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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.

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.

This study aims to focus on the supply chain (SC) cost drivers of healthcare industries in the USA, as SC costs have increased 40% over the last decade. The second-most significant expense, the SC, accounts for 38% of total expenses in a typical hospital, while most other industries can operate within 10% of their operating cost. This makes healthcare centers supply-chain-sensitive organizations with limited facilities for high-quality healthcare services. As the cost drivers of healthcare SC are almost unknown to managers, their jobs become more complex.

Guided by pragmatism and positivism paradigms, a cross-sectional study has been designed using quantitative and deductive approaches. Both primary and secondary data were used. Primary data were collected from health centers across the country, and secondary data were from healthcare-related databases. This study examined the attributes that explain the most significant variation in each contributing factor. With multiple regression analysis for predicting cost and Student's t-tests for the significance of contributing factors, the authors of this study examined different theories, including the market-based view and five-forces, network and transaction cost analysis.

This study revealed that supply, materials and services represent the most significant expenses in primary care. Supply-chain cost breakdown results in four critical factors: facility, inventory, information and transportation.

This study examined the data from primary and secondary care institutions. Tertiary and quaternary care systems were not included. Although tertiary and quaternary care systems represent a small portion of the healthcare system, future research should address the supply chain costs of highly specialized organizations.

This study suggests methods that can help to improve supply chain operations in healthcare organizations worldwide.

This study presents an empirically proven methodology for testing the statistical significance of the primary factors contributing to healthcare supply chain costs. The results of this study may lead to positive policy changes to improve healthcare organizations' efficiency and increase access to high-quality healthcare.

A country’s institutional environment influences every facet of its business. This paper aims to identify institutional factors (state ownership, government attention on employment and employees’ educational background) that affect the asymmetric cost behavior in China.

Using 2,570 listed firms’ data between 2002 and 2015, we use empirical models to explore the effects of state ownership, government attention on employment and employees’ educational background on the asymmetric cost behavior in China.

This study found that the asymmetric cost behavior of central state-owned enterprises (CSOEs) is greater than local state-owned enterprises (LSOEs). Meanwhile, the empirical results show that government attention on employment is reflected in five-year government plans, and employees’ educational backgrounds are positively associated with asymmetric cost behavior.

This study contributes to the economic theory of sticky costs, institutional theory and asymmetric cost behavior literature by providing evidence that shows how government intervention and employee educational background limit the flexibility of corporate cost adjustments. Additionally, this study provides guidance to policymakers by showing how government long-term plans affect firm-level resource adjustment decisions.

Digital transformation is a confidence booster in intrapreneurship, but few have examined its impact on intrapreneurship. Further, quantitative analyses exploring the impact of Chinese enterprises' digital transformation on intrapreneurship at the micro-level are rare. Most enterprises do not have the dividend for digital transformation, and few enterprises have successfully achieved digital transformation through intrapreneurship, internal management re-engineering and technological innovation. This study investigates the effect of digital transformation on intrapreneurship in Chinese real economy enterprises.

The study develops and tests a theoretical model that digital transformation impacts intrapreneurship by promoting working capital turnover and furtherly influencing labor input. Panel data of 1,638 Chinese-listed companies between 2007 and 2020 were used to complete the empirical test.

Digital transformation impacted labor input, with an inverted-U shaped relationship between the two, and labor input significantly stimulated intrapreneurship. This effect promoted labor input's impact on working capital. Chinese real economy enterprises generally increase labor investment to promote intrapreneurship. Heterogeneity analysis revealed that enterprises' asset scale and ownership attributes uniformly affected labor input.

This study provided empirical evidence of the promotional effect of real economy enterprises' digital transformation on intrapreneurship. Further, it advanced the literature by examining this relationship at the micro-level. Moreover, the data sample was long-term and included most industries, thus providing representative results with practical implications.

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.

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.

