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This paper provides a systematic literature review of studies investigating the effect of an intervention on the efficiency of a decision-making unit, when efficiency is computed using nonparametric frontier approaches. This paper offers a guide for future research by identifying patterns in (1) the fields of application, (2) applied efficiency models, and (3) analysis of efficiency determinants. Our findings indicate that, despite the prominent role of frontier techniques in the analysis of public sector performances and the importance of the effectiveness and the policy perspective, these two approaches have long been kept separate. Nevertheless, the combination of efficiency and effectiveness is fundamental to evaluate public interventions and to detect inefficiencies at the policy level, especially in key sectors such as education, health, and environment.

Research Summary: Variance decomposition methods allow strategy scholars to identify key sources of heterogeneity in firm performance. However, most extant approaches produce estimates that depend on the order in which sources are considered, the ways they are nested, and which sources are treated as fixed or random effects. In this paper, we propose the use of an axiomatically justified, unique, and effective solution to this limitation: the “Shapley Value” approach. We show its effectiveness compared to extant methods using both simulated and real data, and use it to explore how the importance of business group effects varies with group diversification and internationalization in a large, representative sample of European firms. We thus demonstrate the method's superior accuracy and its usefulness in asking and answering new questions. Managerial Summary: A key contribution of strategic management research to managerial practice is identifying drivers of firm performance that operate at firm, corporation, industry, and national levels. A branch of this research measures the relative importance of factors at these different levels in producing variation in firm performance, thus helping top managers focus efforts on aspects of their businesses most likely to yield performance differences. However, estimates produced by extant methods are sensitive to method used, and to modeling choices made. This paper proposes the use of the “Shapley Value” approach, which is free from such sensitivity, shows its effectiveness compared to extant methods, and uses it to explore how the importance of factors at the level of the business group varies with group diversification and internationalization.

Much to the liking of many geographers, Forbes Magazine’s contributor and professor in meteorology at the University of Georgia, J. Marshall Shepherd, wrote in early March 2020 an op‐ed titled ‘Why Geography is a key part of fighting the COVID‐19 Coronavirus outbreak’. In Wired, David Wolman (2020) wrote how the pandemic is redefining our relationship with space in a contribution titled ‘Amid a Pandemic, Geography Returns with a Vengeance’. Notwithstanding the many challenges that the Covid‐19 pandemic poses, both in our private lives and in our professional activities, it offers a great opportunity for analysis through a geographic lens. Geographical knowledge and geospatial data, perhaps best exemplified by the widely used Johns Hopkins University COVID‐19 tracking website, have already proven to be vital for understanding the pandemic’s reach. The uneven distribution of the virus across and within countries raises inherently geographic questions regarding the political, economic, financial, socio‐cultural and demographic dimensions of the pandemic. The aim of this special issue of Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (TESG) is to present the initial investigations of geographers and socio‐spatial scientists into the emerging spaces of the effects of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Following a call, we have received well over 40 papers, thereby exceeding our expectations. After internal and external review of the papers we here present the papers that were selected for publication. We are thankful to the reviewers who provided fast, yet detailed, feedback on the papers. In addition, we would like to thank Grace Ong, Senior Journals Publishing Editor at Wiley, and Noel Valdivia, Production Editor, for their support in the publication of this special issue. The papers in this special issue present an interesting geographical mix (with case studies from Asia, Europe and the North America) as well as a variety of methodological approaches towards understanding the spatial manifestations and variegated geographic impact of the pandemic. Furthermore, they well represent the different thematic fields in geography. The editors of TESG welcome more papers on the consequences of the COVID‐19 pandemic, which we will have reviewed as we do with any other paper. We will not be able to fast‐track new submissions but we will publish new papers online in ‘Early View’ soon after they have been accepted for publication. Future papers on COVID‐19 will also be added to a Virtual Special Issue, which will consist of all papers published in this issue together with new papers on the geography of the pandemic. As much as possible we aim for the open access publication of these papers. The papers in this special issue are grouped by theme and in the remainder of this editorial we will briefly introduce these different themes.

