ILR School Ph.D. Dissertations

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Demand for Higher Education Programs: The Impact of the Bologna Process

The Bologna process aims at creating a European Higher Education Area where inter-country mobility of students and staff, as well as workers holding a degree, is facilitated. While several aspects of the process deserve wide public support, the reduction of the length of the first cycle of studies to three years, in several continental European countries where it used to last for four or five years, is less consensual. The paper checks the extent of public confidence in the restructuring of higher education currently underway, by looking at its implications on the demand for academic programs in Portugal. Precise quantification of the demand for each academic program is facilitated by the rules of access to higher education, in a nation-wide competition, where candidates must list up to six preferences of institution and program. We use regression analysis applied to count data, estimating negative binomial models. Results indicate that the programs that restructured to follow the Bologna principles were subject to higher demand than comparable programs that did not restructure, as if Bologna were understood as a quality stamp. This positive impact was reinforced if the institution was a leader, i.e. the single one in the country that restructured that program. Still an additional increase in demand was experienced by large programs that restructured to offer an integrated master degree, thus conforming to Bologna principles while not reducing the program duration.education policy, European Higher Education Area, economic, social and cultural integration, count data

Investment, Credit Rationing and the Soft Budget Constraint: Evidence from Czech Panel Data

Strategic restructuring of firms through investment is key to a transition from plan to market. Using data on industrial firms in the Czech Republic during 1992-98, we find that (a) foreign owned companies invest the most and cooperatives the least, (b) private firms do not invest more than state-owned ones and (c) cooperatives and small firms are credit rationed. Given the large volume of non-performing bank loans to firms and the high rate of investment of large state owned and private firms, our findings also suggest that these firms operate under a soft budget constraint. Estimates of a dynamic model, together with the support for the neoclassical model, suggest that firms started to behave consistently with profit-maximization.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39747/3/wp363.pd

Demutualization, outsider ownership and stock exchange performance - empirical evidence

Academic contributions on the demutualization of stock exchanges so far have been predominantly devoted to social welfare issues, whereas there is scarce empirical literature referring to the impact of a governance change on the exchange itself. While there is consensus that the case for demutualization is predominantly driven by the need to improve the exchange's competitiveness in a changing business environment, it remains unclear how different governance regimes actually affect stock exchange performance. Some authors propose that a public listing is the best suited governance arrangement to improve an exchange's competitiveness. By employing a panel data set of 28 stock exchanges for the years 1999-2003 we seek to shed light on this topic by comparing the efficiency and productivity of exchanges with differing governance arrangements. For this purpose we calculate in a first step individual efficiency and productivity values via DEA. In a second step we regress the derived values against variables that - amongst others - map the institutional arrangement of the exchanges in order to determine efficiency and productivity differences between (1) mutuals (2) demutualized but customer-owned exchanges and (3) publicly listed and thus at least partly outsider-owned exchanges. We find evidence that demutualized exchanges exhibit higher technical efficiency than mutuals. However, they perform relatively poor as far as productivity growth is concerned. Furthermore, we find no evidence that publicly listed exchanges possess higher efficiency and productivity values than demutualized exchanges with a customer-dominated structure. We conclude that the merits of outside ownership lie possibly in other areas such as solving conflicts of interest between too heterogeneous members

Demand for higher education programs: the impact of the Bologna process

The Bologna process aims at creating a European Higher Education Area where intercountry mobility of students and sta?, as well as workers holding a degree, is facilitated. While several aspects of the process deserve wide public support, the reduction of the length of the first cycle of studies to three years, in several continental European countries where it used to last for four or five years, is less consensual. The paper checks the extent of public confidence in the restructuring of higher education currently underway, by looking at its implications on the demand for academic programs. It exploits the fact that some programs have restructured under the Bologna process and others have not, in Portugal. Precise quantification of the demand for each academic program is facilitated by the rules of access to higher education, in a nation-wide competition, where candidates must list up to six preferences of institution and program. We use regression analysis applied to count data, estimating negative binomial models. Results indicate that the programs that restructured to follow the Bologna principles were subject to higher demand than comparable programs that did not restructure, as if Bologna were understood as a quality stamp. This positive impact was reinforced if the institution was a leader, i.e. the single one in the country that restructured the program. Still an additional increase in demand was experienced by large programs that restructured to offer an integrated master degree, thus conforming to Bologna principles while not reducing the program duration.education policy; European Higher Education Area; economic, social and cultural integration; count data.

