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The main goal of this paper is to study empirically the importance of experience of top managers and firms for export performance, having controlled for a number of firm characteristics.

The study is based on the probit model applied to the 2020 edition of the BEEPS firm level survey. The authors analyze firms in 15 EU member and 15 non-member countries.

The results indicate that firm experience can increase the probability of direct exporting, but is not significant for indirect exporting. The results also support the importance of interaction between experience of managers and experience of firms. The authors conclude that only the combination of managerial and firm experience can have a positive and significant effect for direct exporting. This relationship is more pronounced in the case of EU members.

The main limitations of our approach are related to data constraints. These include availability of only cross-sectional data and the limited number of individual characteristics of managers.

The importance of experience for exporting suggests that firms can break into foreign markets by hiring more experienced managers.

Post-communist countries can improve their export performance by hiring more experienced managers that would stimulate direct exports. Moreover, they can also export indirectly through intermediaries.

In contrast to previous studies, the authors used a model proposed by Jørgensen and Schroder (2008) in which the authors endogenized the costs of exporting by linking them to firm and managerial experience. Then, the authors validated empirically the importance of experience for firm export performance, having controlled for the set of individual firm characteristics.

On the basis of labor economics theories, this study examines how adjustment in human capital accounts for labor cost stickiness.

This study makes use of employee education level as a measure of the quality of human capital and relies on data from Chinese public firms to conduct the empirical test. This study focuses on two important components of labor cost changes: one corresponding to the adjustment in the number of employees (capacity adjustment) and another corresponding to the adjustment in the mix of employee education levels (quality adjustment).

This study reveals that labor cost changes driven by the adjustment of employee education level are sticky. This stickiness cannot be explained by the standard adjustment cost theory. This further shows that firms that actively adjust their employee quality during downturns experience improved future performance. The findings are robust to alternative measures and specifications.

This study provides new evidence for and insights into the cost behavior literature. Previous studies treat input resources in a homogenous way and focus on the effect of capacity adjustment. This study considers the heterogeneity of resources and examines three dimensions of salary cost adjustment: capacity, structure, and unit cost. In line with the economic theory of sticky costs proposed by Banker et al. (2013a), the study’s evidence sheds light on the additional underlying economic mechanisms driving cost stickiness behavior. Specifically, managers asymmetrically adjust both employee structure and average salaries, in addition to employee number. This study also adds to the existing knowledge of the consequences of managers' actions regarding cost behavior.

This study aims at introducing a method based on the failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) to aid in selecting the most suitable formwork system with the minimum overall cost.

The research includes a review of the literature around formwork selection and analysis of data collected from the building construction industry to understand material failure modes. An FMECA-based model that estimates the total cost of a formwork system is developed by conducting a two-phased semi-structured interview and regression and statistical analyses. The model comprises material, manpower and failure mode costs. A case study of fifteen buildings is analysed using data collected from construction projects in the UAE to validate the model.

Results obtained indicate an average accuracy of 89% in predicting the total formwork cost using the proposed method. Moreover, results show that the costs incurred by failure modes account for 11% of the total cost on average.

The analysis is limited to direct costs and costs associated with risks; other costs and risk factors are excluded. The proposed framework serves as a guide to construction project managers to enhance decision-making by addressing the indirect cost of failure modes.

The research proposes a novel formwork system selection method that improves upon the subjective conventional selection process by incorporating the risks and uncertainties associated with the failure modes of formwork systems into the decision-making process.

This study aims to explore the impact of leader emotional labor on employee voice. According to the emotion as information theory and the voice as a deliberate decision-making process framework, this study develops and tests a model that examines the mediating effects of psychological safety and perceived voice efficacy in this relationship.

This study conducted two studies to test hypotheses. Study 1 used a quantitative research methodology using a two-wave survey of 435 employees and 58 leaders in China. The research model was analyzed using multilevel path analyses. Study 2 collected 301 full-time employees from Prolific Platform. Hypotheses were tested using Mplus.

The results in Study 1 reveal that leader deep acting has a positive indirect relationship with employee voice via psychological safety. Conversely, leader surface acting has a negative indirect effect on employee voice through psychological safety. The results in Study 2 supported the hypotheses.

This study contributes to the voice as a deliberative process literature by introducing leader emotional labor as an antecedent of voice behavior. Additionally, this study indicates that perceived psychological safety and perceived voice efficacy are two important mediating mechanisms for implementing voice behavior.

This paper aims to revisit the relationship between sales growth and profitability by exploring the direct and indirect effects of cost stickiness in the growth process. Cost stickiness refers to asymmetric variations of costs associated with increases and decreases in sales. Cost stickiness is analyzed as a strategic liability that negatively affects profitability because it contributes to organizational rigidity that causes opportunity costs.

The empirical design is based on a large sample of 65,599 French firms drawn from the Amadeus database and it covers the period 2010 to 2019. The authors take advantage of the presentation of expenses made by nature in Amadeus to calculate cost stickiness in a more direct way than what is commonly done in the literature. The authors use various regression models to test the hypotheses.

For firms that experience rapid growth in sales, cost stickiness has a positive moderating effect on the relation between sales growth and profitability because of a higher asset turnover efficiency. However, for firms that experience slow growth, no growth or a decrease in sales, cost stickiness plays a negative moderating effect on the relation between sales and profitability.

This work contributes to the discussion about the conditions under which high growth is associated with greater profitability and conceptualizes cost stickiness as a strategic liability. The empirical context, privately held firms, has been overlooked by previous research.