The food system, and those who depend on it, have been strongly but unevenly affected by COVID-19. Overall, the impacts on food systems, poverty, and nutrition have been caused by a combination of a generalized economic recession and disruptions in agri-food supply chains. This paper provides an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue of Agricultural Economics. The papers in this volume confirm that both income shocks and supply disruptions have affected food security and livelihoods the most where supply chains were more poorly integrated, and poverty and market informality had greater presence before COVID-19. Yet, as the pandemic still has societies worldwide in a stranglehold, outcomes remain uncertain and reliable data are still sparsely available. This Special Issue of Agricultural Economics provides new insights of the pandemics impact on food systems, household welfare, and food security, building on both model-based scenario analysis and new survey data. These methods have proven helpful in providing these insights amidst the unprecedented shock that the pandemic has caused to production systems and livelihoods worldwide. However, they also suffer from obvious limitations identified in this editorial overview paper and require substantial improvement in order to understand the changes in economic behavior and functioning of food supply chains induced by the pandemic. ispartof: AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS vol:52 issue:3 pages:365-374 ispartof: location:Netherlands status: published

This paper examines the impact of private equity (PE) directors and their human capital on operating performance in a unique hand‐collected sample of 200 secondary management buyouts (SMBOs) during 2000–2015. It shows that PE directors’ human capital tends to play a statistically and economically important role in performance. Financial (rather than operational) experience of PE directors in acquiring PE firms tends to have a substantial impact on post‐SMBO profitability, while high‐level business education is especially important in post‐SMBO growth performance enhancement. Complementary expertise, provided by directors in buying and selling PE firms, plays an important role only in post‐SMBO growth improvements. Overall, the paper's results provide evidence that governance benefits of the buyout model tend not to be exhausted in the primary buyout stage, but the effects in the secondary buyout phase depend on the nature of PE directors’ human capital resource, notably in respect of the balance between board monitoring and advisory roles. This study therefore adds to growing evidence on how the ownership and life‐cycle nature of firms affect sustainability of boards fulfilling their roles. The results are robust to sample selection bias, different types of PE firms and different measures of human capital.

One of the fundamental and recurring issues in performance management is the adoption of a simplistic, short‐term, narrow, metrics‐oriented approach, which often results in unintended negative outcomes, some of which could be disastrous. This paper makes the case that the key to preventing this syndrome lies at the intersection of paradox and stakeholder theories. Both theories encourage a more complex, long‐term, holistic, balanced approach to management. Stakeholder theory focuses on addressing the many (sometimes conflicting) goals of multiple stakeholders, and paradox theory provides insights into how this challenging task (i.e. of simultaneously addressing multiple conflicting priorities) can be accomplished. Thus, the former provides the ‘what’ and the latter the ‘how’ of effective organizational performance management. Accordingly, the literature at the intersection of both theories (composed of 69 scholarly outputs), was reviewed, and in so doing, identified seven domain areas and 21 constructs, all of which implicitly deal with either performance management or its communication, thereby lending support to this paper's thesis. The implications of this review for both theory and practice, including the role of paradoxical cognitive mechanisms, is discussed.

Universities and research centres have long been used to study management issues. A growing body of research has focused on how science can be effectively commercialized, emphasizing technology-commercialization activities, university-industry collaborations, and academic entrepreneurship. While much of this work has documented empirical relationships, our aim in this introductory paper of the special issue is to show how research on science commercialization may yield conceptual contributions to the field of management. Hence, we first discuss the importance of context for theory development and how science commercialization can be a promising setting for making contributions to management theory. We then review how the science commercialization context has been used for theory development, identifying two facets used by scholars to conceptualize science commercialization (i.e., managing the lengthy complex process of transition between institutional contexts, and the multiple goals and impacts of actors engaging in science commercialization). This forms the basis for discussing what makes this context particularly suited for theory-development in general management and for outlining a future research agenda. We conclude by summarizing the papers in the special issue.

