To date, little is known about the effects of the composition of skills on academic entrepreneurship. Therefore, in this paper, following Lazear’s (2005) jack-of-all-trades approach, we study how his or her composition of skills affects a scientist’s intention of becoming an entrepreneur. Extending Lazear, we examine how the effect of balanced entrepreneurial skills is moderated by a balanced working time allocations and peer effects. Using unique data collected from 480 life sciences researchers, we provide the first evidence that scientists with more balanced skills are more likely to have higher entrepreneurial intentions, particularly when they are in contact with entrepreneurial peers. Furthermore, we find even higher entrepreneurial intentions when balanced skill sets are combined with balanced working time allocations. Thus, to encourage the entrepreneurial intentions of life scientists, one has to ensure that they are exposed to diverse work experiences, have balanced working time allocations across different activities and work with entrepreneurial peers; i.e., collaborating with colleagues or academic scientists who have started new ventures in the past is important.
Although studies of student employment (‘earning while learning’) mostly find positive wage effects, they do not adequately consider the relation of the employment to the field of study. We investigate how different types of student employment during tertiary education affect short- and long-term labour market returns. Beyond examining differences between non-working and part-time working students, we distinguish between student employment related and unrelated to the field of study. Our results show significant positive labour market returns of ‘earning while learning’ only for student employment related to the field of study. These returns consist of a lower unemployment risk, shorter job-search duration, higher wage effects, and greater job responsibility.
In our paper, we explore the diversity-performance link in knowledge production and argue it to be the result of two countervailing effects (resource vs. process perspective). Theoretically, we show that the relative strength of the two effects crucially depends on moderating factors that relate to specificities of the knowledge production process, the type of diversity and group interaction. We empirically test our hypotheses based on an original data set of 45 university research groups from different disciplinary fields which are by nature expected to produce new knowledge and are faced with complex tasks. Employing traditional OLS regressions as well as non-parametric LOWESS analyses, our hypotheses are largely born out by the data. In particular, we find a U-shaped relation between cultural diversity and performance in research groups from the humanities & social sciences and a negative link between functional diversity and per-formance in research groups from the natural sciences. As the disciplinary fields proxy different underlying knowledge production processes, the implications of our study can be generalized to other settings and help derive general conclusions for the management of diversity and future competitiveness strategies in knowledge intensive economies.
This paper investigates the effect of financial incentives on student performance and analyzes for the first time how the incentive effect in education is moderated by students’ risk and time preferences. To examine this interaction we use a natural experiment that we combine with data from surveys and economic experiments on risk and time preferences. We not only find that students who are offered financial incentives for better grades have on average better first- and second-year grade point averages, but more importantly, we find that highly impatient students respond more strongly to financial incentives than less impatient students. This finding suggests that financial incentives are most effective if they solve educational problems of myopic students.
Drawing on an unusually large set of employer-employee data, we examine how workers’ pay is related to the educational composition within their occupational group. We find that educational composition as measured by the educational diversity and the educational level of an occupational group is positively related to its workers’ pay within that group. In addition, our findings suggest that the educational level moderates the positive effect of educational diversity, i.e. that pay increases related to diversity are higher in occupational groups with higher levels of education. We also discuss implications for management practice and possible further theoretical developments.
We use a long panel data set for four cohorts of male blue-collar workers entering into an internal labor market to analyze the effect of age on the probability of participating in different employer-financed training measures. We find that training participation probabilities are inverted u-shaped with age and that longer training measures are undertaken earlier in life and working career. These findings are consistent with predictions from a human capital model that incorporates amortization period and screening effects.
This paper examines whether high quality, curriculum-based training at the workplace makes firms more innovative. Our dependent variable innovativeness is operationalized with four different measures: general innovation, product innovation, process innovation and patent applications. As explanatory variable we use regulated apprenticeship training programs with three to four years length of the type found in German speaking countries. We argue that this type of curriculum-based workplace training provides an additional source of knowledge in the knowledge production process through its innovative and steadily revised training curricula. We expect that this additional source of knowledge leads to higher innovation in training firms compared to non-training firms. Our empirical results show that up-to-date curriculum-based apprenticeship training is positively associated with all of the four innovation measures. Taking endogenous apprenticeship decision into account, the positive effect is only significant for general innovation and patent applications.
This paper contains a critique of solvency regulation such as imposed on banks by Basel I and II. Banks’ investment divisions seek to maximize the expected rate of return on risk-adjusted capital (RORAC). For them, higher solvency S lowers the cost of refinancing but ties costly capital. Sequential decision making by banks is tracked over three periods. In period 1, exogenous changes in expected returns dμ and in volatility dσ occur, causing optimal adjustments dS* / dμ and dS * / dσ in period 2. In period 3, the actual adjustment dS* creates an endogenous trade-off with slope dμ / dσ. Both Basel I and II are shown to modify this slope, inducing top management to opt for a higher value of σ in several situations. Therefore, both types of solvency regulation can run counter their stated objective, which may also be true of Basel III.
We show in a rather general setting that Hoelder and Lipschitz stability properties ofsolutions to variational problems can be characterized by convergence of more or less abstract iteration schemes. Depending on the principle of convergence, new and intrinsic stability conditions can be derived. Our most abstract models are (multi-) functions on complete metric spaces. The relevance of this approach is illustrated by deriving bothclassical and new results on existence and optimality conditions, stability of feasible and solution sets and convergence behavior ofsolution procedures.
