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By investigating the reactions of family businesses to COVID-19 pandemic this article aims to explaining how family firms are capable to preserve employment during hardship.

Stemming from resource-based-view, we theorise that familiness is not directly associated with new hiring but instead fully mediated by pivoting strategic decisions (the propensity to transform the business).

Our findings show that familiness triggers pivoting strategic decisions and consequently increases the likelihood of new hiring. Additionally, we found that the involvement of multiple generations strengthens this relationship.

Family firms must consolidate their family human and social resources (familiness) and assure the presence of multiple generations in the firm because they can leverage their entrepreneurial disposition and increase the need to preserve employment and new hires during crises.

The main contribution lies in the explanation of the mechanisms that family firms deploy to overcome a crisis and thus explains why some family firms are more resilient than others in relation to firm’s employment during hardship.

This study aims to examine the effect of political connection on operational efficiencies in the case of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and to discover the channel through which political ties affect a firm's decision-making process.

Following the scope of the study, panel fixed effect has been adopted to explore the impact of political connection on a firm's operational efficiencies. The data were collected every two years from 2005 to 2015 from SMEs in Vietnam under the collaboration of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), the Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs (ILSSA) and the Development Economics Research Group (DERG) of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

The results suggest that political connection has a significantly negative effect on both investment efficiencies and employee productivity. Significantly, the impact of political connections on employment decisions is more significant than it is on investment decisions. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that high-growth firms experience the interference of political connection in the decision-making process less often than their low-growth peers.

This paper provides some empirical evidence of the negative impact of political connections on a firm's operational efficiencies. It analyzes the channels through which political connection influences a firm's operational efficiencies. Providing empirical evidence demonstrates a dimension to capture the negative side of the political link to small and medium enterprises in developing economies.

This paper aims to review the literature extensively by analysing recent work and providing a guide for models, data sets and research findings.

This paper reviews the literature extensively by analysing recent work and providing a guide for models, data sets and research findings within the context of capital market imperfections. The authors further break down the literature into closer-in-nature categories for reader’s convenience and comprehension. Finally, the authors address gaps in the existing literature and propose government policies that can tone down the potential effect of credit rationing on employment.

This paper provides a map of the literature so as to help future researchers in the relevant literature and give a short insight of what has been explored so far.

This paper is original and is the result of a thorough review of an extensive literature.

The study aims to investigate the impact of industrial robot application on corporate labor cost stickiness and labor investment efficiency in China.

Using the textual analysis to construct firm-level industrial robot application indicators in China, we implement the methodology in Anderson et al. (2003) and Banker and Byzalov (2014) to estimate cost stickiness.

We argue that the industrial robot uses in China would increase firms’ labor adjustment costs by increasing the employment scale and upgrading the employment structure (i.e. by employing more high-skilled and high-educated labor). Consistent with our expectation through the channel of labor adjustment costs, the use of robotics increases firms’ labor cost stickiness. We further find that the positive impact is more significant among labor-intensive industries, and among state-owned enterprises with lower labor adjustment flexibility. We also find that industrial robot uses do not decrease the labor cost stickiness even when robots are more likely to substitute labor. Finally, we find that industrial robot uses significantly facilitate more efficient hiring practices by mitigating overinvestment in labor (i.e. over-hiring).

Against the backdrop of intelligent manufacturing worldwide, our study sheds new insight into the effects of new technologies on corporate labor cost behavior in developing countries. We contribute to scant studies examining how robotics, AI adoption or other automation technologies (e.g. specialized machinery, software, etc.) affect corporate cost behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of crossvergence from international human resource management (IHRM) as a conceptual lens for understanding and analyzing the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices in supplier firms in global production networks (GPNs). The crossvergence perspective can particularly contribute to understanding how the agency of suppliers is influenced by the interaction of global–local dynamics.

The paper illustrates how the formation of socially (ir)responsible employment practices can be understood as a process of crossvergence. Subsequently, it reviews and structures insights from GPN and IHRM literature to detail the process.