In this retrospective article, we outline the rationale for starting the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. We provide evidence on the percentage of published papers in SEJ in each of ten key themes in strategic entrepreneurship identified when the journal was founded. Evidence on progress towards goal achievement in terms of trends in submissions, desk reject and acceptances rates, downloads, plus examples of highly cited papers and entry into key indicators such as the Financial Times list of 50 journals. We outline developments in strategic entrepreneurship and their implications for future research, notably the need to consider multiple levels of analysis and the role of context variety. Finally, we discuss some of the lessons from SEJ for the general challenges that arise in starting a new journal.

Missing data are a common issue in cost‐effectiveness analysis (CEA) alongside randomised trials and are often addressed assuming the data are ‘missing at random’. However, this assumption is often questionable, and sensitivity analyses are required to assess the implications of departures from missing at random. Reference‐based multiple imputation provides an attractive approach for conducting such sensitivity analyses, because missing data assumptions are framed in an intuitive way by making reference to other trial arms. For example, a plausible not at random mechanism in a placebo‐controlled trial would be to assume that participants in the experimental arm who dropped out stop taking their treatment and have similar outcomes to those in the placebo arm.Drawing on the increasing use of this approach in other areas, this paper aims to extend and illustrate the reference‐based multiple imputation approach in CEA. It introduces the principles of reference‐based imputation and proposes an extension to the CEA context. The method is illustrated in the CEA of the CoBalT trial evaluating cognitive behavioural therapy for treatment‐resistant depression. Stata code is provided. We find that reference‐based multiple imputation provides a relevant and accessible framework for assessing the robustness of CEA conclusions to different missing data assumptions.

We establish a rigorous duality theory, under No Unbounded Profit with Bounded Risk, for an infinite horizon problem of optimal consumption in the presence of an income stream that can terminate randomly at an exponentially distributed time, independent of the asset prices. We thus close a duality gap encountered by Vellekoop and Davis in a version of this problem in a Black-Scholes market. Many of the classical tenets of duality theory hold, with the notable exception that marginal utility at zero initial wealth is finite. We use as dual variables a class of supermartingale deflators such that deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption in excess of income is a supermartingale. We show that the space of discounted local martingale deflators is dense in our dual domain, so that the dual problem can also be expressed as an infimum over the discounted local martingale deflators. We characterise the optimal wealth process, showing that optimal deflated wealth is a potential decaying to zero, while deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption over income is a uniformly integrable martingale at the optimum. We apply the analysis to the Vellekoop and Davis example and give a numerical solution., Major revision of earlier paper entitled "Duality and deep learning for optimal consumption with randomly terminating income". arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2006.04687, arXiv:2009.00972

Even though it is well known that for most relevant computational problems different algorithms may perform better on different classes of problem instances, most researchers still focus on determining a single best algorithmic configuration based on aggregate results such as the average. In this paper, we propose Integer Programming based approaches to build decision trees for the Algorithm Selection Problem. These techniques allow automate three crucial decisions: (i) discerning the most important problem features to determine problem classes; (ii) grouping the problems into classes and (iii) select the best algorithm configuration for each class. To evaluate this new approach, extensive computational experiments were executed using the linear programming algorithms implemented in the COIN-OR Branch & Cut solver across a comprehensive set of instances, including all MIPLIB benchmark instances. The results exceeded our expectations. While selecting the single best parameter setting across all instances decreased the total running time by 22%, our approach decreased the total running time by 40% on average across 10-fold cross validation experiments. These results indicate that our method generalizes quite well and does not overfit., International Transactions in Operational Research. 2019

