The importance of knowledge and skills in meeting new challenges in production and distribution is particularly evident in today’s market, which is characterized by a saturation of products and strong competition. To be successful in the market, companies must stand out and be creative and...

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (2008) to detect whether the widely used class of Residual Income based...

Gamification as the use of game mechanisms for motivation in non-game contexts has been gaining popularity and is considered one of the hottest topics in management. However, there is little research on gamification in remuneration systems, especially with regard to the sales force. The article...

A recent literature documents that manufacturing employment growth in developing countries has been sluggish over the past decades, and that deindustrialization has often set in at historically low levels of income. However, there is little evidence on which kind of jobs are disappearing...

Although four out of five manufacturing employees work in production occupations in most countries (as opposed to white collar occupations), there is little international evidence on how the transition to more capital intensive production methods has affected the demand for different groups of...

How does risk or uncertainty in the productivity of research affect the growth rate of the economy? To answer this question, a model of endogenous technological change is used where sustained growth stems from intentional investments in R&D from profit-maximizing firms. The uncertainty arises...

Evolutionary and environmental economics have a potentially close relationship. This paper reviews past and identifies potential applications of evolutionary concepts and methods to environmental economics. This covers a number of themes: resource use and ecosystem management; growth and...

The analysis in this paper shows that unpredictable variations in economic productivity may have a positive or negative effect on the average growth rate of output. This theoretical ambiguity result is not solely determined by the value of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (of...

The strategic choices regarding innovation and R&D policy in Portugal have, over the last two decades, produced various positive benefits, in which particularly the regions of Lisbon and Algarve have taken the lead. These are the only parts of the country that converge towards the European...

Measuring the dispersion of productivity or efficiency across firms in a market or industry is rife with methodological issues. Nevertheless, the existence of considerable dispersion now is well documented and widely accepted. Less well understood are the economic features and mechanisms...