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The gender pay gap is a well-documented phenomenon in labor economics. Based on the 2018 Structure of Earnings Survey (SES), the authors estimate the impact of observable characteristics on the gender pay gap in Visegrad Group countries and provide policy recommendations on reducing the gender pay gap.

The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is applied to estimate the values of explained and unexplained parts of the gender pay gap. Gender pay gap in unadjusted as well as adjusted form is estimated using data on the individual level.

The results show that unadjusted gender pay gap proved to be stable at more than 20%. The authors found evidence that education widens gender pay gap implying that men have higher returns on education than women. Tertiary education proved to be the highest contributor to widening of gender pay gap. Results also show that there is strong sectoral and occupational segregation. Decomposition proved that only 21% of gender pay gap could be explained by observed characteristics. The unexplained part showed negative values, meaning women would have higher wages, if they had characteristics like men.

Structure of Earnings Survey data are published every four years; therefore the authors’ dataset from year 2018 might not completely reflect today's reality. Unfortunately, newer data are note available yet. Second, Structure of Earning Survey data do not contain variables representing social factors of respondents like marital status, number of children or labour market absence due to birth or childcare. Third, data used for this study do not contain firms that have less than 10 employees; therefore, considerable portion of the labour market is omitted.

Results of this study will help policymakers understand the roots and causes of the gender pay gap in Visegrad Group countries but addressing this issue requires further research.

The effects of ownership concentration on firm performance usually considers two conflicting perspectives: monitoring and expropriation hypotheses. Past studies have produced mix findings. This study aims to shed light on this relationship by focusing on a specific measure of firm performance, firm growth. The moderating effect of industry growth in the aforementioned relationship is also considered, which advances knowledge on the role of moderators.

This study resorts to data from a sample of 21,476 Portuguese firms, which is examined using hierarchical linear modelling. This approach is adequate because the data has a hierarchical structure: the firms are nested within industries.

The results show that equity ownership concentration has a positive effect on firms’ growth and that industry growth amplifies this relationship. Ownership concentration can spur effective monitoring, thereby alleviating principal–agent conflicts of interest and speeding up decision-making, enabling timely competitive actions that promote growth.

The research conceives ownership structure in two groups. However, equity ownership concentration often acquires more complex shapes. In addition, the data used is from a single country.

The results show that firms pursuing growing strategies and operating in growing industries benefit from equity concentration.

Different from past studies, this study focuses on firm growth performance and considers the moderating effect of industry growth.

Many individuals start a new firm each year, mainly intending to become independent or improve their financial situation. For most of them, the first years of operations mean a substantial investment of time, effort and money with highly insecure outcomes. This study aims to explore how entrepreneurs running new firms perform financially compared with the established ones and how this situation influences their well-being.

A questionnaire survey was completed in 2021 and 2022 by a representative sample of N = 1136 solo self-employed and microentrepreneurs in the Czech Republic, with dependent self-employed excluded. This study used multiple regressions for data analysis.

Early-stage entrepreneurs are less satisfied with their financial situation, have lower disposable income and report more significant financial problems than their established counterparts. The situation is even worse for the subsample of startups. However, this study also finds they do not have lower well-being than established entrepreneurs. While a worse financial situation is generally negatively related to well-being, being a startup founder moderates this link. Startup founders can maintain a good level of well-being even in financial struggles.

The results suggest that policies should focus on reducing the costs related to start-up activities. Further, policy support should not be restricted to new technological firms. Startups from all fields should be eligible to receive support, provided that they meet the milestones of their development. For entrepreneurship education, this study‘s results support action-oriented approaches that help build entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy while making them aware of cognitive biases common in entrepreneurship. This study also underscores that effectuation or lean startup approaches help entrepreneurs develop their startups efficiently and not deprive themselves of resources because of their unjustified overconfidence.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the financial situation and well-being of founders of new firms and, specifically, startups. The personal financial situation of startup founders has been a largely underexplored issue. Compared with other entrepreneurs, this study finds that startup founders are, as individuals, in the worst financial situation. Their well-being remains, however, on a comparable level with that of other entrepreneurs.