In this paper we descriptively investigate the Covid-19 pandemic's early impact on the fruit and vegetable supply chain in Senegal, using trade statistics and survey data collected through online questionnaires and telephone interviews with smallholder farmers, agro-industrial companies, agricultural workers, traders, importers, and consumers. Our results point to major differences in how Covid-19 and containment measures disrupt supply chains between the modern export-oriented supply chain that is centered around a few large vertically integrated agro-industrial companies, and the more traditional domestic-oriented supply chain with a large number of smallholder farmers and informal traders-with the former being more resilient to the Covid-19 shock. We show that both the modern and the traditional supply chain innovate to cope with the Covid-19 containment measures. While our study is subject to some limitations, our findings bring nuance in the debate on the resilience of the food system to the pandemic, and have important policy and research implications toward international trade, social safety measures, and food and nutrition security. ispartof: AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS vol:52 issue:3 pages:423-440 ispartof: location:Netherlands status: published

Geographical indications (GI) certify the geographical origins of a product and delineate the specific area in which the certified product must be produced. Despite a large literature on the economics of GIs, few papers have explored the question of the optimal size of GI regions. This note presents a flexible conceptual framework to explore the economics and politics of the delimitation of a GI. The general framework describes the efficiency and distributional effects of the size of a GI and shows how this affects interest groups’ incentives to influence government decision‐making. ispartof: JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS vol:72 issue:1 pages:321-328 status: published

This paper assesses the relationship between import competition and firm‐level markups by examining the imports of intermediate and final goods. Using a rich firm‐level dataset of French food companies from 2001 to 2013, we find that, on average, increased final goods import competition (intermediate inputs) is negatively (positively) associated with firm‐level markups. These results are consistent with the trade models that predict the pro‐competitive effects of trade and the incomplete cost pass‐through to prices. Importantly, the reduction in markups due to the pro‐competitive effect of trade tends to be counterbalanced by the increase in markups induced by incomplete pass‐through. Our empirical analysis uncovers considerable heterogeneity in the effects of output and input import competition on markups. Our results particularly reveal that firm size and industry market structure (i.e. concentration) are key determinants of how firm‐level markups respond to import competition.

Banking plays a vital role in the financial life of an industry, and the significance of banks can be realized from the fact that they are measured as to be the life-blood of the modern economy. The Banking industry is considered as the mirror of any country. Banks are especially crucial for developing economies like Bangladesh, which has 57 listed banks. Due to increased competition, banks are trying to grab a new and growing market segment like the students' segment. So, there is a gap to explore student's purchase intention toward banking service as the intention is one of the critical predictors of behavior. Banks utilize service marketing strategies, a key concept of service marketing, to retain existing customers, and attract new ones. Therefore, this paper addressed the impact of a service marketing mix on the purchase intention of banking service among university students in Dhaka city, the capital of Bangladesh. The results should enable marketers to detect the most critical and significant drivers affecting the purchase intention of university students. All the elements of the service marketing mix except place, promotion, and physical evidence were significantly related to purchasing intention. It has implications for bank service marketers regarding the practical design of mix strategy of service marketing for student segments. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This paper examines the determinants of the spatial and topological structure of three types of urban networks within the Yangtze River Delta. These networks consist of transport infrastructure links, business interactions in producer services firms, and leisure mobility. The influence of distance, size, administrative borders, landform contiguity, cultural affinities, economic alliances and administrative rank are examined. We position our findings as an empirical elaboration of the formation of multiplex urban networks. Our results show that in spite of significant correlations between all of these explanatory factors and the three urban networks, only some factors affect each of the three networks. More specifically, the business network has a weak dependence on distance and cultural affinities; intercity mobility is closely related to the size of cities' populations and distance; and landform patterns remain a fundamental basis for intercity transport linkages. Our results highlight China's hierarchical-administrative specifics in the shaping of urban networks.

In this paper, I revisit the central trade-off between insurance and incentives in the design of unemployment insurance policies. The generosity of unemployment insurance benefits differs not only across countries, but also across workers within countries. After illustrating some important dimensions of heterogeneity in a cross-country analysis, I extend the standard Baily–Chetty formula to identify the key empirical moments and elasticities required to evaluate the differentiated unemployment policy within a country. I also review some prior work and aim to provide guidance for future work trying to inform the design of unemployment policies.