The paper underscores the complicated role of suppliers in ensuring decent work in GPNs. Suppliers face a multitude of global and local interacting, and partially conflicting, demands. They process these demands as active agents and need to develop suitable employment practices in response.

The paper supports the nascent discourse on supplier agency in forming socially responsible employment practices. It connects different streams of literature to illuminate the perspective of suppliers, introduces IHRM insights to the debate and offers conceptual guidance for analyzing interacting global and local pressures on suppliers.

The choice of Southern Europe is partly based on the observation that the sample includes a number of countries whose economies faced more severe difficulties than elsewhere in Europe. Economically they were less able to absorb the economic shock posed by COVID-19. It is also partly based on the characteristics of the pandemic. A number of countries in the sample were amongst the earliest in Europe to be hit by the pandemic and a several were harder hit in terms of both morbidity and mortality.

This study uses evidence from World Bank enterprise surveys of a sample of firms from six countries in Southern Europe. It examines the early evidence of the effects of COVID-19 on labour markets. The economic consequences potentially cover a wide range of issues. The focus of this study is on firm level evidence of the effect on labour. The evidence and the analysis are provided at a time when the pandemic is still in progress. The authors use both traditional regression analysis and IPWRA to assess the joint effect of loans versus government support on, firstly, the change in sales revenues and, secondly, the number of weeks that the firm would expect to survive with no sales revenues.

The study suggests that, despite efforts to support firms and hoard labour, there is a prospect of a significant number of firm closures with a consequent loss of employment. Temporary firm closures also represent a substantial loss of labour weeks. These are partly related to a significant number of workers subject to furloughs. The empirical findings suggest that COVID-19 cases and deaths have directly affected firm sales but government containment measures, particularly closures, have more strongly affected firms. Losses of sales were unsurprisingly related to losses of employment. Remote working has contributed to sustaining employment but online business has not affected most sectors.

The future progress of COVID-19 and government containment measures is uncertain, and the full economic consequences will probably continue to emerge after the end of the pandemic. The full extent of the impact on labour will probably not be the first of these. There are obvious advantages in seeking to learn lessons from the early stages of the pandemic but there are also obvious constraints. The full economic consequences will take longer to emerge than the pandemic itself and the full consequences for employment will take longer to be evident than many other economic effects.

Both temporary closures and furloughs impose costs that will be borne by firms, workers and government. The effects of COVID-19 on firms differ across sectors. Adverse effects tend to be higher in hospitality, non-essential retail and travel. That many firms lack the capacity to survive further temporary closures of a similar duration to those in the earlier stages emphasises that the support provided in the near future is of critical importance to control employment losses through permanent firm closures. A long-term perspective suggests neither permanent closure nor laying off workers may be the best response to a temporary crisis in demand. A stakeholder model of the firm would often suggest that it is not an optimal for the point of view of workers or the wider economy either. Both imply a preference for labour hoarding.

The most affected are sectors with a high proportion of female workers and, in consequence, most of the countries in the sample exhibit an early decline of the already lower than average share of women in employment.

The data used have been recently released and this is the first analysis using the data to look at the consequence on firms employment decisions during the Pandemic. The case of Southern Europe is much understudied, though one of the most dramatic as to the consequences of the pandemic. From a methodological point of view, the authors use not only traditional regression analysis, but also the matching approach to identify the effect of different policy options on labour demand by firms.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

This paper develops an integrative framework explaining multinational firms’ managerial staffing decisions in initial foreign-entry situations from resource-based theory, agency theory, and transaction-costs theory, and it offers a set of theoretically grounded, testable propositions concerning these staffing decisions. In particular, we maintain that managerial staffing decisions are influenced by: (1) the value that managerial expatriates and local hires could potentially add to the firm; and (2) the relative contractual risks associated with the use of managerial expatriates and local managers.