The authors analyzed the evolution of working from home (WFH) within industries in 12 European countries in the period 2008–2017 and studied its relationship with information and communication technologies (ICT).

The authors used data from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) to document the trends and levels of WFH within industries in 12 European countries. The authors further used the EU-KLEMS database and a difference-in-difference approach to study whether the fall in prices of ICT is associated with a higher share of employees who work from home in industries that depend more on ICT relative to industries that depend less.

The authors show that WFH has increased almost everywhere and that there is significant heterogeneity across industries. The authors provide evidence that the fall in prices of ICT is associated with a higher share of employees who work from home in industries that depend more on ICT relative to industries that depend less. This result also holds within age, gender and occupation groups. While the authors find no significant differences among gender and occupation groups, the positive association between the fall in ICT prices and WFH increases with age.

This paper has two main contributions: First, it reports that WFH has increased in European countries in the period 2008–2017. Second, it provides new explorations about the relationship between ICT and WFH by using the price variation of ICT.

The economic crisis of 2008 resulted in a unique context for the empirical experimentation of organizational learning and entrepreneurship theories from Schumpeterian inspiration. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the economic downturns change the limits and possibilities to pursue both exploration and exploitation and thus achieve innovative performance.

This study examines an original database with the patent portfolio of 2,309 firms based in Brazil, covering a period of eight years preceding the 2008 economic crisis, that is 2000–2007, and five years thereafter, 2008–2013. To test the hypotheses empirically, the authors use the negative binomial model.

The findings add to the literature in two ways. First, this study found a positive association between exploitation and exploration behaviour and innovative performance. However, this relation is curvilinear because there are diminishing negative effects on innovation. Second, regarding the distinction between creative destruction and creative accumulation, the results support the prevalence of creative accumulation, although consistent with the notion of co-occurrence of both models.

This study expands the discussion on how entrepreneurs respond to the economic crisis in specific contexts of an emerging economy. We provide new empirical evidence through the exploration of a unique data set on the patent portfolio of 2,309 firms based in Brazil. Most of the previous literature has applied this topic to developed countries, and there are few studies that apply this topic outside the focus of US and European countries.

This article analyses the recent inverse transition from goodwill impairment to goodwill amortisation implemented in Spain in 2016. The authors contribute to the existing literature by describing their differing impact over goodwill and impairment figures and testing the impact of goodwill on balances over stock prices.

First, using a database with all Spanish non-financial firms with positive goodwill on their balance sheets, the authors describe the impact of the regulatory change over goodwill and impairment figures. Second, focussing on listed firms only, the authors study the impact of financial reporting of goodwill and impairment on stock prices.

Average goodwill per company and the share of goodwill over total assets significantly reduced after 2016, but the results cannot be easily extrapolated to listed firms due to lack of data. When testing the impact of potentially inflated goodwill balances on prices, the authors find that investors kept overvaluing firms with inflated goodwill balances also with the amortisation method.

The lack of data for listed firms with goodwill in Spain makes it difficult to obtain statistically sound evidence, the results could be biased by the cultural traits of the country and related to the intensity of enforcement and monitoring.

This might suggest that the effects of the impairment method linger, so the authors conform to the interpretation that the systematic amortisation paired with a periodic impairment test may lead to accounting that better reflects the underlying economics of goodwill.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, there are no recent articles that analyse this new “turn-around” requiring again the systematic amortisation of goodwill.

Despite the increasing attention given to product-service integration (PSI), little is known about this innovation strategy from a key decision-maker’s perspective. To address this gap, our study draws from personality psychology and decision-making (DM) logics theory to better understand why and how companies’ decision-makers strategize for PSI.

Using an abductive, empirics-first approach, we identify the study’s theoretical building blocks, followed by an exploratory quantitative analysis to generate new theory. We propose a fit-as-mediation conceptual framework suggesting that (1) specific personality traits [i.e. honesty-humility (H), emotionality (E), extraversion (X), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C) and openness to experience (O) (HEXACO)] make decision-makers more likely to include PSI in their company’s strategy and (2) depending on their personality, they apply different DM logics (i.e. causation or effectuation) to do so. To empirically examine this, we use data from 289 SMEs’ decision-makers.

