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Service quality has become an important area for competition among Chinese carriers. This paper focuses on studying the relationship between customer satisfaction measured by customer complaints and their expectation of the on-time performance of Chinese carriers and how the customer complaints affect the financial performance of carriers. By using a quarterly balanced panel data set covering six large listed carriers, the empirical results show that an increase in actual on-time performance reduces customer complaints. However, an increase in expected on-time performance significantly raises customer complaints. An increase in customer complaint reduces the yield measured as revenue per revenue ton kilometer (RTK) of carriers.

Using a population study, we provide evidence on the important but understudied issue of company survival under employee ownership, as well as on the performance effects of employee ownership and the issue of whether employee ownership substitutes for other pension benefits.

Company survival and pension benefits are assessed using a unique dataset from Dun & Bradstreet of privately held Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) companies over the 1988–1999 period, matched to non-ESOP companies in the same industry. Performance is assessed using pre/post-comparisons of ESOP adopters in the 1988–1994 period.

Privately held ESOP companies in 1988 were only half as likely as non-ESOP firms to go bankrupt or close over the 1988–1999 period, and only three-fifths as likely to disappear for any reason. The ESOP companies had significantly higher post-adoption annual employment and sales growth, along with higher sales per employee. ESOP companies are four times more likely than their non-ESOP pairs to have defined benefit pension plan and other forms of defined contribution plans.

The greater survival was not explained by higher productivity, or by greater compensation flexibility. The higher survival may instead be tied to complementary policies adopted along with ESOPs to create a more committed and engaged workforce that contributes ideas to enhance survival and is more flexible when economic difficulties arise. The pension results are consistent with other studies on compensation under employee ownership, suggesting that employee ownership is generally used as a form of efficiency wage to provide above-market compensation.

Higher survival among ESOP companies could result in lower job loss and unemployment, potentially providing a public policy rationale for support of employee ownership.

The chapter provides the first examination of company survival in privately held ESOP companies, and one of the few examinations of how ESOPs relate to other pension benefits.

We assess the impact of labor litigations on the ex post performance of firms. Using a sample of 44 French labor litigation cases, our empirical results confirm that the compensation amount requested by an employee has a significant and negative influence on the firm financial performance. Although that effect fades over time, it still remains significant four years after the employee has initiated the legal procedure. In addition, firms that have opted for a trial rather than a conciliation procedure improved their financial performance only in the first two years following the triggering of the litigation. That effect can be mainly explained by the long delays in the judgment of French labor courts. Our results contribute to the debate on the labor litigation impacts by assessing the financial opportunity of enacting pro-worker labor legislation dealing with employment redundancies.

Using an extensive data set on Finnish workers during the years 1990–2002, we analyze the relation between dispersion of wages within plants and labor productivity. We find a positive and significant relation between dispersion of wages within plant and average sales per worker. This relation is quadratic when dispersion is conditioned on workers’ observable characteristics. We also find positive and significant relation between unconditional dispersion of wages within plant and value added per hours worked, while we find a non-significant relation between conditional wage dispersion and valued added per hours worked. Results indicate that the incentive effect of wage dispersion dominates fairness or sabotage considerations.

In this chapter, we document the growing importance of FDI from BRIC countries in relation to FDI from both developed and developing countries and investigate the types of firms that are responsible for BRIC FDI.

We follow a two-step empirical approach. First, we provide macro evidence on FDI from BRIC countries. We use UNCTAD data to highlight the patterns of FDI flows and stocks. Second, we provide firm-level evidence on FDI. Using ORBIS data, we elaborate a rich taxonomy of FDI that accounts for the decision to invest abroad and for the location, ownership, and number of foreign subsidiaries. Thus, we characterize BRIC multinationals’ involvement in FDI and examine the relationship between FDI and performance at the firm level.

We unveil new facts about BRIC multinationals. BRIC multinationals are in the minority in their home countries, but they outperform domestic enterprises. Within the group of BRIC investors, those firms that invest in developing countries, that operate in joint ventures, or that have more than five foreign subsidiaries are in the minority, but they outperform those firms that select other FDI strategies.

Our estimates document a positive and robust correlation between FDI and performance; however, the cross-sectional nature of our data does not permit a proper causality analysis.

Our work contributes to the International Economics literature on internationalization and firm performance as well as to the International Business literature on FDI from emerging economies. With respect to the former, we innovate by studying the relation between FDI strategies and firm performance. In relation to the latter, we innovate by introducing firm-level data and a cross-country approach that lets us illustrate the roles and features of FDI from BRIC countries.

This chapter provides a survey of alternative methodologies for measuring and comparing productivity and efficiency of airlines, and reviews representative empirical studies. The survey shows the apparent shift from index procedures and traditional OLS estimation of production and cost functions to stochastic frontier methods and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods over the past three decades. Most of the airline productivity and efficiency studies over the last decade adopt some variant of DEA methods. Researchers in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly interested in the effects of deregulation and liberalization on airline productivity and efficiency as well as the effects of ownership and governance structure. Since the 2000s, however, studies tend to focus on how business models and management strategies affect the performance of airlines. Environmental efficiency now becomes an important area of airline productivity and efficiency studies, focusing on CO₂ emission as a negative or undesirable output. Despite the fact that quality of service is an important aspect of airline business, limited attempts have been made to incorporate quality of service in productivity and efficiency analysis.

This paper investigates the impact of the storms Katrina and Rita on firm survival in the Orleans Parish. In particular, a Bayesian spatial probit model is used to assess the impact of a number of firm characteristics on firm survival. The results reveal that larger firms and those with less flooding are more likely to survive. Larger chain stores were less likely to return to the city than sole proprietorships. Spatial results also reveal a very strong spatial component to firm survival just after the storm which diminishes as time passed.

Using data from a retail chain of 193 bakery shops that underwent downsizing, we study the effects of two types of downsizing announcements – closure or sale to another operator – on sales in the affected shops, and how these effects are moderated by job security perceptions. On average, sales in the affected shops go down by 26% after a closure announcement and by 7% after a sale announcement. Sales decline more sharply in shops where employees had higher job security perceptions before the announcement. Our findings are consistent with psychological contract theory: a breach of an implicit contract promising job security in exchange for work effort results in a reciprocal effort withdrawal. We rule out several alternative explanations to our findings.

This research aimed to determine the mediating effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and leadership styles. Two hundred hardware and footwear entrepreneurs from the Las Malvinas Commercial Emporium, Lima, Peru were surveyed. The partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) multivariate statistical technique was applied for data analysis. It was found that there is a complementary mediating effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy in the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and leadership styles. On the other hand, it was concluded that entrepreneurial passion has a positive influence on entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Likewise, there is a positive influence of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on leadership styles, and there is a positive influence of entrepreneurial passion for leadership styles. This research contributed theoretically to the academic literature and provided empirical evidence of the relationship of the proposed variables; it proved a new predictive and explanatory structural model that can now be used in future research worldwide and generated a model of the studied variables that are useful for both academia and the business world.

This is the first study to investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on corporate financial performance (CFP) in Mongolian banks. We hand-collect data to construct CSR disclosure index from 65 annual reports of 12 banks in Mongolia from 2003 to 2012. The results indicate that banks with larger size or Chief Executive Officer duality exhibit higher CSR performance. Moreover, banks with higher CSR performance tend to have higher net interest margin and lower non-performing loan. Furthermore, the CSR–CFP relationship varies before and after the financial crisis. The findings provide meaningful insight to the foreign investors regarding the effect of CSR on the profitability and credit risk in Mongolian banking sector.