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showing 10 items of 2270 documents
Do foreign workers reduce trade barriers? Microeconomic evidence
2015
This paper provides evidence that foreign workers reduce firms' trade costs and thus increase the probability that firms export. This informs both the literature on trade costs and the microeconomic literature on firms' export behaviour. We identify the nationality of each worker in a large sample of German establishments, and relate this to the exporting behaviour of these establishments. We allow for the possible endogeneity of an establishment's workforce by instrumenting the share of foreign workers with the regional distribution of foreign workers in the wider labour market. We find a significant effect of worker nationality on exporting which is not driven by the industrial, occupatio…
Regional unemployment, self-employment and family background
2006
This paper analyses the role of regional unemployment on self-employment. The paper argues that family background separates individuals with respect to the effect of unemployment. The empirical analysis is based on data on a sample of Finnish residents aged 0–14 years in 1970 whose subsequent employment is examined. The results show that high unemployment in a region pushes individuals from self-employed families into self-employment, while it has the opposite effect on individuals from wage earner families. The push effect seems to work only among those individuals who already have entrepreneurial skills through their family background. peerReviewed
ARE LAC COOPERATIVE AND COMMERCIAL BANKS SO DIFFERENT IN THEIR MANAGEMENT OF NON‐PERFORMING LOANS?
2018
This paper assesses technical efficiency in the management of non‐performing loans (NPLs) in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) banking industry. To that end, Data Envelopment Analysis techniques are employed with data from the years 2013 to 2016 on a sample of 307 LAC cooperative and commercial banks. Our main contribution to existing literature is that differences of efficiency between cooperative banks and commercial banks are assessed as the result of the different capacities of their managers – managerial efficiency – and the so‐called programme efficiency, which represents differences in the technology used by these two categories of entities. Our principal result suggests that th…
BOARD GOVERNANCE: DOES OWNERSHIP MATTER?
2019
Good governance is crucial to achieving an organization's mission. Nevertheless, little is known about how the structure of governance is influenced by the nonprofit (NPO) or for‐profit ownership (FPO) structure of an organization, partly because they tend to be active in different sectors. In this paper we overcome this challenge by using data from a global sample of 392 microfinance institutions. The results show that the average NPO has a larger board, more female directors, and a higher number of board meetings than the average FPO. Moreover, where there are larger boards and more frequent board meetings, this has a positive effect on the financial performance of NPOs. It is thus confir…
Is the environmental performance of industrialized countries converging? A ‘SURE’ approach to testing for convergence
2008
In this paper, we test for convergence in the environmental performance of a sample of OECD countries, with data ranging from 1971 to 2002. First, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute two environmental performance indicators (EPIs) in the production theory framework. Second, we propose the use of a sequential multivariate approach to test for convergence in environmental performance. These tests allow us to reconcile the time series literature with the cross-sectional dimension, which is basic when testing for convergence in regional blocs. The SURE technique is used, which allows for the existence of correlations across the series without imposing a common speed of mean revers…
Directional distance functions and environmental regulation
2005
Abstract In this paper we use directional technology distance functions to evaluate the impact of environmental regulations on firms’ performance. Following Fare et al. [Fare, R., Grosskopf, S., Lovell, C.A.K., Pasurka, C., 1989. Multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable: a nonparametric approach. The Review of Economics and Statistics 71, 90–98.], we construct an index that measures opportunity costs for individual firms arising from regulations that prevent free disposal of wastes. The methodology is applied to a sample of Spanish producers of ceramic pavements. We assume that firms maximise desirable output simultaneously reducing inputs, with no change in t…
Measurement of ERP-project success: findings from Germany and Austria
2016
The implementations of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have increased rapidly world-wide over the last two decades. ERP projects are long lasting and complex activities, influencing main internal and external operations of organizations. As companies spend an immense investment on these projects, in the beginning managers are focusing on most common success factors to reach the main goal of a proper implementation. For evaluating ERP projects in retrospective, an applicable measurement of the whole implementation and its economic effects is essential. This research paper evaluates the most prominent ERP project success models mentioned in scientific literature and gives an overvi…
Management Control Systems and ISO Certification as Resources to Enhance Internationalization and Their Effect on Organizational Performance
2012
There has been a general consensus in recent literature that internationalization is a key success factor in the competitive business environment we now live in. Using a sample of Spanish agri-food companies, the main objective of this research is to determine the linkage of Management Control Systems (MCS), ISO certifications, internationalization and performance. The results obtained reveal, as expected, that internationalization has a direct and positive relationship with organizational performance. In addition, we find that both the use of MCS and the deployment of ISO certification positively influence companies' level of internationalization. Nevertheless, our findings clearly indicat…
Educational attainment in the OECD, 1960-2010. Updated series and a comparison with other sources
2015
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. This paper describes the construction of updated series on the educational attainment of the adult population for a sample of 22 OECD countries covering the period 1960-2010. These series are then compared with (the OECD subsample of) the latest available version of other cross-country data sets on average years of schooling that are commonly used in the literature. Finally, statistical measures of the information content of the different series are constructed using the procedure developed by Krueger and Lindhal (K&L, 2001) and de la Fuente and Doménech (D&D, 2006). The exercise shows that there are important differences in quality across data sets and suggests that su…
Family firm prerequisites for international business operations: a production and marketing capabilities approach
2014
The purpose of this study is to compare SME family firms’ and non-family firms’ organisational prerequisites for international business operations. The main focus lies in the production and marketing capabilities needed for conducting international business. A quantitative study was conducted in Finland. A random sampling was done by utilising the database of the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK). A sample of 2,000 firms was gathered from the target population, EK database, which consisted of 16,000 firms. The answer rate for the study was 28%. All together, 555 firms answered the mail survey. Three hundred thirty three respondents were coming from family firms and 222 replies repres…