Explaining firms' heterogeneity in productivity and wages: ownership, innovation and size

Micro data have provided invaluable contributions to a better understanding of the drivers of, and factors affecting, wages, productivity and productivity growth. The literature in this area has highlighted both ownership and innovative activity as two factors that consistently seem to affect productivity and its dynamics at the micro level and the empirical regularity that larger firms pay higher wages. This thesis provides evidence on these issues. In the first chapter I investigate the implications of ownership concentration and the presence of financial institutions for productivity, using both accounting data and detailed data on shareholdings for a panel of quoted UK companies. I control for unobserved firm fixed effects and the endogeneity of inputs and ownership using GMM estimation. The second chapter considers whether nationality of ownership affects productivity. The analysis challenges previous evidence of a foreign ownership advantage in the UK by showing that the foreign advantage is by and large a multinational advantage, except for US firms. In addition, longitudinal analysis disentangles the sources of the US and MNE productivity advantage. The third chapter examines the hypothesis that multinational firms have accessto larger knowledges tocks and quantifies how much multinationals' innovative successis due to higher innovation expenditure and how much to access to their intra-firm worldwide pool of information. The fourth chapter matches information on innovative activity with production data to investigate the link between innovation expenditure, knowledge flows and productivity growth. The results confirm the importance of knowledge flows for innovation and of innovation for productivity growth. The final chapter of the thesis investigates the empirical regularity that larger establishments pay higher wages. The longitudinal estimates demonstrate that positive effects of firm size on wages persist after controlling for observed and unobserved worker, firm and match specific characteristics and correcting for non-random mobility of workers

Entrepreneurial marketing in the B2C mobile application business: A netnographic study across four expert blogs

This study provides insight into the use of entrepreneurial marketing in the mobile app context, with aim of answering the research question: how can entrepreneurial marketing can be used to affect mobile application adoption and retention? The motivation for the study stems from the lack of research on entrepreneurial marketing in the mobile application context and the scarcity of research on mobile application marketing. A thorough review of studies relating to entrepreneurial marketing, mobile commerce, mobile advertising and mobile applications was conducted in order to establish the theoretical foundations of this study. On the basis of the literature review the I-A-R framework was constructed which explores marketing through customer intelligence, acquisition and retention. Netnography was utilized to study experts across four company blogs. These blogs present North American companies that offer services and/or platforms related to mobile app marketing mainly to small and medium sized enterprises. Due to the large amount of data, the findings were first categorized according to the I-A-R framework, and then a summarized and presented along with a revised framework. The revised framework presents a four stage mobile app marketing process. These stages represent the app developer's approach towards making apps, the development of the app, user acquisition, and user retention. In terms of the research question, the two most important ways that EM can be used in the mobile app context are: creating apps that users have an incentive to share in order to leverage a small marketing budget for user acquisition and establishing relationships as a customer loyalty strategy

Baseball and Antitrust: The Legislative History of the Curt Flood Act of 1998

https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_books/1185/thumbnail.jp

Gender and management : factors affecting career advancement of women in the federal civil service of Pakistan