Growth of the platform economy has been accompanied by critiques of the fragmented, isolated and precarious nature of the employment it offers. Yet, little is known about how creative freelancers perceive the meaning of work on the platforms. Based on 40 interviews with freelancers, clients, platform owners and industry experts, this paper reveals that most freelancers are concerned about how operating through the platform, and their dependence on it, is undermining the meaningfulness of their work. Freelancers find that the platforms are eroding both the manifest (i.e. monetary) and latent (i.e. non-monetary) meaning of their work although they are mostly concerned about the latent element of meaning. The analysis reveals that the small group of freelancers who pursue meaningful work and earn a sustainable income on platforms are those with strong entrepreneurial orientation.

Research Summary Constructing narratives of transformative change is an important but challenging practice through which strategy makers attempt to influence acceptance of an ongoing transformation. To understand whether and how strategy makers can construct a steady influx of captivating narratives of transformative change, we analyzed how one noted strategy maker assisted the successful transformation of his organization over three decades by orchestrating the production of change narratives. Our analysis reveals that the strategy maker constructed and reconstructed meanings of change over time using three sets of distinct but interconnected narrative practices. We develop a dynamic model linking the simultaneous mobilization of these practices to strategy makers’ ability to harness the persistent tension between novelty and familiarity in a transformative change, and thereby win endorsement from key audiences. Managerial Summary How can storytelling be used to influence acceptance of an ongoing organizational transformation? In this paper, we try to answer this question by examining how, over three decades, Italian company Alessi documented its transformation from a manufacturer of kitchen steel utensils to a producer of a variety of household objects purchased also for their symbolic value. The leader behind Alessi's transformation, Alberto Alessi, orchestrated such narrative production, targeting employees, customers, retailers, and visitors to Alessi exhibitions. Our findings uncover how narratives can be used to win audiences’ endorsement of change, through narrative practices aimed at: (1) constructing a collective memory of change; (2) depicting change as a novel but coherent departure from the past; and (3) portraying change as a transcendent endeavor.

ispartof: PAPERS IN REGIONAL SCIENCE vol:98 issue:5 pages:1903-+ status: published

Despite consensus in the literature that regulation, technology-push and market-pull drive eco-innovation (EI), evidence remains limited on the diverse firm capabilities needed to boost EI. Building on the natural-resource-based-view (NRBV) of the firm and the EI literature, this paper posits that firms need to renew and realign their capabilities, and ultimately develop distinctive sustainability-oriented capabilities, in order to meet the rapidly changing regulatory, technology, and market demands. Results of the analysis, based on a survey of UK firms, reveal that eco-innovations are more likely to arise when firms: (a) build capabilities on voluntary self-regulation (i.e. executive driven EMS and CSR) because such organisational capabilities allow them to address increasing regulatory pressures; (b) invest in environmental research and development (i.e. eco-R&D)- instead of generic research and development- because it provides them with the relevant and specific technological capabilities to tackle technology shifts towards sustainability; and (c) develop capabilities in green market sensing as such capabilities allow them to address green consumption needs.