Corporate site visits increase labor investment efficiency.

Our empirical model for the baseline analysis follows those of Jung et al. (2014) and Ghaly et al. (2020).

We show that corporate site visits are associated with significantly higher labor investment efficiency; more specifically, site visits reduce both over-hiring and under-hiring of employees. The effect of site visits on labor investment efficiency is more pronounced for firms with higher labor adjustment costs, greater financial constraints, weaker corporate governance and lower financial reporting quality. We also find that site visits mitigate labor cost stickiness.

First, while the literature has suggested how the presence of institutional investors and analysts may affect labor investment decisions, we focus on institutional investors and analysts’ activities and interactions with firm executives. We provide direct evidence that institutional investors and analysts may use corporate site visits to improve labor investment efficiency. Second, our study adds to a line of recent studies on how corporate site visits reduce information asymmetry and agency conflicts. We show that corporate site visits allow institutional investors and analysts to influence labor investment efficiency. We also provide new evidence that corporate site visits reduce labor cost stickiness.

Forced labour is one of the most exploitative practices in supply chains, generating serious human right abuses. The authors seek to understand how relationships for reducing forced labour are influenced by institutional logics. The emerging supply chain efforts of social enterprises offer particularly intriguing approaches, as their social mission can spur creative new approaches and reshape widely adopted management practices.

The authors study supplier relationships in the smartphone industry and compare the evolving practices of two cases: the first, a growing novel social enterprise; and the second, a high-profile commercial firm that has adopted a progressive role in combating forced labour.

The underlying institutional logic influenced each firm's willingness to act beyond its direct suppliers and to collaborate in flexible ways that create systematic change. Moreover, while both focal firms had clear, well-documented procedures related to forced labour, the integration, rather than decoupling, of forced labour and general supply chain policies provided a more effective way to reduce the risks of forced labour in social enterprises.

As authors’ comparative case study approach may lack generalizability, future research is needed to broadly test their propositions.

The paper identifies preconditions in terms of institutional logics to successfully reduce the risk of forced labour in supply chains.

This paper discusses how social enterprises can provide a learning laboratory that enables commercial firms to identify options for supplier relationship improvement.

Africa's business environment (BE) is characteristically unfriendly and poses severe development challenges. This study evaluates the impact of business climate on productivity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Macroeconomic data for 51 sub-Saharan African economies from 1990 to 2018 are employed for the analysis. The seemingly unrelated regression model is used to address inter-sectorial linkages.

The study uncovers several findings. First, a high start-up cost substantially leads to productivity losses by limiting the funds available for investment in productivity-enhancing labour and technology and limiting the number of businesses that see the light of day. The productivity impacts of start-up costs are most enormous for industry, followed by services and agriculture. Second, economies with favourable financing environments tend to be more productive economy wide and sector wise. Third, high taxes and tax inefficiency lower productivity by reducing the resource envelope of firms, thus lowering investment amounts. Fourth, poor business infrastructure inflicts the most damage on productivity. Lastly, business administration and macroeconomic environments impact sectoral and economy-wide productivity.

SSA economies must strive to lower the cost of starting a business as high start-up costs injure productivity. One way of reducing start-up costs is to create a one-stop shop for registering and formalising a business. Another way is to automate business registration and administrative processes to reduce red tape and corruption.

The authors extend the body of knowledge by analysing sectoral and economy-wide productivity effects of various business climate indicators while accounting for inter-sectoral linkages, cross-sectional dependence and endogeneity.

This study aims to analyze the factors driving Syrian refugees into the informal labor market in Türkiye despite the existence of regulations and programs to facilitate their integration into the formal labor market.

This study presents results from a literature review of secondary sources and primary data collection through semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and Syrian refugees.

The study shows that the implementation of policies and programs to boost formal employment among refugees has yielded limited results. Many refugees continue to operate within the informal economy. This informality is due to various socio-economic challenges, including anti-refugee sentiments, geographical restrictions and economic crises. The 2023 twin earthquakes have further exacerbated the vulnerable situation of refugees, intensifying the difficulty of achieving self-reliance.

The study’s drawbacks include a small sample size. This implies that the sample is not representative; therefore, results may lack generalizability.

The study’s findings could stimulate greater engagement in public policy, facilitate the management of public perceptions regarding refugees and provide support to the private sector, all to enhance the integration of Syrian refugees into the formal labor market.

This study addresses crucial areas previously unexplored, including the impact of economic and natural disaster crises on the labor market integration of refugees. To the best of the author’s knowledge, by investigating these factors for the first time, this study offers novel insights into their influence on refugees’ labor market integration.

This research studies the influence and mechanism of rearing cost and endowment insurance on family fertility desire from the micro perspective.

Through the construction of overlapping generations (OLG) model and on the basis of this research purpose, the research hypothesis proposed by the theoretical model is tested by using the data of China household tracking survey (CFPS).

(1) Endowment insurance has an inhibitory effect on family fertility desire. The marginal effects of participating in old-age insurance on total fertility desire and boy fertility desire are – 3.2% and – 3.6% respectively. (2) The cost of rearing has a significant negative impact on family fertility desire. (3) There is regional heterogeneity in the impact of endowment insurance and rearing cost on fertility desire. (4) There is no significant difference in the impact of endowment insurance on fertility desire between urban and rural areas.

This research tries to fill the gap existing in the international literature by analyzing the micro mechanism of the influence degree of upbringing cost on fertility desire by introducing the rearing cost and fertility rate into the OLG, providing a micro basis for relevant quantitative calculation.