Corporate political activity and firm outcomes: A meta-analysis

Using meta-analytic methods on a sample of 74 studies, we explore the links between CPA and public policy outcomes, and between CPA and firm outcomes. We find that CPA has at best a weak effect and that it appears to be better at maintaining public policy than changing them.

International Expansion, Diversification and Regulated Firm Nonmarket Strategy

Previous studies have shown that regulated firms diversify for reasons that are different than for unregulated firms. We explore some of these differences by providing a theoretical model that starts by considering the firm-regulator relationship as an incomplete information issue, in which a regulated incumbent has knowledge that the regulator does not have, but the firm cannot convey hard information about this knowledge. The incumbent faces both market and nonmarket competition from a new entrant. In that context, we show that when the firm faces tough nonmarket competition domestically, going abroad can create a mechanism that makes information transmission to the regulator more credible. International expansion can thus be a way to solve domestic nonmarket issues in addition to being a catalyst for growth.

Labor market experience and well-being after firm closure. Survey evidence on displaced manufacturing workers in Switzerland

This study examines how plant closure affected individuals' careers and lives about two years after they lost their job. We analyze the displaced workers' reemployment prospects and study for reemployed workers the characteristics of their new jobs in terms of reemployment sectors, wages, and job quality. Additionally, we inquire how workers' sociability and subjective well-being were affected by job loss. Our analysis is based on our own survey conducted in Switzerland in 2011. The survey included the workforce of five manufacturing companies that had closed down two years earlier. We addressed the risk of biases typically prevailing with observational data by complementing it with register data from the public unemployment insurance. Moreover, we use a control group based on matched data from the Swiss Household Panel. We find that workers experience strongly diverging outcomes after plant closure: on the one hand, high proportions of the workers experience a smooth transition after plant closure. More than two-thirds of the workers returned to employment, more than half of them within less than six months. With respect to their social lives, we find that positive changes in relationships with their spouse, family and friends are more frequent than negative changes. On the other hand, for a small group of workers plant closure had a detrimental effect. Close to twenty percent remained unemployed. About ten percent of the workers were long-term unemployed and subsequently often were reemployed in jobs of lower quality. Unemployed workers and workers who dropped out of the labor force were particularly prone to find their subjective well-being decreasing. The most vulnerable subgroup in our study were workers over 55. This result stands in striking contrast to a large body of literature that considers labor market institutions to be primarily biased against young workers. Our findings show that older workers not only take longer to find a job but are also less likely to return to employment. Moreover, if they manage to find a job, they experience the severest cuts in wages and job quality of all cohorts. From a life-course perspective this result is remarkable since it shows that workers are not protected from hardship in their late careers. In light of the current demographic changes this finding may have important policy implications. -- Cette étude analyse l'impact des fermetures d'entreprises sur les travailleurs licenciés. Plus précisément, nous examinons les chances de réinsertion des travailleurs dans le marché du travail et - pour ceux qui l'ont fait avec succès - dans quels secteurs, pour quels salaires et avec quelle qualité d'emploi ils sont réengagés. Nous nous intéressons également aux répercussions engendrées par la perte de l'emploi sur la sociabilité et le bien-être subjectif des travailleurs concernés. Notre analyse se base sur les données d'une enquête que nous avons menée en 2011. Cette enquête cible le personnel de cinq entreprises industrielles suisses qui avaient fermé leurs portes deux ans auparavant. Pour dépasser les biais typiques liés aux données d'observation, nous utilisons en complément des données administratives issues de l'assurance chômage publique. De plus, nous utilisons un groupe de contrôle basé sur des données appariées provenant du Panel Suisse de Ménage. Nos analyses montrent des résultats fortement contrastés. D'un côté, la majeure partie des travailleurs ont vécu une transition professionnelle plutôt facile : plus des deux tiers des personnes ont retrouvé un travail et parmi elles plus de la moitié en moins de six mois. Par rapport aux relations sociales, tant avec leur partenaire, qu'avec les membres de leur famille et leurs amis, les changements expérimentés étaient plus fréquemment positifs que négatifs. De l'autre côté, cependant, pour une petite partie de travailleurs la fermeture de leur entreprise a eu des conséquences très négatives sur leur carrière et leur bien-être. Au moment de notre enquête, presque vingt pourcents des travailleurs étaient au chômage. Les personnes au chômage et celles qui avaient quitté le marché du travail ont été particulièrement affectées par une diminution de leur bien-être subjectif. Les plus vulnérables parmi les travailleurs licenciés étaient ceux qui étaient âgés de plus de 55 ans. Notre analyse montre que les travailleurs âgés ont beaucoup moins fréquemment retrouvé un travail. Pour les personnes de plus de 55 ans qui ont tout de même retrouvé un emploi, la réinsertion a durée plus longtemps, les pertes de salaire étaient plus conséquentes et la diminution de la qualité de l'emploi plus grande que pour les autres cohortes. Au vu des changements démographiques actuels, ce résultat interpellant peut avoir des implications politiques importantes.