This study aims to examine the impact of China's “Manufacturing and Internet Integration Development Pilot Demonstration Project” (MIP) policy on the digital transformation (DT) and labor structure optimization (LSU) of manufacturing enterprises, reveal the relationship between DT and LSU at the micro level and investigate the mechanism between them.

This study employs MIP as a quasi-natural experiment and develops a time-varying difference-in-difference (DID) model based on a sample of 2,445 Chinese A-share listed manufacturing enterprises in the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets from 2013 to 2021.

The implementation of MIP significantly increases DT by 0.4366 and optimizes LSU by 0.0507. By enhancing the two mediated variables of organizational learning inputs (SI) and employees' personal digital cognition (PDC), DT can optimize the LSU of pilot enterprises by 0.035 and 0.034, according to the results of the mechanism analysis. The study also reveals that the impact of MIP on LSU is highly heterogeneous. With effects of 0.0691 and 0.0632, the optimization effect is more pronounced in state-owned firms and firms with low ownership concentration, respectively.

This study demonstrates the dual effects of the MIP pilot on DT and LSU. In addition, this study pioneers research on the significance of optimizing the labor structure through SI and PDC on the basis of DT, which provides an empirical foundation for the Chinese Government to expand the scope of MIP pilots and revise policy content, as well as for manufacturing enterprises to upgrade the labor structure.

Although India is seen as a key player in the global economy, it is still below its potential level of growth. In this age of globalism, integration with the global economy through trade and foreign investments fosters domestic growth. For India, although this integration has strengthened over the years, there are certain gaps that remain to be addressed. Though numerous studies in the literature have tried to find answers to these questions, an important aspect that has not been considered by these studies relates to India’s federal structure and the role of states in determining the aggregate economic outcome. As Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to India are concentrated in a few states, this paper aims to provide an assessment of the reasons behind this trend.

This paper aims to investigate the reasons behind the interstate differences with respect to FDI inflows in India. The analytical work undertaken for this paper is based on secondary data, collected and collated from various sources. The approach adopted for this paper includes a heat graph analysis to examine whether there is a clear pattern in terms of the state-specific factors for high FDI states versus the low FDI states. This data analysis is followed by an econometric estimation to gauge the impact of state-specific factors in determining the FDI inflows.

As per the secondary data–driven heat graph and econometric analysis, factors like industrial output, social sector expenditure, judicial quality, connectivity indicators, labor cost and availability of credit, act as differentiators between high and low FDI-receiving states. It then becomes imperative to bridge the gap between the two sets of states in terms of these specific factors. Implementation and success of policy interventions can only be derived at the state level and therefore needs more decentralized approach.

This paper tries to identify the reasons that are responsible for FDI inflows being concentrated in a few Indian states. This involves a comprehensive analysis of several variables to understand whether there is a clear pattern where high-FDI states are also in a better position with respect to these attributes. This effort to factor in the federal aspect of a macroeconomic indicator like FDI provides new dynamic to this area of work.

Our study aims to evaluate the impact of infrastructure and public investment on private investment in machinery and equipment in Brazil from 1947 to 2017. The contribution of our article to the existing literature lies in providing a more comprehensive understanding of the presence or absence of the crowding effect in the Brazilian economy by leveraging an extensive historical database. Our central argument posits that the recent decline in private capital accumulation over the last few decades can be attributed to shifts in economic policies – moving from a developmentalist orientation to nondevelopmental guidance since the early 1990s, which is reflected in the diminished levels of public investment and infrastructure since the 1980s.

We conducted a series of econometric regressions utilizing the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model as our chosen econometric methodology.

Employing two different variables to measure public investment and infrastructure, our results – robust across various specifications – have substantiated the existence of a crowding-in effect in Brazil over the examined period. Thus, we have empirical evidence indicating that the state has influenced private capital accumulation in the Brazilian economy over the past decades.

Our article contributes to the existing literature by offering a more comprehensive understanding of the crowding effect in the Brazilian economy, utilizing an extensive historical database.