Firm Growth in Advanced Stages of Economic Transition: Evidence from Slovak Industry

This article analyzes the reaction of firms to transition in adjusting firm size. The author offers an empirical analysis in the context of the firm-growth model with emphasis on the presence of ownership and corporate-structure effects.There is no evidence for a general firm-growth/firm-size relationship. On the other hand, the author finds evidence that firm growth is a function of size for firms of a particular type. Specifically, there is an inverse growth-size relationship for privately owned joint-stock companies. Examining the character of these effects, the author concludes that their character is transitory: It corresponds to events related to exogenous settings of economic privatization and the economic restructuring process rather than tangible ownership or corporate-governance effects.firm growth; firms; transition; ownership; industry; Slovak Republic

Some Econometric Evidence on the Effectiveness of Active Labour Market Programmes in East Germany

In this paper we summarise our previous results on the effectiveness of different kinds of labour market training programmes as well as employment programmes in East Germany after unification. All the studies use the microeconometric evaluation approach and are based on different types of matching estimators. We find some positive earnings effect for on-the-job training and also some positive employment effects for employment programmes. No such effects appear for public sector sponsored (off-the-job) training programmes. Generally, the scope of such analysis is very much hampered by the insufficient quality and quantity of the data available for East Germany. Although in particular the results for public sector sponsored training programmes raise serious doubts about the effectiveness of these programmes, any definite policy conclusion from this and other studies about active labour market policy in East Germany would probably be premature.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39702/3/wp318.pd

IMF Bank-Restructuring Efficiency Outcomes: Evidence from East Asia

We report new findings on bank efficiency in East Asian countries for the preand post-IMF restructuring periods. We find that bank efficiency has improved, but only to the pre-IMF intervention level, and that restructured banks are not more efficient than their unrestructured counterparts. Different restructuring measures have different effects. Bank closures are economically justified, but mergers show short-term efficiency losses. Recapitalization and reprivatization of badly performing banks lead to efficiency improvement, but also increase government ownership. Ease of entry that has allowed for more foreign bank participation results in slightly improved performance of badly performing banks.

Organizational Change and Management Control in a Not-For-Profit Organization:A Qualitative Field Study

In this article we report the results of an inductive field study designed to develop an understanding of organizational and accounting change in an Australian church organization. We approach this study following the insights from Burns and Scapens’ (2000) theorisation of management accounting change and the new institutional sociology perspective. The data collection and analytical methodology adopted is grounded approach that summarized interview data into shorter statements to identify themes and to reveal the emergent phenomena. Eight broad themes emerged and were the points of discussion adopted by us. The cause and effect relationships of the predominantly internally generated organisational changes within a Christian-based community service organization became apparent. The subject organization had enjoyed success through hard work, commitment, dedication and loyalty and the collective energy of the individuals and groups within. Additionally, pressures of tighter government funding and service outcome orientation moderately caused the traditional family-like structure to diminish and evolve into, or at least resembled a more corporate styled organization. However, the structuring of the funded operations within the organization had a strong grain of internal force at the time that kept these influences fairly minimal, but manageable without impacting, to a large degree, the management accounting control mechanisms. Our contribution to the accounting and organizational change literature lies in the diversity in the findings that offers a rich and colorful representation of the impact of radical change in a not-for-profit organization. We call for more empirical research into this emerging area in management accounting.Organizational change; institutional theory; management accounting change; not-for-profit organizations

Some Notes on the Scientific Methods of Simon Kuznets

This paper discusses the scientific methods that guided the economic research of Simon Kuznets, with particular stress on his approach to measurement and theory. The paper closes with the transcription of a brief autobiographical talk by Kuznets at a dinner in honor of his eightieth birthday.