This paper indicates that the use of managerial expatriates can improve contractual efficiencies in at least four ways. First, the use of expatriates helps align the economic incentives between the headquarters and the foreign subsidiaries. Second, the headquarters knows better the characteristics of expatriates relative to local hires. The use of expatriates reduces the uncertainty of the headquarters in recruiting managers and mitigates the incomplete contracting problem. Third, expatriates are better equipped with firm-specific capabilities than local hires, reducing contractual (small-numbers) problems. Fourth, expatriates have committed greater sunk cost investments in the multinational firm than local hires. These investments support their cooperative relationships with the firm and mitigate potential bargaining problems in employment contracting. However, although managerial expatriates can potentially improve contractual efficiency and may relieve a firm’s concern over its limited control on managers, expatriates may not have adequate abilities in managing local idiosyncrasy.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of more stringent Employment Protection Legislation on employment outflows and wages of women compared to those of men.

The authors exploit the Italian labor market reform of 1990 that raised firing costs for firms with less than 15 employees leaving unchanged existing rules for larger firms. The authors setup a natural experiment using this firm size threshold to examine if an increase of severance pay in small relative to large firms has a different impact on labor flows and earnings by gender. Using administrative linked employer–employee data, the authors find a significant reduced flow out of employment of women with respect to men in small relative to large firms after 1990.

The results also indicate a reduction of the gender wage gap after the reform of about 1.5 percent. These findings are statistically significant for women in fertility age and disappear if we consider older women.

The findings are consistent with the idea that employment protection may help in reducing gender disparities.

Prior work has shown that the board of directors can alleviate market imperfections that lead to capital investment inefficiency. The authors extend previous work by exploring how board characteristics influence the efficiency of human capital investment, a critical production factor that has remained insufficiently examined. Specifically, this study aims to investigate how board activity, size, the presence of a separate chairman, female directors and board independence affect firm labour investment efficiency in the European context.

The sample contains 4,331 firm-year observations traded on the STOXX® Europe 600 index from 2009 through 2022. This paper applies a lagged ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to test the proposed hypotheses. It also uses a dynamic panel generalised method of moments (GMM) regression to tackle potential endogeneity concerns.

The results show that board gender diversity and the level of independent directors are positively linked to labour investment efficiency, whereas board size and meeting frequency are negatively related to labour investment efficiency. Meanwhile, the presence of a separate chairman on the board does not appear to be significantly associated with labour investment efficiency. In additional subgroup analyses, the authors find that board gender diversity mitigates managers’ inclinations towards both overinvestment and underinvestment in labour. The authors also find that the level of independent directors helps greatly in reducing the underinvestment in labour, while it fails to attenuate the overinvestment in labour. Moreover, the authors find board size to be significantly associated with the tendency to make suboptimal labour decisions, manifesting as both overinvestment and underinvestment in labour. Finally, the results show that board meetings are significantly associated with overinvestment problems, while underinvestment problems seem to be unrelated to meeting frequency.

The empirical results have implications for policymakers and market participants in Europe. Firstly, firms may improve the efficiency of their labour investments by increasing directors’ independence and adding more female voices to corporate boards. Secondly, the evidence shows that some board attributes, such as board activity and size, do not necessarily have a beneficial impact on corporate decisions, particularly labour investment decisions. Finally, market participants are likely to benefit from this paper by understanding the role of board attributes in promoting the efficient allocation of firm resources.

This paper makes two significant contributions. Firstly, it extends the literature on the role of boards of directors in shaping corporate decision-making processes, particularly concerning human capital investment decisions within European firms. By doing so, the authors provide new evidence confirming that certain board attributes, such as board size, director independence and board gender diversity, are important for optimising firms’ resource allocation. Secondly, although numerous studies investigate boards’ role in capital investment decisions, relatively few empirical studies exist on the role of boards in labour investment decisions. This paper, therefore, tries to tackle this void in the literature by investigating firms’ decision-making concerning labour investments.