a brief history of sustainable value, demonstrate how and why it is an important source of competitive advantage, and describe five core capabilities companies need to embed sustainability throughout their organizations. We use case examples to illustrate these ideas and conclude with implications for research and practice.