Intra-Firm Human Capital Externalities in Tunisia

In this case-study, we use matched worker-firm Tunisian data to elicit the roles of intra-firm human capital and modern firm features in worker remunerations. We show that the estimated return to education in wage equations is not modified when replacing in the list of regressors the firm dummies, representing observed and unobserved firm heterogeneity, by the first three factors of a Principal Component Analysis of the observed firm characteristics. These factors can be interpreted as: the activity sector, the intra-firm human capital density and the modernity of the firm. These results constitute an interesting argument in favour of the presence of intra-firm human capital externalities. Moreover, the estimated education coefficient does not change when the three factors are replaced by three surrogate variables, respectively: the textile industry dummy, the intra-firm mean education, and the firm’s age.economic development, rate of returns, human capital, wage differentials, intra-firm knowledge externalities, Tunisia.

Assessing competitiveness: how firm-level data can help

As policymakers refocus on growth, the ability to take a firm-level view is key to disentangling the various factors at the root of competitiveness, and thus to designing appropriate policies. â?¢ Firm-level data provides critical information for the design of appropriate competitiveness measures that complement traditional macro analysis. â?¢ More work remains to be done assembling firm-level information, but the variance of the distribution of firm characteristics already conveys important information in addition to standard averages. â?¢ New indicators should be developed to translate the distribution of firm characteristics into indicators of competitiveness designed to capture not only average performance but also the heterogeneity of firm performance. This Policy Contribution builds on ongoing research within EFIGE (www.efige.org), a project to help identify the internal policies needed to improve the external competitiveness of the European Union.

PENGARUH STRUKTUR KEPEMILIKAN DARI CORPORATE GOVERNANCE PADA BADAN USAHA PUBLIK YANG TERDIVERSIFIKASI DAN TIDAK TERDIVERSIFIKASI DALAM HUBUNGANNYA DENGAN LAYANAN BAGI PIHAK INTERNAL DAN EKSTERNAL BADAN USAHA

The stakeholders of the firm have the same objective to the survival of the firm. In order to survive, the firm can diversify its line of business. Through diversification the firm gets several benefit, such as financial synergy, increasing debt capacity, and earning stability. However, there are possibilities that the managers do the diversification for their personal intention, such as prestige, higher compensation, and risk-shelter. Since there is a difference between the goal of shareholders and managers, then it will induce the agency conflict. Therefore diversification could have positive and negative side to the firm. The strategy of doing diversification is influenced by ownership structure and corporate governance. The proxy for corporate governance are leverage, size of the firm, growth opportunity, and financial performance. This research try to test the influence of both factors above by using logit regression model. The result is that only size of the firm gives a siginifcant influence to the diversification strategy. The possible explanations are still few public firms do diversification, many firms are owned by family member, and there are nonfinancial factors, such as the composition of board of directors

Corporate governance, enterprise risk management, and inter-temporal risk transfer

This work is an initial attempt to describe the interconnections among corporate governance, enterprise risk management, and the phenomena of inter-firm risk transfer that occurs in combination with firms’ income smoothing. Corporate governance is conceived as a set of rules according to which a firm is managed and governed by its top managers. Extant literature on corporate governance has pointed out the benefits of the adoption, at a firm level, of a comprehensive enterprise risk management process. We note that, although such an adoption favors the smoothing of a firm’s income, in smoothing the income a firm, it also gives rise to an inter-temporal transfer of risk from the firm itself to its stakeholders, specifically to suppliers and employees. Such transfer of risk depends on the strength of a firm contractual power and on the structural relationships established by a firm with its stakeholders. We therefore argue that larger-sized organizations affiliated with a business group are likely to smooth income to a greater extent than smaller-sized organizations unaffiliated with a business group. The paper also offers some discussions of the findings and points out some important issues to be addressed in future studies

Colombia Firm Energy Market

A firm energy market for Colombia is presented. Firm energy—the ability to provide energy in a dry period—is the product needed for reliability in Colombia’s hydro-dominated electricity market. The firm energy market coordinates investment in new resources to assure that sufficient firm energy is available in dry periods. Load procures in an annual auction enough firm energy to cover its needs. The firm energy product includes both a financial call option and the physical capability to supply firm energy. The call option protects load from high spot prices and improves the performance of the spot market during scarcity. The market provides strong performance incentives through the spot energy price. Market power is addressed directly: existing resources cannot impact the firm energy price. Since load is hedged from high spot prices, the market can rely on high prices to balance supply and demand during dry periods, rather than rationing.Auctions

Firm Heterogeneity and Firm Behavior with Conditional Policies

This paper shows that the result of Ju and Krishna (2002, 2005), i.e., the non-monotonicity in the comparative statics across regimes, disappears, if exporters differ in their productivities, which provides very different predictions about the results of policy changes.

Innovation and corporate dynamics: a theoretical framework

We provide a detailed analysis of a generalized proportional growth model (GPGM) of innovation and corporate dynamics that encompasses the Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect and the Simon growth process as particular instances. The predictions of the model are derived in terms of (i) firm size distribution, (ii) the distribution of firm growth rates, and (iii-iv) the relationships between firm size and the mean and variance of firm growth rates. We test the model against data from the worldwide pharmaceutical industry and find its predictions to be in good agreement with empirical evidence on all four dimensions

Firm development as an integrated process: with evidence from the General Motors-Fisher Body case

This paper argues that an adequate approach to the firm should be able to accommodate the complexities of actual firm development. The latter is conceptualized in terms of three general stages: prime movers or drivers of change, change processes, and change attractors. Furthermore, any "real-world" firm is both a technical and an institutional unit. To emphasize the importance of "real firm" analysis, the discussion presented here revolves around an understanding of the much considered case of General Motors and Fisher Body integration has developed over time. Generalization from this case suggests that an integrated view of the firm is necessary that combines the three stages and the two bases (technical and institutional). Six general perspectives on the firm are identified as having technical or institutional bases that are relevant in each of the three stages. This integrated approach to the firm is explored in terms of the general topic of firm development. It is concluded that, without an integrated approach to firm development, a potentially biased or incomplete analysis can result

Strategic Compensation: Does Business Strategy Influence Compensation in High-Technology Firms?

This study examined whether a firm\u27s business strategy influences the firm\u27s compensation systems in high-technology firms. For the firm strategy variable, we used innovation strategy, which is one of the most critical business strategies in the high-technology industry. Our analysis showed that a firm\u27s emphasis on innovation is positively related to the firm\u27s employee pay level, both short-term pay and long-term pay. Moreover, a firm\u27s emphasis on innovation has significant influence on several other aspects of employee compensation management. Innovation is positively associated with the difference in pay level between R&D employees and other employees, time orientation of employee compensation (the relative emphasis on long-term pay to short-term pay), and the length of the stock option vesting period. The influence of innovation is significant after controlling for industry membership