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Growth in the age of complexity : steering your company to innovation, productivity, and profits in the new era of competition
\"Growth is rarely in a straight line. It is tempting to think otherwise, particularly when looking in the rear view mirror, but anyone faced with plotting the coordinates for a company's growth knows the fallacy of this notion. As much as we like to think of corporate leaders executing sure-fire growth strategies, the truth is far messier: it's more an act of exploration and discovery than a step-by-step process. In Growth in the Age of Complexity, the authors describe in detail how complexity has impacted businesses and the markets in which they compete, and the strategies, mindsets and skillsets required to grow profitably! New strategies are required to navigate the ?Sirens of Growth : the growth plans borne of Industrial Age mindsets that too frequently lead to complexity vs. scale. In addition, companies need to develop an Explorer's Mindset and a Navigator's Skillset to sustain performance. You'll discover how to: Assess where you're truly making money, Reignite your core products and services to drive growth, Incorporate experimentation as a key way to discover new opportunities, Create an operating model for scale, location, and replication, Identify new markets where you are positioned to win, Understand the fundamentals for executing in a distributed organization.\"--Amazon.
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Americans Do IT Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle
US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a \"productivity miracle.\" US multinationals obtained higher productivity from IT than non-US multinationals, particularly in the same sectors responsible for the US productivity acceleration. Furthermore, establishments taken over by US multinationals (but not by non-US multinationals) increased the productivity of their IT. Combining pan-European firm-level IT data with our management practices survey, we find that the US IT related productivity advantage is primarily due to its tougher \"people management\" practices.
Journal Article
What is capital? Economists and sociologists have changed its meaning: should it be changed back?
This article traces the historical usages of the term capital and the explosion of different types of supposed 'capital' in the twentieth century, including 'human capital' and 'social capital'. In medieval and early modern times, capital meant money investable or invested in business. This meaning persists in business circles today. In contrast, Adam Smith treated physical assets, machines and people as 'capital' and this different usage has dominated economics since. The pre-Smithian meaning referred to money or other saleable assets that could be used as collateral. This article questions the change in meaning by economists and sociologists and highlights the importance of collateralisable property for capitalism. 'Human capital' can only be collateral if the humans involved are slaves. 'Social capital' can never be used as collateral and it is not even owned. These important issues are masked by the broadened notion of'capital'. Given the conceptual problems involved, economists and sociologists should consider returning to the pre-Smithian and surviving business usage of the term.
Journal Article
Firm ownership and productivity: a study of family and non-family SMEs
Motivated by a lack of consensus in the current literature, the objective of this paper is to reveal whether family firms are more or less productive than non-family firms. As a first step, this paper links family business research to the theoretical notion that family involvement has an effect on the factors of production from a productivity standpoint. Second, by using a Cobb-Douglas framework, we provide empirical evidence that family labour and capital indeed yield diverse output contributions compared with their non-family counterparts. In particular, family labour output contributions are significantly higher, and family capital output contributions significantly lower. Interestingly, differences in total factor productivity between family and non-family firms disappear when we allow for heterogeneous output contributions of family production inputs. These findings imply that the assumption of homogeneous labour and capital between family and non-family firms is inappropriate when estimating the production function.
Journal Article
Retrospectives: Whatever Happened to the Cambridge Capital Theory Controversies?
We argue that the Cambridge capital theory controversies of the 1950s to 1970s were the latest in a series of still-unresolved controversies over three deep issues: explaining and justifying the return to capital; Joan Robinson's complaint that, due to path dependence, equilibrium is not an outcome of an economic process and therefore an inadequate tool for analyzing accumulation and growth; and the role of ideology and vision in fuelling controversy when results of simple models are not robust. We predict these important and relevant issues, latent in endogenous growth and real business cycle theories, will erupt in future controversy.
Journal Article
Reviewing the literature on non-parametric dynamic efficiency measurement: state-of-the-art
Much of the literature on static efficiency measurement models assumes that the inputs are fully used for producing outputs in the same period, with the result that no time interdependence exists between the input utilization and output realizations for a production unit in consecutive periods. A review of the literature on nonparametric dynamic efficiency models identifies five key factors of the inter-temporal dependence between input and output levels over different periods: (i) production delays; (ii) inventories (inventories of exogenous inputs or inventories of intermediate and final products); (iii) capital or generally quasi-fixed factors (and associated embodied technological change, vintage specific capital); (iv) adjustment costs; and (v) incremental improvement and learning models (disembodied technological change). This paper reviews the literature and finds that the dynamic issues associated with adjustment costs and capital have received considerable attention in the literature, whereas the dynamic issues associated with inventories have received less attention. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research such as relaxing the perfect anticipation/knowledge assumption for future variables, prices, and states. Moreover, Dynamic Network Data Envelopment Analysis has provided a unifying framework for some dynamic factors, but further development of these models is necessary including meaningful applications.
Journal Article
Balanced growth despite Uzawa
The evidence for the United States points to balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and a less-than-unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawïs theorem to show that the introduction of human capital accumulation in the standard way does not resolve the puzzle. However, balanced growth is possible if education is endogenous and capital is more complementary with schooling than with raw labor. We present a class of aggregate production functions for which a neoclassical growth model with capital-augmenting technological progress and endogenous schooling converges to a balanced growth path.
Journal Article
Methodological aspects of a comprehensive analysis of the fixed capital of machine building enterprises
The article examines in detail the main areas and methodological features of a comprehensive analysis of movement and use of fixed capital of machine building enterprises. The fixed capital of enterprises is particularly important in the process of economic activity and it requires considerable investment for development and improvement. The purpose of this study is to develop a comprehensive approach to the quantitative assessment of change in the fixed assets of enterprises, their structure, and efficiency of use.
Journal Article
Human Capital Development and Parental Investment in India
We estimate production functions for cognition and health for children aged 1–12 in India, based on the Young Lives Survey. India has over 70 million children aged 0–5 who are at risk of developmental deficits. The inputs into the production functions include parental background, prior child cognition and health, and child investments, which are taken as endogenous. Estimation is based on a nonlinear factor model, based on multiple measurements for both inputs and child outcomes. Our results show an important effect of early health on child cognitive development, which then becomes persistent. Parental investments affect cognitive development at all ages, but more so for younger children. Investments also have an impact on health at early ages only.
Journal Article
Sectoral Technology and Structural Transformation
We assess how the properties of technology affect structural transformation, i.e., the reallocation of production factors across the broad sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, and services. To this end, we estimate sectoral constant elasticity of substitution (CES) and Cobb-Douglas production functions on postwar US data. We find that differences in technical progress across the three sectors are the dominant force behind structural transformation whereas other differences across sectoral technology are of second-order importance. Our findings imply that Cobb-Douglas sectoral production functions that differ only in technical progress capture the main technological forces behind the postwar US structural transformation.
Journal Article