Is Polder-Type Governance Good for You?: Laissez-Faire Intervention, Wage Restraint, And Dutch Steel

This paper searches for the origins of the relatively successful performance of Hoogovens, the only sizeable steel firm in the Netherlands. It is suggested that Hoogovens has at critical moments benefited substantially from both strategic and financial support, but was basically left to decide its own policies. Luckily, it mostly opted for 'right' policies so that the industry's decline hit less hard in the Netherlands than elsewhere thus making it less necessary to develop emergency programmes. More specifically, Hoogovens chose to diversify into the aluminium market at a relatively early stage, and it broke up its merger with Germany's Hoesch. However, Hoogovens also benefited from the Polder Model's emphasis on wage restraint as much of the firm's output is exported. Moreover, corporatist welfare arrangements allowed Hoogovens to shed labour without causing extraordinary unrest. It is concluded that the success of 'laissez-faire intervention' heavily depends on the qualities of the supported firm's management. Polder-type governance in terms of wages and labour has beneficial effects in the short run, may but retard innovation

First Forms of Art : Pt.2. Crystal Forms

2 v. : 80 leaves of plates ; 36 cm. Cover title. In portfolio. This collection of 156 different forms of crystals was produced by microphotography. Professor T.H. Schenk, of Austria, experimented several years in order to bring about interesting designs through the action of acids on various metals... --Pt. 2., cover page verso. Pt. 1. Nature -- Pt. 2. Crystal forms. Library has Pt. 2 only ; Plates: 1-20.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_books_nature/1003/thumbnail.jp

The effects of mergers and acquisitions on the firm size distribution

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on the shape of the firm size distribution, by using data of the population of manufacturing firms in the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that M&As do not affect the size distribution when we consider the entire population of firms. When we focus on the firms involved in an M&A event, we observe a shift of the firm size distribution towards larger sizes. Firm size distribution becomes more concentrated around the mean, less skewed to the right hand side, and thinner at the tails as a whole. The shift toward higher sizes due to M&A is not uniform but affects firms of different sizes in different ways. While the number of firms in the lower tail decreased, the number of firms in the central size classes increased substantially and outweighed the increase in the number (and mean size) of firms in the upper tail of the distribution (consequently the overall market concentration measured by the Herfindahl index declines). M&As lead to a departure from log-normality of the firm size distribution, suggesting that external growth does not follow Gibrat's law. Our counterfactual analysis highlights that only internal growth does not affect the shape of the size distribution of firms. On the contrary, it suggests that the change in the size distribution is almost entirely due to the external growth of the firms

Uncovering metabolic pathways relevant to phenotypic traits of microbial genomes

A new machine learning-based method is presented here for the identification of metabolic pathways related to specific phenotypes in multiple microbial genomes

Demasqué der diversificatie

De recente geruchtmakende opsplitsingen van enkele vooraanstaande concerns zijn vooral gepresenteerd als acties die voortkomen uit zorg voor de aandeelhouderswaarde. In deze bijdrage wordt gesteld, dat zij eerder het gevolg zijn van het spaak lopen van al te uitbundige acquisitiestrategieën uit het verleden. De negatieve effecten daarvan konden gedurende lange tijd worden gecompenseerd door een flinke dosis marktmacht. Door toenemende mondiale concurrentie is deze marktmacht afgenomen. Aan de noodzakelijk geworden herstructureringen wordt helaas opnieuw vorm gegeven door middel van fusies en acquisities

SKY1 is involved in cisplatin-induced cell kill in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and inactivation of its human homologue, SRPK1, induces cisplatin resistance in a human ovarian carcinoma cell line

The therapeutic potential of cisplatin, one of the most active and widely used anticancer drugs, is severely limited by the occurrence of cellular resistance. In this study, using budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism to identify novel drug resistance genes, we found that disruption of the yeast gene SKY1 (serine/arginine-rich protein-specific kinase from budding yeast) by either transposon insertion or one-step gene replacement conferred cellular resistance to cisplatin. Heterologous expression of the human SKY1 homologue SRPK1 (serine/arginine-rich protein-specific kinase) in SKY1 deletion mutant yeast cells restored cisplatin sensitivity, suggesting that SRPK1 is a cisplatin sensitivity gene, the inactivation of which could lead to cisplatin resistance. Subsequently, we investigated the role of SRPK1 in cisplatin sensitivity and resistance in human ovarian carcinoma A2780 cells using antisense oligodeoxynucleotides. Treatment of A2780 cells with antisense oligodeoxynucleotides directed against the translation initiation site of SRPK1 led to down-regulation of SRPK1 protein and conferred a 4-fold resistance to cisplatin. The human SRPK1 gene has not been associated with drug resistance before. Our new findings strongly suggest that SRPK1 is involved in cisplatin-induced cell kill and indicate that SRPK1 might potentially be of importance for studying clinical drug resistance