Subsidized research joint ventures (RJVs) between public research institutions and industry have become increasingly popular in Europe and the US. We study the long-run effects of such a support scheme that has been maintained by the Danish government since 1995. To cope with identification problems we apply nearest neighbor matching and conditional difference-in-difference estimation methods. Our main findings are that (i) program participation effects are instant for annual patent applications and last for three years, (ii) employment effects materialize first after one year and (iii) there are no statistically significant effects on value added or labor productivity. We further show that these overall results are primarily driven by firms that were patent active prior to joining the RJV and that there are no statistically significant effects for large firms. The insignificant results we document for large firms coupled with the fact that these type of firms are over-represented in many support programs, including the one considered here, leads us to suggest a rethinking of support policies that often aim at large firms.
This paper provides non-experimental field evidence on positive and negative worker reciprocity. We analyze the performance reactions of professional workers to fair and unfair wage allocations in their natural environment. The objects of interest are professional soccer players in the German Bundesliga. This environment enables us to circumvent the main problems of observational studies on reciprocity because there is substantial transparency in individual player values and performance. Our main finding is that workers exhibit both positive and negative reciprocity toward employers who deviate from a player’s perception of a fair market wage. This perception of a fair wage follows from a Mincer-type wage equation that incorporates a worker’s past performance. The different results between changing and non-changing players are in line with theories of fairness perception but cannot be explained by private information from the employers or the personal career concerns of the players. Altogether, our findings provide strong evidence for the external validity of previous laboratory results on gift exchange in the labor market.
This paper provides a formal analysis of persuasive advertising when firms compete for consumers with heterogenous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive advertising varies across consumers and increases in the average degree of conformity. In equilibrium, both quality and cost leaders choose higher advertising intensities and charge higher prices than their competitors. In addition, we show that an increase in the average degree of conformity among consumers reinforces asymmetries between firms.
Although trainee pay is central to the economics of work-based training, institutionalists have paid it little attention, while economists typically assume that it is set by market clearing. We document large differences in the pay of metalworking apprentices in three countries: relative to the pay of skilled employees, it is high in Britain, middling in Germany, and low in Switzerland. Combining fieldwork evidence with national survey data, we associate apprentice pay with both institutional attributes and market forces: specifically, with trade union presence and goals, employer organisation, the contractual status of apprentices, the supply of eligible and interested young people, and public subsidies. Apprentice pay appears to have fallen in Britain and Germany as bargaining coverage has declined.
This article offers reflections and insights on Management Communication Quarterly from a younger scholar in the field of organizational communication. After providing a brief history of the journal, topics of internationality, interdisciplinarity, and identity are explored. This is followed by a discussion among other “emerging scholars” in the field of organizational communication about these topics. The article concludes with a discussion about the role and format of Management Communication Quarterly in the digital age.
Innovations are rarely generated in complete isolation. Due to the inherent uncertainty, the manifold underlying knowledge base and high financial investments, firms seek to integrate external partners for the generation of new products and processes. However there is an ongoing debate whether firms, which develop their innovations in close cooperation with external partners, such as suppliers, customers and governmental research institutions, can benefit with respect to innovation performance in contrast to firms which cooperate less. This paper aims at investigating how diversity in cooperation partners effects the firms' output innovation performance in terms of generated sales with innovative products. To address this question the authors analyze a large-scale sample of microdata from Swiss firms derived from four waves (1999, 2002, 2005, and 2008) of the Swiss innovation survey data according to the European Community Innovation Survey, applying a panel data analysis. The findings suggest, that firms with a higher diversity in cooperation partners could benefit in generating new product innovations.
This is a well-written compendium of both classical and recent results on qualitative and quantitative stability of linear optimization problems, where the case of infinitely many constraints is intrinsically included. The author presents basic theoretical approaches and outcomes of this area in a concise, competent and informative manner. Since this survey is almost complete, we cannot add much in our note. So, we will restrict ourselves to a discussion of two special subjects which are related to our own research, complementing thereby single aspects of the author’s presentation of Lipschitz stability analysis.