Organisations today operate under extreme pressures to be effecient and productive to meet the challenges of globalisation. The concern for best utilisation of available human resources is at the core of the movement for effeciency and productivity. There is a growing realisation that the quality of top managers, irrespective of gender, is critical to the success and survival of organisations. This has made the advancement of women managers to the top managerial hierarchy an organisational imperative rather than merely an equity issue. Recognising this need, career advancement of women managers, in recent years, has emerged as an important area of research in the field of gender and management. A number of studies have been conducted to examine the factors affecting women's advancement in management careers. Although these studies provide a useful insight into the phenomenon of scarcity of women in top management, they are parochial in nature and are limited in focus. These studies are largely based on the experiences of women managers in the western and industrialised countries and focus only on the personal and organisational factors overlooking the broader societal context. Hence, recently, the need for incorporating systemic dimension into theoretical discourse as well as empirical research on managerial advancement of women has been recognised to explore this phenomenon across cultures. This study develops a gender-organisation-system model of managerial advancement to study the factors affecting career advancement of women. The model is applied to the federal civil service of Pakistan, the largest single employer of women in a non-western, developing and Islamic country. The data are collected using triangulation of methods, self-administered questionnaire, face-to-face interviews and documentation. A sample of 300 civil servants was randomly selected for the study. The findings are based on the analysis of the results of 138 questionnaires received and 30 interviews and examination of the status of women in Pakistani society and the civil service through documentation. The study reveals an inventory of personal, organisational and systemic factors that may facilitate or impede advancement of women civil servants in Pakistan. At the personal level, dual commitment to family and career poses a great dilemma to women civil servants. While parental encouragement, spouse's support, socioeconomic background and educational achievements facilitate women civil servants, the potential barriers to their career advancement are spouse career, time away from family and difficulty in relocation. At the organisational level, women are denied equal career opportunities through indirect and subtle forms of discriminatory practices including gender streaming, work segregation, limited opportunities of training, mentoring and networking. These covert forms of discrimination often go unnoticed and are perpetuated due to a number of organisational factors such as gender-biased selection processes, regional and military quotas, absence of lateral entry, lack of women friendly policies and absence of women from important decision making bodies. The gender and organisational factors affecting career advancement of women civil servants are the mirror images of the role and status of women in Pakistani society. The cultural norms, values, and perceptions about the role of women in society, low level of gender development and gender empowerment, and absence of legal institutional framework for addressing issues of sex discrimination at work are the major systemic factors that adversely affect women's advancement in the civil service hierarchy. The study reveals similarities as well as differences between women administrators in Pakistan and western and non-western countries. Pakistani women administrators like women managers in the other countries are not in any sense less than their counterparts in terms of career commitment, managerial ability and self-confidence. They face barriers that arise from two major forces counteracting their career aspirations, work-family conflict and institutionalised discrimination. However these constraints in Pakistan are not only different in nature and forms but are more intense due to rigid sex-role demarcation and strong family orientation compared with western and industrialised countries. Hence, coping strategies at personal, organisational and systemic levels to deal with these pressures are also different. The study makes several policy recommendations to facilitate women aspiring for managerial careers in general and women civil servants in particular, which includes institutionalised child care, anti-discrimination legislation, flexible working practices, review of recruitment, selection and promotion system, affirmative action, a balanced representation of women in decisionary bodies and gender sensitivity training. Though traditional societal values are in conflict with women's work outside the private sphere, these recommendations if adopted may bring a positive change towards gender equality in managerial careers in Pakistan including the civil service

Focus on Cities: Proceedings of a conference organised by the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Natal, Durban, 8th-12th July, 1968

See also 'Focus on Cities' Abstracts of papers, Programme and the Excursion handbooks which accompany the conference

Free Access to Public Information - More Transparency, Less Corruption: The Case of Republic of Macedonia

The traditional model of not transparent administration today disappears step by step. Citizens are increasingly becoming an equal entity with state institutions which have responsibility to ensure protection of their rights, accountability, openness and transparency in its operations - as the basic principles upon which rests the principle of good governance. Therefore, adoption of a law of free access to public information in many countries in the world which seek to enhance democracy in their societies today is a trend (process) that can not stop. Nowadays, countries that don’t have such a law can not claim that they have full democracy. One of the reasons for passing this law is reducing corruption. Corruption is based on secrecy. Citizens and institutions become corrupted when the public has no insight into their work. If the work of public institutions is transparent and offered for public inspection, then the chance for them to be corrupt is smaller. Republic of Macedonia has adopted the Law of free access to public information in 2006. This paper analyzes the law and its application; the situation in Macedonia after the adoption of the law; concluding that despite some inconsistencies, the law has contributed to increasing transparency and reducing corruption. Keywords: Free access, information, transparency, corruption