Statistical cluster techniques are applied in the development of two new taxonomies of manufacturing industries. The first focuses on the distinction between exogenous, location dependent comparative cost advantages, such as the relative abundance of capital or labour, and endogenously created...

This paper aims at establishing the existence of systematic differences in the nature of competitive strategies available to individual firms across industries. By means of qualitative content analysis, we extracted a matrix of 76 industries times 12 strategies reported as being characteristic...

The increasing overload of information that bothers people is affecting businesses on online job boards as well. Although there is no doubt about the benefits of those platforms, companies are threatened to get lost in the sheer mass of similar advertisements. Considering the background of the...

In 1996, Becker and Gerhart noted that much of the work on human resources (HR) and performance had traditionally been conducted at the individual level of analysis. However, in the 1990s, empirical research on HR and performance increasingly moved to the plant/unit and firm level of analysis...

We use a unique longitudinal dataset that tracks the exporting behavior of Belgian manufacturing firms between 1997 and 2009. We ask how slack resources, including financial and human resource slack, influence firms’ exporting behavior. Our findings suggest that both types of slack resources...

Sprachwissenschaftler haben das 'Humankapital' zum Unwort des Jahres 2004 erklärt, weil - so die Kritik - der Begriff den Menschen auf eine nur ökonomisch interessante Größe reduziere. In ähnlicher Weise mit der wirtschaftlichen Bedeutung des Menschen für das Unternehmen wird argumentiert,...

The present paper examines the wage effects of continuous training programs using individual-level data from the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP). In order to account for selectivity in training participation we estimate average treatment effects (ATE and ATT) of general and firm-specific...