This study presents evidence of heterogeneous returns to education over the wage distribution. The authors use instrumental variable quantile regression and data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey to identify the causal link between education and wages at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages. The results provide evidence that there is no unique causal effect of schooling and that for each individual the effect may deviate from those extensively documented by ordinary least squares or two-stage least squares. In particular, while ordinary quantile regression estimates increasing returns in the quantile index, once the endogeneity of schooling is taken into account the authors instead observe higher returns at lower quantiles of the wage distribution. Interpreting the quantile index as a measure of unobserved ability, the results suggest that higher-ability individuals have higher wages, but the slope of their wage-education profile is flatter than that for lower-ability individuals.
An infinite-horizon asset-pricing model with heterogeneous agents and collateral constraints can explain why adjustments in stock market margins under US Regulation T had an economically insignificant impact on market volatility. In the model, raising the margin requirement for one asset class may barely affect its volatility if investors have access to another, unregulated class of collateralizable assets. Through spillovers, however, the volatility of the other asset class may substantially decrease. A very strong dampening effect on all assets׳ return volatilities can be achieved by a countercyclical regulation of all markets.
Our longitudinal study of the entire population of internal corporate ventures within a large European electronics manufacturer finds that the conventional focus in the corporate venturing literature to evaluate ventures based on business growth and financial performance may be misguided. Instead, we found that ventures are temporary conduits for capability development and play a primary role in launching the founding stage of new capability life cycles. Ventures' main contribution was often to transfer valuable capabilities to other ventures or the firm's existing business units. The benefit from investing in ventures was therefore largely independent of their commercial success. Furthermore, estimation of success rates proved highly sensitive to the stage of the ventures at which sampling began. These findings suggest the need to reconceptualize the notion of early stage ventures and their success. We further found that the venturing process can be conceptualized as a nested system of simultaneous selection at both the venture and the capability level. We show that these selection processes are distinct yet operate in a coevolutionary way and are amenable to proactive management.
The book establishes links between regularity and derivative concepts of nonsmooth analysis and studies of solution methods and stability for optimization, complementarity and equilibrium problems. In developing necessary tools, it presents, in particular, (i) an extended analysis of Lipschitz functions and the calculus of their generalized derivatives, including regularity, successive approximation and implicit functions for multivalued mappings, (ii) a unified theory of Lipschitzian critical points in optimization and other variational problems, with relations to reformulations by penalty, barrier and NCP functions, (iii) an analysis of generalized Newton methods based on linear and nonlinear approximations, (iv) the interpretation of hypotheses, generalized derivatives and solution methods in terms of original data and quadratic approximations, (v) a rich collection of instructive examples and exercises. It is written for researchers, graduate students and practitioners in various fields of applied mathematics, engineering, OR and economics, but also for university teachers and advanced students who wish to get insights into problems, potentials and recent developments of this rich and thriving area of nonlinear analysis and optimization.
We discuss conditions for the Aubin property of solutions to perturbed cone constrained programs, by using and refining results given in Klatte-Kummer "Nonsmooth Equations in Optimization", Kluwer, 2002. In particular, we show that constraint nondegeneracy and hence uniqueness of the multiplier is necessary for the Aubin property of the critical point map. Moreover, we give conditions under which the critical point map has the Aubin property if and only if it is locally single-valued and Lipschitz.
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, this article develops a novel approach to the study of corporate social responsibility (CSR). According to this approach, pro-social activities are conceptualized as social practices that individual managers employ in their efforts to attain social power. Whether such practices are enacted or not depends on (1) the particular features of the social field; (2) the individual managers’ socially shaped dispositions and (3) their stock of different forms of capital. By combining these theoretical concepts, the Bourdieusian approach we develop highlights the interplay between the economic and non-economic motivations that underlie CSR, acknowledging influences both on the micro- and the macro-level, as well as deterministic and voluntaristic aspects of human behaviour.
Innovation research increasingly focuses on understanding why and how firms implement new management practices, processes or structures. Emerging in the shadow of research on technological innovation, growing evidence points towards the inter-firm relation as an important locus of innovation. Yet although organizational theory suggests discrete alternative inter-firm coordination mechanisms, the literature on management innovation has thus far treated the inter-firm relation as one broad mode of organizing. This study takes a configurational perspective to identify archetypes of inter-firm relations leading to the implementation of management innovation. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to analyse 56 firm partnerships in China’s biopharmaceutical industry, the empirical evidence identifies four such discrete inter-firm archetypes: organic coalitions, bureaucratic foundations, coalitions of intense interdependency and reciprocal foundations. The results suggest that the type of interdependency, rather than the coordination mechanisms governing inter-firm relations, leads to the implementation of management innovation.
We document a curious feature of the German mutual fund industry. Unlike U.S. mutual funds, funds domiciled in Germany do not necessarily compute their net asset values (NAV) as of market close. Using a sample of German equity funds, we infer each fund's NAV closing time from the best-fit market model using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation. The results of both approaches coincide perfectly and show that all but one of the funds domiciled in Germany report intraday NAVs. We show that using market returns computed at the end of the day instead of the best-fit time, usually leads to misleading inferences about mutual fund performance.
