Contributions in Merlin

We review and condense the body of literature on the economic returns of public R&D on private R&D and find that: (i)private returns to R&D appear to be large and larger than the returns to alternative investments; (ii) private R&D and R&D subsidies are positively correlated and there is no evidence for crowding out; (iii)R&D cooperation increases private R&D; (iv) there appear to exist complementarities between alternative sources of funding; (v) the mobility of R&D workers, particularly of university scientists,is positively related to innovation; (vi) there are many university spin-offs but these are no more successful than non-university spin-offs; (vii) universities constitute important collaboration partnersand (viii)clusters enhance collaboration, patents and productivity. Key problems for economic policy advice are that the identification of causal effects is problematic in most studies and that little is known about the optimal design of policy measures.

This study analyzes the relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and the variation of within-firm pay gaps by combining data on regional votes on gender equality laws with a data set of multi-establishments firms and their workers. The data set allows us for the first time to study gender pay gaps within the same firm across establishments located in regions with varying discriminatory social attitudes. Our results show that firms have larger pay gaps in regions with stronger discriminatory social attitudes. This result remains robust when we account for detailed worker and job characteristics and prevails for different subsamples. Thus we show that a relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and gender pay gaps prevails even after accounting for the sorting of women and men into different firms and occupations.

Scientific knowledge is an important ingredient in the innovation process. Drawing on the knowledge-based view of the firm and the literature on the relationship between science and technology, this paper scrutinizes the importance of university scientists’ mobility for firms’ innovative activities. Combining patent data and matched employer-employee data for Danish firms, we can track the labor mobility of R&D workers from 1999 to 2004. We find that new joiners contribute more than long-term employees to innovative activity in the focal firm. Among new firm recruits, we observe that newly hired former university researchers contribute more to innovative activity than newly hired recent graduates or joiners from firms, but only in firms with a high level of absorptive capacity in the form of recent experience of hiring university researchers. We find also that firms’ recent experience of hiring university researchers enhances the effect of newly hired recent graduates’ contributions to innovation.

We investigate the effect of mobility of highly skilled workers in Denmark on the total patenting activity of the firms involved for the population of R&D active Danish firms observed between 1999 and 2004. Our study documents how workers joining increase firms’ patenting activity. The effect is strongest if workers join from patent-active firms. We also find evidence of a positive feedback effect on patenting from workers who have left for another patent-active firm. Summing up the effects of joining and leaving workers, we show that labor mobility increases the total innovative activity of the new and the old employer. Our study thus provides firm-level support for the notion that labor mobility stimulates overall innovation of a country or region.

This article deals with the analysis of large or complex system dynamics (SD) models, exploring the benefits of a multimethodological approach to model analysis. We compare model analysis results from SD and social network analysis (SNA) by deploying SNA techniques on a pertinent example from the SD literature—the world dynamics model. Although SNA is a clearly distinct method from SD in that it focuses on social actors and their interrelationships, we contend that SD can indeed learn from SNA, particularly in terms of model structure analysis. Our argumentation follows renowned system dynamicists who acknowledge the potential of SD to synthesize and advance theories in social science at both the conceptual and technical levels.

This study investigates the relationship between corporate sustainability performance and earnings management practices in a European setting. We measure earnings management based on discretionary accruals (cash flow approach) and real activity management. Corporate sustainability performance is a multi-dimensional construct that is measured based on data provided by the CSRHub database. Employing a European sample of 1,426 firm-year observations, our results reveal a negative relationship between corporate sustainability performance and earnings management activities. This finding supports the notion that a broad and integrated approach of sustainability performance constrains the use of earnings management practices. The results are consistent with recent research on U.S. non-financial companies (Kim et al. 2012), indicating the application of similar principles in U.S. and European settings. Additional analyses reveal that this relationship is particularly applicable to the environmental and community dimensions of sustainability, whereas we find only limited empirical evidence on this relationship for the employee dimension. Taken together, our study provides further evidence regarding the relevance of corporate sustainability in the financial context.

This paper explores, based on the varieties-of-capitalism approach, configurations of key human resource management practices that explain radical innovation in subsidiaries. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is conducted with data for 69 subsidiaries of US-based MNEs in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Contrary to the implications of the varieties-of-capitalism literature, combining numerical flexibility and employing a high share of academics does not necessarily achieve radical innovation. Various paths to radical innovation exist, and most of them involve functional flexibility. Overall, the findings emphasize the strategic discretion MNEs have, and accentuate that functional flexibility is a key HR practice to achieve radical innovation across differing varieties of capitalism countries.

We empirically compare the performance of female and male team managers. We find that female team managers never perform worse than male team managers and that females work under significantly worse conditions than males. Additionally, we find that specialized experience has no influence. Special- 1 ized experience means having worked previously as an employee in the same industry. Our dataset consists of female and male managers in women soccer leagues acroos countries, viz., France, Germany, and Norway. Managers in team sports usually have exactly the same tasks (selection, coordination, and motivation of team members) as team managers in other industries. The limited number of women in top management positions in some of these industries and the lack of available data do not often allow comparisons. Our study, which includes a fair number of female team managers and a clear measurement of performance, can help understanding stereotypical behaviors. Therefore, our results have important implications for industries, companies, and clubs who oppose employing female team managers.

This article develops a game-theoretical model to analyze the effect of subsidies on player salaries, competitive balance, club profits, and welfare. Within this model, fan demand depends on win percentage, competitive balance, and aggregate talent. The results show that if a large market club receives a subsidy and fans have a relatively strong preference for aggregate talent, compared to competitive balance and own team winning percentage, club rofits and welfare increase for both clubs. If the small-market club is subsidized, a small subsidy increases competitive balance and player salaries of both clubs.

We study how temporal separations affect recurring decision-making under risk and thus ask when reference points update. Using both experimental and panel data from a casino, we analyze how individual risk-taking behavior during a casino visit depends on the outcomes of temporally separated prior visits. Our results show that small prior gains lead to more risk-averse behavior in the next visit, but small prior losses have no effect on subsequent risk-taking. These results suggest an asymmetric temporal effect of small prior gains and losses, whereby gains affect subsequent choices for longer than losses. Thus, the reference point — which determines subsequent risk-taking behavior — updates much faster after small losses than after small gains. Further, we find that risk-taking greatly depends on the size of prior outcomes. Whereas large prior losses also impact subsequent choices and strongly reduce risk-taking, large prior gains only have a marginal effect, if any.