We report several meaningful relationships among our key theoretical constructs. For instance, we find that conscientious decision-makers are more likely to develop a PSI strategy via causation, whereas extravert decision-makers are more likely to do so via both causation and effectuation.

This service study is the first to apply the well-established HEXACO Personality Inventory to companies’ key decision-makers. Moreover, it contributes to the microfoundations of PSI strategy and DM logic theories.

The purpose of this paper is to test the impact of selected characteristics of jobseekers on employers’ decisions regarding potential hires (direct and probabilistic signals). The main focus of the study is to test the impact of jobseekers’ participation in selected active labour market programmes on employers’ hiring decisions for three positions: unskilled worker, skilled worker and administrative employee. Other characteristics tested include age, gender, presence of children in the household, state of health, experience of short- and long-term unemployment and indebtedness.

This study analyses data from a representative survey of employers with five or more employees in the Czech Republic. The survey was conducted in December 2020 using stratified random sampling, combining online questionnaires and personal interviews. The study includes 1,040 employers and uses the factorial survey experiment (FSE) design.

The results of the FSE suggest that the perceived positive impact of completing one of the activation programmes depends on the position for which the candidate is being recruited. While for the unskilled job category, the completion of any of the tested schemes (training, subsidised jobs or public works) had a positive effect; for the skilled job category, only the training and subsidised jobs schemes had a positive effect; and for the administrative job category, public works programme even had a negative effect.

A somewhat limiting factor in the context of this study seems to be the definitions of the positions tested (unskilled and skilled workers and administrative staff). The decision-making of the respondents was somewhat restricted by such broadly defined categories. Typically, studies with FSE designs have a focus on a specific sector of the economy, which allows for a better definition of the positions or jobs under test. The relationship between position and the impact of individual characteristics is clearly a matter for further research.

The results of the study confirm that completion of the activation programme, as well as other candidate characteristics, constitute differentiating signals for employers that influence their hiring decisions. At the same time, there is evidence that the training programme and the subsidised jobs programme are effective in terms of increasing participants’ chances of employment.

The demand side should be included in the evaluation of activation policies. The design of the FSE provides an appropriate way to test the impact of activation measures on the decision-making of employers.

Understanding the determinants of a corporate initial public offering (IPO) success is essential for reducing investors' valuation uncertainty when participating in share offerings. In this sense, this study contributes to the existing debate by examining IPO prospectus readability. The authors specifically investigate how clear and more informative insights into pure corporate key financial numbers can lead to a higher valuation for the company after the listing process.

Through a sample of European IPOs, the authors employ a cross-sectional regression to test the relationship between prospectus readability through the Flesch reading ease (FRE) score and companies' market-to-book ratio at the period end date after the listing process.

The study findings show a positive impact of higher readability on the post-IPO market-to-book ratio. Thus, clear and more informative communication results in stocks being traded at a premium to their book value. This study presents a concrete call for firms to increase corporate documents’ readability to mitigate the risk of withdrawing or spoiling corporate market access. Specifically, enhanced clarity and transparency increase investors' confidence, facilitating a better understanding of companies' intrinsic value and the overall IPO process. The authors conducted several tests to validate the results.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first works to explore the relationship between the readability of corporate prospectus and the sustained IPO success in the European context.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the marketing and communication activities carried out by small management consulting firms and how they relate to customers.

After the framing of the literature on the subject, the study is based on the results of a survey carried out through an online questionnaire. The sample under investigation is represented by 914 small consulting firms located in central Italy.

Results show that half of the sample carried out marketing and communication activities, mainly through the website and social media, while others participating in events as speakers at conferences. It also emerges that management consulting firms carry out activities aimed at maintaining relationship with customers even if they do not invest time in market research in order to find potential and new clients.

The study suggests that management consulting firms should adopt a systematic and strategic approach to communication and should develop a complete and integrated digital communication strategy, as well as to rethink the consulting business model.

There are no previous studies that provide insight into the everyday practice of marketing and communication of small management consulting services in today's dynamic and changing economic environment.