Search results

To examine the nature and the determinants of the incidence and diffusion of a range of new technologies.

We collected new survey data in 2001 for medium sized establishments in upstate and central New York.

Our econometric findings suggest that the use of new technologies tends to be more extensive in firms in which greater use is made of flexible work practices and flexible compensation practices and when skill levels are high. We find that the use of IT, the intranet, and computer literacy training is greater when the average tenure of managers is low, which might reflect a greater comfort with new technologies by younger managers. Larger establishments tend to use the Internet more extensively, which may reflect the cost of setting up Internet billing and purchasing systems, and an intranet communication system. Managerial tenure does not affect the use of the Internet in general perhaps because these might be operations that are less central to the activities of more senior managers. Also, we find mixed evidence for our digital divide hypothesis that predicts that the use of new technologies would be greatest in metropolitan areas and least in rural locations.

We recognize it is potentially risky to draw inferences from a relatively small survey.

Some findings mesh with those contained in earlier studies (e.g., Black & Lynch, 2004) though, importantly, now finding emerge when a broader range of new technologies is being considered.

We utilize a unique comprehensive dataset, drawn from the 1999 baseline survey of some 2000 micro and small-scale enterprises (MSEs) in Kenya. We analyze the financing behavior of these enterprises within the framework of a heterodox model of debt-equity and gearing decisions. We also study determinants of the success rate of loan applications. Our results emphasize three major findings. First, MSEs in Kenya obtain debt from a wide variety of sources. Second, debt-equity and gearing decisions by MSEs and their success rates in loan applications can all be understood by relatively simple models which include a mixture of conventional and heterodox variables. Third, and in particular, measures of the tangibility of the owner's assets, and the owner's education and training have a significant positive impact on the probability of borrowing and of the gearing level. These findings have important policy implications for policy makers and entrepreneurs of MSEs in Kenya.

Recent attempts to measure altruism toward other players or charities suffer from a potential confound: the act of giving is typically correlated with the size of the pie left on the experimenter's table. Altruistic acts could thus be more generous if subjects prefer that monies go toward other players, or charities, than be left on the table. On the other hand, revealed altruism could be lower if subjects are more altruistic toward the residual claimant than they are toward the agent to whom they are being asked to give. We demonstrate this point with simple laboratory experiments that derive from popular recent designs. We find a significant effect from the hypothesized confound, with revealed altruism dependent upon who is specified as the residual claimant.

In M&A markets, acquirers face a hold-up problem of losing the value of investments they make in due diligence, negotiations, and post-acquisition planning if targets would pursue the options of waiting for better offers or selling to an alternative bidder. This chapter extends information economics to the literature on M&A contracting by arguing that such contracting problems are more likely to occur for targets with better outside options created by the information available on their resources and prospects. We also argue that acquirers address these contracting problems by using termination payment provisions to safeguard their investments. While previous research in corporate strategy and finance has suggested that certain factors can facilitate an acquisition by reducing a focal acquirer’s risk of adverse selection (e.g., signals, certifications), we note that these same factors can make the target attractive to other potential bidders and can exacerbate the risk of hold-up, thereby leading acquirers to use termination payment provisions as contractual safeguards.

In this chapter, the authors contribute toward building a better understanding of farmers’ responses to behavioral drivers of land-use decision by establishing an alternative analytical procedure, which can overcome various drawbacks suffered by methods currently used in existing studies. Firstly, our procedure makes use of spatially high-resolution data, so that idiosyncratic effects of physical environment drivers, e.g., soil textures, can be explicitly modeled. Secondly, we address the well-known censored data problem, which often hinders a successful analysis of land-use shares. Thirdly, we incorporate spatial error dependence (SED) and heterogeneity in order to obtain efficiency gain and a more accurate formulation of variances for the parameter estimates. Finally, the authors reduce the computational burden and improve estimation accuracy by introducing an alternative generalized method of moments (GMM)–quasi maximum likelihood (QML) hybrid estimation procedure. The authors apply the newly proposed procedure to spatially high-resolution data in England and found that, by taking these features into consideration, the authors are able to formulate conclusions about causal effects of climatic and physical environment, and environmental policy on land-use shares that differ significantly from those made based on methods that are currently used in the literature. Moreover, the authors show that our method enables derivation of a more effective predictor of the land-use shares, which is utterly useful from the policy-making point of view.

