We investigate the impact of adopting an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in a retail chain and find interesting parallels between firm and employee outcomes. Concerning performance: (i) sales and inventory turnover initially drop by 7% and recover in 6-12 months; (ii) inventory...

We examine the proposition that, in co-operatives, the need for democracy must clash with efficiency demands. To shed light on diverse issues surrounding this claim we distinguish different forms of co-operatives and identify different meanings of democratic governance and forms of economies of...

The recent era of economic turbulence has generated a growing enthusiasm for an increase in new and original economic insights based around the concepts of reciprocity and social enterprise. This stimulating and thought-provoking Handbook not only encourages and supports this growth, but also...

By using weekly records on efficiency for four production lines in a Finnish food-processing plant during the period 1999–2005, the authors investigate the effects on production line performance once changes in Human Resource Management (HRM) practices were instituted. Using time-series...

We investigate the impact of adopting an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system on performance changes and employee outcomes in a retail chain. We find that: (i) sales and inventory turnover initially drop by 7 % and recover in 6-12 months; (ii) inventory turnover recovers more quickly for...

Using new panel data for Finnish co-operative banks we study the impact of training on wages and performance. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to compare explicitly the effects of general and firm-specific workplace training on outcomes for both employees and firms. Unlike much existing...

In this paper we use rich panel data for a representative sample of Estonian enterprises to analyse diverse issues related to the determinants of ownership structures and ownership changes after privatisation. A key focus is to determine whether ownership changes are related to economic...

This paper presents the first empirical evidence on the nature and effects of human resource practices (HRM) in the Finnish manufacturing sector. In the analysis, we use the novel survey on HRM practices, based on a representative random sample from the population of the Finnish manufacturing...

While theorists differ sharply on the expected economic impact of stock options, typically empirical work has found a positive association between option schemes and firm productivity. However, existing data are limited and may not enable reliable investigation of the productivity effects of...

A new, long and rich panel data set consisting of all Finnish publicly traded firms is used to study how firm characteristics and stock market developments influence the adoption and targeting of stock option compensation. Stock option adoption is found to be a pro-cyclical phenomenon. Findings...