Research summary Patent data is a valued source of information for strategy research. However, patent‐based studies may suffer from sample selection bias given that patents result from within‐firm selection processes and hence do not represent the full population of inventions. We assess how incidental and nonincidental data truncation resulting from firm‐level and inventor‐level selection processes may result in sample selection bias using a quasi‐replication approach, drawing on rich qualitative data and a novel, proprietary dataset of all 40,000 invention disclosures within a large multinational firm. We find that accounting for selection both reaffirms and challenges past work, and discuss the implications of our findings for work on the microfoundations of exploratory innovation activities and for strategy research drawing on patent data. Managerial summary Much of what is known about innovation in general, and in particular about what makes inventors prolific, comes from studies that use patent data. However, many ideas are never patented, meaning that these studies may not in reality talk about ideas or inventions, but only about patents. In this paper, we examine the question of whether patent data can accurately be used to represent inventions by using data on all inventions generated within a large multinational firm to explore how and to what degree the selection processes behind firms' patenting decisions may lead to important differences between the two. We find that accounting for selection changes many previously given managerial implications; for example, we show how junior inventors may often not get the credit they deserve.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd In this paper, we analyse how smallholder farms have evolved during the transition process in former communist countries and how this process has differed across countries and commodities. The role of smallholders in agriculture differs among transition countries, and this diversity is due to a combination of factors, including capital, labour and land endowments, income levels, scale economies, market imperfections, and reform choices. Institutions to access inputs and sell outputs affect the efficiency and survival of smallholders. In the past decade, the share of smallholders in land use and production has declined significantly as younger and more dynamic smallholders have become integrated in modern value chains, whereas older, less dynamic farmers have (semi-)retired, producing only for household consumption. ispartof: Journal Of Agrarian Change vol:18 issue:4 pages:882-892 status: published

In this paper we investigate the role played by capital mobility, labor migration and input–output linkages in shaping the spatial distribution of economic activity in a spatial computable general equilibrium framework. We identify European Union core and periphery regions based on an accessibility index and simulate the impact of a homogeneous transport shock. Our results suggest that agglomeration patterns are magnified by labor and capital mobility, the latter exerting a stronger influence than the former. Results are more nuanced for vertical linkages, which are associated with more agglomeration in terms of GDP, but more dispersion in terms of number of firms and labor demand. These results shed additional light on location mechanisms in applied general equilibrium applications of the new economic geography (NEG) theory and complement the theoretical NEG literature based on analytically solvable models.

Based on a longitudinal case study, this paper presents an ecosystem‐level process model of the interlocking key activities of the business model disruptor, other ecosystem participants (customers, partners, media, analysts), and the incumbent. Together these constitute a strategic process of ecosystem evolution from incumbent‐centered to disruptor‐centered. We identify the phenomenon of a “disruptor's gambit,” where the disruptor reveals its intentions early on through effective framing, followed by rapid adaptation of its business model to satisfy ecosystem needs. These processes generate a virtuous framing‐adaptation cycle, where feed‐forward and feedback enable rapid response to customers and partners, while engaging them as force multipliers during new ecosystem creation. Our findings suggest that framing constitutes a dynamic strategic process enabling disruptors to reduce uncertainty, dislodge powerful incumbents, and shape new ecosystems through business model innovation.

Scholars are paying more attention to knowledge workers (KW) as they gain importance in the knowledge-based economy. Knowledge worker mobility (KWM) can involve various forms of employee and entrepreneurial movements: the transfer of employees from one organization to another either through locational movement or through a change in ownership, the transfer of employees within the same organization but in different units and/or geographies, and the spinning off by employees into new ventures. KWM spans a variety of different contexts which have rarely been explored in prior research. We focus on advancing our understanding of KWM in context, pushing the boundaries of theory and methods by developing a framework focusing on five main contextual dimensions: organizational context and roles, geographical and spatial context, social context and teams, institutional and cultural norms, and temporal dynamics. We summarize the papers presented in the special issue and also identify an agenda for further research.

Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in interest in entrepreneurship research, practice, and policy. Since its founding in 2007, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (SEJ) has sought to contribute by publishing high‐quality papers on a range of themes relating to strategic entrepreneurship, broadly defined. The 10‐year anniversary of SEJ provides an opportunity both to reflect on the road travelled so far and to chart out future directions for the route ahead. We are pleased to do so in this special issue, which draws on themes of enduring and emerging interests to scholars at the interface of strategy and entrepreneurship.

