Effectual Entrepreneurship: Book Review

This review offers an overview of the new textbook, titled “Effectual Entrepreneurship” (2011, Routledge), by Read, Sarasvathy, Dew, Wiltbank, and Ohlsson (hereafter RSDWO). The book addresses large audiences of students, scholars, latent and current entrepreneurs, offering a new insight on the study and practice of entrepreneurship. This is achieved via the overview and critical evaluation of the stylized facts of the entrepreneurship literature, and the provision of the principles of effectual entrepreneurship for startups, growing ventures and social enterprises. This synthesis is presented in a unique non‐technical way that makes the book a valuable handbook for individuals from all backgrounds with an interest in entrepreneurship as a discipline or as practice. The authors envisage the role of entrepreneurial education based on the view that entrepreneurship is not necessarily innate, and this is exactly what they achieve: the production of a remarkable entrepreneurship education tool

Unionism and peer-referencing

This study assesses the “fair-wage-effort” hypothesis, by examining (a) the relationship between relative wage comparisons and job satisfaction and quitting intensions, and (b) the relative ranking of stated effort inducing-incentives, in a novel dataset of unionised and non-unionised European employees. By distinguishing between downward and upward-looking wage comparisons, it is shown that wage comparisons to similar workers exert an asymmetric impact on the job satisfaction of union workers, a pattern consistent with inequity-aversion and conformism to the reference point. Moreover, union workers evaluate peer observation and good industrial relations more highly than payment and other incentives. In contrast, non-union workers are found to be more status-seeking in their satisfaction responses and less dependent on their peers in their effort choices The results are robust to endogenous union membership, considerations of generic loss aversion and across different tenure profiles. They are supportive of the individual egalitarian bias of collective wage determination and self-enforcing effort norms.EPICURUS, a project supported by the European Commission through the 5th Framework Programme “Improving Human Potential” (contract number: HPSE-CT-2002-00143

Greece, Financialization and the EU: The Political Economy of Debt and Destruction, By: Vassilis K. Fouskas and Constantine Dimoulas, Palgrave Macmillan July 2013

No abstract available

Union Mediation and Adaptation to Reciprocal Loyalty Arrangements

This study assesses the industrial relations application of the “loyalty-exit-voice” proposition. The loyalty concept is linked to reciprocal employer-employee arrangements and examined as a job attribute in a vignette questionnaire distributed to low and medium-skilled employees. The responses provided by employees in three European countries indicate that reciprocal loyalty arrangements, which involve the exchange of higher effort for job security, are one of the most desirable job attributes. This attribute exerts a higher impact on the job evaluations provided by unionised workers, compared to their non-union counterparts. This pattern is robust to a number of methodological considerations. It appears to be an outcome of adaptation to union mediated cooperation. Overall the evidence suggests that the loyalty-job evaluation profiles of unionised workers are receptive to repeated interaction and negative shocks, such as unemployment experience. This is not the case for the non-union workers. Finally, unionised workers appear to “voice” a lower job satisfaction, but exhibit low “exit” intentions, compared to the non-unionised labour.EPICURUS, a project supported by the European Commission through the 5th Framework Programme “Improving Human Potential” (contract number: HPSE-CT-2002-00143

Earnings Aspirations and Job Satisfaction: The Affective and Cognitive Impact of Earnings Comparisons

Theories of interdependent preferences predicts that the effect of peer earnings on individual well-being is either negative, the “relative deprivation”, or positive the “cognitive effect”. The evidence so far has attributed the dominance of each of the above effects on the country’s economic and political environment. This study claims that relative earnings can affect job satisfaction in two opposite ways, through the affective, “relative deprivation”, and the cognitive channel. The dominance of each effect depends on the individual-specific financial situation rather than the country’s environment. Utilising a longitudinal dataset for British employees, the results of this study show that the cognitive informational effect of “peer earnings” dominates social comparisons for those in financial distress. It further suggests job satisfaction is a relative concept

Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning in View of a Growing Youth Demographic: The Russian Case

Our study contributes to the financial literacy literature by examining its association with retirement planning in an interesting and novel context, i.e. that of a country with a relatively old and rapidly ageing population, large regional disparities and a rapidly emerging financial market. Even though consumer borrowing is increasing very rapidly in Russia, we find that only 36.3% of respondents in our sample know about the working of interest compounding and only half can answer a simple question about inflation. In a country with pervasive public pension provision, we find that financial literacy is significantly and positively related to retirement planning using private pension funds and schemes. Residents in rural areas are much more reliant on the public provision and invest less in private schemes and savings. The results of our study have a clear policy implication; along with encouraging the availability of private retirement plans and financial products, efforts to improve financial literacy can be pivotal to the expansion in the use of such schemes

Financial literacy and retirement planning : the Russian case

The authors examine the association of financial literacy with retirement planning in Russia, a country with a relatively old and rapidly aging population, large regional disparities, and a rapidly emerging financial market. They find that only 36.3 percent of respondents in the sample understand interest compounding and only half can answer a simple question about inflation. In a country with widespread public pension provisions, they find that financial literacy is significantly and positively related to retirement planning involving private pension funds and schemes. Thus, along with encouraging the availability of private retirement plans, efforts to improve financial literacy could be pivotal to the expansion of the use of such schemes.Financial Literacy,Pensions&Retirement Systems,Emerging Markets,Debt Markets,Gender and Law

Effectual Entrepreneurship

Output Type: Book Revie

The Inter-Related Dynamics of Dual Job Holding, Human Capital and Occupational Choice

The inter-related dynamics of dual job-holding, human capital and occupational choice between primary and secondary jobs are investigated, using a panel sample (1991-2005) of UK employees from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). A sequential profile of the working lives of employees is examined, investigating, first, the determinants of multiple job-holding, second, the factors affecting the occupational choice of a secondary job, third, the relationship between multiple-job holding and job mobility and, lastly, the spillover effects of multiple job-holding on occupational mobility between primary jobs. The evidence indicates that dual job-holding may facilitate job transition, as it may act as a stepping-stone towards new primary jobs, particularly self-employment.Moonlighting, Occupational Choice, Human Capital, Mobility