Contributions published at Empirical Research in Business, Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management (Uschi Backes-Gellner)

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Because the extent to which multinational companies (MNCs) benefit from foreign subsidiaries depends on how effectively MNCs manage their foreign subsidiaries' workforce, the international management literature has long focused on how MNCs transfer Human Resource Management (HRM) practices. However, the literature has only vaguely dealt with institutional differences between host and home countries, often simplifying these differences under the umbrella of institutional or cultural distance. This article investigates how MNCs use expatriates to adjust subsidiaries' employment modes to different market economies. We define employment modes as bundles of HRM and industrial relations (IR) practices implemented at the firm level and examine the employment modes of 76 subsidiaries of U.S. MNCs in a coordinated market economy (Germany), a hybrid market economy (Switzerland), and a liberal market economy (United Kingdom). Our results reveal substantial differences in the expatriation strategies of MNCs that depend not only on the international focus of the MNC but also on the differences in IR between the parent and subsidiary's environment. Our findings qualify the role of expatriates in adjusting subsidiaries' employment modes to different market economies and highlight the boundary conditions of integrating HRM with IR practices in the management of foreign subsidiaries.

Background By applying the inventory theory to hiring skilled workers under uncertainty, the authors explain how firms decide on their optimum investment in an “inventory of skills.” This paper investigates the conditions under which firms are willing to make investments in a skilled workforce themselves rather than relying on skills produced within the education system or by other companies. By applying inventory theory to investments into apprenticeship training, the authors explain how firms decide on producing an optimum “inventory of skills” today to meet future demand. The authors derive hypotheses on how much firms are willing to invest in having a larger inventory of skilled workers depending on different types of inventory costs (overage costs, underage costs, demand structure). Methods The authors use data from the BIBB Cost–Benefit-Survey 2012/2013, which comprises detailed information on different costs and benefits of training investments from the firm’s perspective. The study applies a negative binomial estimation model. Results Results are threefold: firms are willing to invest in a larger inventory of skilled workers, i.e., to train more apprentices, first, if the costs of producing and retaining an excessive number of skilled workers (overage costs) are lower, second, if the costs of being short of skilled workers (underage costs) are higher, and third, given an identical cost structure, if it is more likely that the demand for skilled workers may be high in the future. Even more important is the relationship of the three: the combination of a firm’s critical ratio (underage costs in relation to overage costs) with its demand structure (industry volatility) is associated with a higher inventory of skills. Conclusion The findings (particularly the relation of underage and overage costs, in combination with the demand structure) have important policy implications for firms’ incentives to invest in apprenticeship training.

This paper summarizes results of a project that tries to examine how the revision of vocational training (apprenticeship) curricula affects the training behavior and investment decision of training companies. The project paid particular attention to IT-related changes in curricula and firms' investments in IT and new production technology. Unfortunately, based on the available dataset, the German Linked-Employer-Employee-Data (LIAB), the project was not able to produce conclusive evidence on the expected relationship. We find first support for a positive correlation between curricula changes and the probability to invest in IT for training firms but with the small number of cases (occupational curricula changes) and the limited number of adequate dependent variables we did not find significant effects for most single occupations. In the following, however, we provide some descriptive patterns that shed light on what we do know and what we do not know.