Effects of business-to-business customer orientation, satisfaction and retention on firm profitability

The objective of this master’s thesis was to examine the effect of customer orientation on customer satisfaction and how customer satisfaction and customer retention contribute to firm profitability. Beside customer orientation, also other antecedents of customer satisfaction, i.e. service quality, flexibility, trust and commitment, were investigated as control variables. Literature review revealed several research gaps concerning research of the key concepts. These research calls were also answered. The empirical study focused on one case company, a telecommunication expert. The data for the empirical part was collected with web-based questionnaire from case company’s business customers in January-February 2008. Sample (N=95) produced 59 answers, thus the response rate of the survey was 62,1%. The data was analyzed by using statistical analysis program, SPSS. As a conclusion, the results indicate that customer orientation do not affect customer satisfaction directly, but through service quality, flexibility and trust. Moreover, customer satisfaction has positive impacts on commitment and intentions to stay as a customer in the future, but not on profitability. In the present study, only past purchase behavior, measured with customer database measure, is positively related to firm profitability.

Service Concept Development - An Appoach for Professional Service Firm

Specific demand for service concept creation has come about from industrial organizations’ desire to find new and innovative ways to differentiate their offering by increasing the level of customer services. Providers of professional services have also demanded new concepts and approaches for their businesses as these industries have become increasingly competitive. Firms are now seeking better ways to understand and segment their customers, to ensure the delivery of quality services and strengthen their position in aggressively competitive markets. This thesis is intended to provide management consulting companies with a new work method that enables service concept creation in a business-to-business environment. The model defines the service concept as a combination of delivered value and the target customers; the third-dimension operating model is brought to the new system in testing of the service concept creation guidelines in the target organization. For testing, service concepts for a management consulting company are created. Service concepts are designed to serve as a solid foundation for further service improvements. Recommendations and proposals for further action related to service development in the target organization are presented, and recommendations to further improve the model created are given.

Customer driven business model – connecting customer value to firm resources in ICT value networks

The objective of this thesis is to provide a business model framework that connects customer value to firm resources and explains the change logic of the business model. Strategic supply management and especially dynamic value network management as its scope, the dissertation is based on basic economic theories, transaction cost economics and the resource-based view. The main research question is how the changing customer values should be taken into account when planning business in a networked environment. The main question is divided into questions that form the basic research problems for the separate case studies presented in the five Publications. This research adopts the case study strategy, and the constructive research approach within it. The material consists of data from several Delphi panels and expert workshops, software pilot documents, company financial statements and information on investor relations on the companies’ web sites. The cases used in this study are a mobile multi-player game value network, smart phone and “Skype mobile” services, the business models of AOL, eBay, Google, Amazon and a telecom operator, a virtual city portal business system and a multi-play offering. The main contribution of this dissertation is bridging the gap between firm resources and customer value. This has been done by theorizing the business model concept and connecting it to both the resource-based view and customer value. This thesis contributes to the resource-based view, which deals with customer value and firm resources needed to deliver the value but has a gap in explaining how the customer value changes should be connected to the changes in key resources. This dissertation also provides tools and processes for analyzing the customer value preferences of ICT services, constructing and analyzing business models and business concept innovation and conducting resource analysis.