We investigate the effects of management-employee similarity on mistreated employees’ propensities to engage in legal and organizational claiming, to quit, and to not seek a remedy in ongoing employment relationships.

We test hypotheses generated by the similarity-attraction and similarity-betrayal paradigms using Tobit regression and data from vignette-based employee surveys.

Mistreated employees with same-sex supervisors are more likely to initiate legal claims and to quit than those with opposite-sex supervisors, but less likely to initiate legal claims and to quit when they have a same-race supervisor than when they have a different-race supervisor. The effects of management-employee similarity on mistreated employees’ remedy-seeking responses exhibit asymmetries by gender and by race. The presence of same-race supervisors or other managers appears to diminish the greater reluctance of nonwhite employees, compared to white employees, to use organizational claiming mechanisms.

We know of no prior published research that has investigated the determinants of employees’ propensities to engage in multiple forms of remedy seeking, as well as the propensity to not seek a remedy, in response to plausibly illegal mistreatment not involving dismissal.

The regional nature of MNEs has become a key aspect of international business thinking, since Rugman demonstrated empirically that MNEs are mainly home-region oriented and studied the impact that the regional phenomenon has on firm performance. The extant international business literature on small- and medium-sized firms of interest to Aharoni is also evolving with the consideration of new aspects such as the “born global illusion,” and the necessary balance between firm-specific advantages (FSAs) and the liability of foreignness (LOF) when going abroad. This chapter presents new insights on these topics by examining the regionalization of Spanish manufacturing firms, their export sales orientation and their FDI orientation. Finally, we study the impact of FSAs on the intraregional and foreign sales of Spanish companies.

I examined the association between economic, savings, and psychological factors on participation in traditional Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) (1983–1985). The data were panels of tax returns representing households qualifying for the maximum IRA contribution and whose only sources of income were employment and investments. Along with traditional economic variables, my regressions included psychological factors such as framing effects based on adaptive expectations. Although both economic and psychological constructs were important in explaining savings behavior, the latter were shown as more salient. Households having less favorable than expected withholding positions increased IRA participation, a finding corroborating prior research. Savings propensity (SAVE) and past participation were the most important factors linked to IRAs. Unexpected investment income was significantly related to IRA participation, providing evidence that deductible IRA contributions represent new savings rather than reshuffled old savings. The policy implications of this study suggest that savings plans redesigned to encourage greater retirement savings should include tax benefits that are in temporal proximity to the desired savings behavior.

This chapter investigates the relationship between heterogeneous social preferences and charitable giving under alternative prices of giving and types of subsidies. Using 10 allocation decisions, we categorize participants’ social preferences as self-interested, inequity averse, or social surplus maximizing. In subsequent charitable giving treatments, analysis of within-person decision-making gives support for several predictions consistent with social preference types: social surplus maximizers are most likely to give to a charity that increases production; inequity averters give more to charity than do other groups; all preference types give more when the price of giving declines; and social surplus maximizers are more responsive to the price of giving than are inequity averters.

We review the use of behavior from television game shows to infer risk attitudes. These shows provide evidence when contestants are making decisions over very large stakes, and in a replicated, structured way. Inferences are generally confounded by the subjective assessment of skill in some games, and the dynamic nature of the task in most games. We consider the game shows Card Sharks, Jeopardy!, Lingo, and finally Deal Or No Deal. We provide a detailed case study of the analyses of Deal Or No Deal, since it is suitable for inference about risk attitudes and has attracted considerable attention.