Much of the literature on international new venture s (INVs) tends to focus on early internationalization and view it as the ex pression of firm-specific advantages that existed prior to internationalizati on. This paper presents a normative framework that articulates how INVs can l everage internationalization to drive de novo competitive a dvantage. Drawing on organizational capability and business model litera tures, the framework of Strategic Entrepreneurial Internationalization (SEI ) argues that INVs that adopt an active learning orientation (LO); a niche orientation (NO); encapsulate cross-border asymmetries in their activ ity system (AE); and adopt a business model experimentation approach (BM E) are more likely to succeed in building sustainable competitive advanta ge.

The management buyout is an important exit strategy for small business owners. Negotiations of buyout deals have received little research attention to date. This is surprising given buyout negotiations’ complexity giving rise to multiple issues that require consideration and often conflicting interests of deal parties. This paper examines perceived bargaining power in buyout negotiations between private equity (PE) firms and current owners who sell their business. We identify competition, expertise, and time pre ssure as key antecedent s of PE firms’ perceived barga ining power and examine the moderating effect of PE firms’ industry and size specialization in buyout negotiations. We use a sample of 176 respondents who each report on a particular buyout deal for a PE firm. The majority of respondents are seasoned PE professiona ls who held managing director or investment director positions.

This paper analyses UK unemployment in the period 1979-2005. Structural breaks are identified endogenously and they coincide with key institutional changes associated with financial deregulation and computerization in the New Economy. A vector error correction model is estimated and it confirms that computerization and financial deregulation have had counteracting impacts on UK unemployment. The results are consistent with three hypotheses: technological advances associated with computerization have moderated inflationary struggles between firms and insiders by increasing total factor productivity; financial deregulation has generated financial fragility fostering rises in unemployment; financial deregulation and computerization together have been associated with shifts from manufacturing towards services, fostering structural unemployment. © 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Board of Trustees of the Bulletin of Economic Research.

Many scholars and practitioners have suggested that a creativity-supporting work environment contributes to a firm's product innovation performance. Although there is evidence that such an environment enhances innovative behavior at individual level, very few studies address the effect of a creativity-supporting work environment on product innovation performance at firm level, and the results are inconsistent. This paper examines the relationship between a firm's creativity-supporting work environment and a firm's product innovation performance in a sample of 103 firms. For measuring a firm's creativity-supporting work environment, a comprehensive and creativity-focused framework is used. The framework consists of 9 social-organizational and 12 physical work environment characteristics that are likely to enhance employee creativity. These characteristics contribute to the firm's overall work environment that supports creativity. The firm's product innovation performance is defined by two distinct concepts: new product productivity (NP productivity), which is the extent to which the firm introduces new products to the market, and new product success (NP success), which is the percentage of the firm's sales from new products. In most firms, different knowledgeable informants provided the data for the variables. The results show that firms with creativity-supporting work environments introduce more new products to the market (NP productivity), and have more NP success in terms of new product sales (NP success). NP productivity partly mediates the relationship between creativity-supporting work environment and NP success. The mediation model shows that the two paths from a creativity-supporting work environment to NP success are about equally important: the direct path between creativity-supporting work environment and NP success has a coefficient of .22, and the coefficient of the indirect path via NP productivity is .23. The creativity-supporting work environment framework can be used in managerial practice to enhance employee creativity for product innovation. It allows applying a flexible and broad approach by influencing both social-organizational and physical characteristics of the work environment.

This paper explores ways in which volatility in the housing market that has damaging impacts on the financial system and the wider economy can be reduced. Alternatives to standard debt contracts to finance house purchase are considered. A form of equity loan, where repayments are linked to the value of the house, have major advantages in terms of risk reduction. The way in which such loans can be structured is analyzed.

This paper examines the role of technological capability in product innovation. Building on the absorptive capacity perspective and organizational inertia theory, the authors propose that technological capability has curvilinear and differential effects on exploitative and explorative innovations. The findings support the proposition that though technological capability fosters exploitation at an accelerating rate, it has an inverted U-shaped relationship with exploration. That is, a high level of technological capability impedes explorative innovation. Strategic flexibility strengthens the positive effects of technological capability on exploration, such that when strategic flexibility is high, greater technological capability is associated with more explorative innovation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.