Kreivi Carl Gustav Mannerheim, entomologi

Hyönteistiedettä Suomessa 250 vuotta

Gustav Hasford's Gothic Poetics of Demystification

Gustav Hasford is the author of two important Vietnam War novels: The Short-Timers (1979), which was adapted by Stanley Kubrick into Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Phantom Blooper (1990), its sequel. Relentlessly critical of the war that destroyed his generation, Hasford uses an array of Gothic themes, tropes and figures - such as the werewolf, vampire, and ghost - to describe the transformation of men into monsters that begins with basic training and can never be reversed. These and other Gothic devices allow Hasford to demystify and disenchant the Vietnam War, to strip it of euphemisms and official myths, and to reveal the violence that lays beneath. Unlike other well-known writers of the same generation, such as Michael Herr and Chris O'Brien, Hasford eschews postmodern techniques in order to pursue a rhetorical strategy of horror combined with black humor. The results are two novels of extraordinary ferocity, critical acumen and wit. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the specifically Gothic reading experience of ethical dilemma - a Gothic exercise in judgment - choreographed by both narratives.

Expanding to institutionally different countries. Reasons, Firm International Experience, and Entry Mode Choice

We examine entry mode choice and its consequences when a multinational enterprise (MNE) expands into an institutionally different country. We argue that discussions of entry mode should distinguish between informal (e.g., culture) and formal (e.g., laws) institutions, and should take into account not just the home country of the MNE and its distance to the focal host country, but the MNE's overall footprint and experience across the world in general, especially in countries with an institutional structure that is similar to that of the focal host country. Specifically, we argue that firms with experience in countries with different informal institutions will be more likely to enter via acquisitions than firms without such experience, that such experience will not matter as much in the case of formal institutions, and that such firms will exit more quickly when they enter via equity alliances than through full acquisitions. We also distinguish between balanced and unbalanced alliances and argue that balanced alliances will be more enduring, but only when the host country is culturally (not legally) different from the other countries where the MNE has experience. Our arguments suggest that entry mode should be conditioned on a firm's experience in other markets, and that intercountry differences in formal versus informal institutions have distinct influences on entry mode.

Incumbent audit firm-provided tax services and the clients with low financial reporting quality

This study investigates whether incumbent audit firm-provided tax services enhance or impair the likelihood of acknowledging client companies’ low financial reporting quality. In particular, we examine the association between tax-related fees and the likelihood of timely restatements, and internal control weakness disclosures among a sample of US companies that all have misstatements in financial information. The empirical findings indicate that companies paying higher tax-related fees are less likely to disclose SOX 404 internal control weakness disclosures, implying that underlying control problems are unacknowledged when incumbent audit firm provided tax-related fees are higher. However, the findings suggest that just providing both audit and tax-related services does not have an impact on audit quality per se, but rather it is the magnitude of the tax-related fees in particular that counts. We also find some evidence suggesting that companies paying higher tax-related fees have higher likelihood of restatement lags, whereas companies paying smaller tax-related fees to their audit firm restate financial statements in a timelier manner. Overall, the findings suggest that audit scrutiny of client companies with low quality financial reporting is weaker when the magnitude of tax-related fees is higher.

Cooperation in R&D, firm size and type of partnership: Evidence for the Spanish automotive industry

This paper aims to analyse cooperation in R&D in the automobile industry in Spain. It first examines to what extent firms cooperate with external actors in the field of technological innovation, and if so, with what type of cooperation partner, paying special attention to the differentiation according to the size of the firms. Second, it aims to study how the firm’s size may affect not only the decision of cooperating but also with which type of partner, while controlling for other determinants that have been considered in the literature as main drivers of collaborative activities in R&D. We use data provided by the Technological Innovation Panel in the 2006-2008 period for firms in the automotive sector. We estimate a bivariate probit model that takes into account the two types of cooperation mostly present in the automotive industry, vertical and institutional, explicitly considering the interdependencies that may arise in the simultaneous choice of both.

Cooperation in R&D, firm size and type of partnership: Evidence for the Spanish automotive industry

This paper aims to analyse cooperation in R&D in the automobile industry in Spain. It first examines to what extent firms cooperate with external actors in the field of technological innovation, and if so, with what type of cooperation partner, paying special attention to the differentiation according to the size of the firms. Second, it aims to study how the firm’s size may affect not only the decision of cooperating but also with which type of partner, while controlling for other determinants that have been considered in the literature as main drivers of collaborative activities in R&D. We use data provided by the Technological Innovation Panel in the 2006-2008 period for firms in the automotive sector. We estimate a bivariate probit model that takes into account the two types of cooperation mostly present in the automotive industry, vertical and institutional, explicitly considering the interdependencies that may arise in the simultaneous choice of both.